[ANN][CLAM] CLAMs, Proof-Of-Chain, Proof-Of-Working-Stake, a.k.a. "Clamcoin"

[paulc010]

 Be careful to use 'coin-control'   no idea about that at all

Under Settings->Options->Display(tab) you can turn on coin control.

Once this is on, when you go to the "Send Coins" screen there's a button at the top marked "Inputs...". Clicking this opens a new window that lets you manually select the coin inputs to use in a transaction, otherwise it's done automatically (which could adversely affect your staking). It also lets you see your unstaked piles of coins in detail.

[1714221356]

1714221356

[1714221356]

1714221356

[1714221356]

1714221356

[jd1959]

 Be careful to use 'coin-control'   no idea about that at all

Under Settings->Options->Display(tab) you can turn on coin control.

Once this is on, when you go to the "Send Coins" screen there's a button at the top marked "Inputs...". Clicking this opens a new window that lets you manually select the coin inputs to use in a transaction, otherwise it's done automatically (which could adversely affect your staking). It also lets you see your unstaked piles of coins in detail.

Thank you for the well written explanation......i didn't see anything about unstaked coins

[SuperClam]

Be careful to use 'coin-control'   no idea about that at all

Under Settings->Options->Display(tab) you can turn on coin control.
Once this is on, when you go to the "Send Coins" screen there's a button at the top marked "Inputs...". Clicking this opens a new window that lets you manually select the coin inputs to use in a transaction, otherwise it's done automatically (which could adversely affect your staking). It also lets you see your unstaked piles of coins in detail.

Thank you for the well written explanation......i didn't see anything about unstaked coins

As previously stated (thank you):

Coin control is a feature that can be turned on in the settings (settings -> options -> display).

It allows you to choose which output (pile) you send from.
This is important, as when you send a part of an output (pile) of coins, the entire pile loses any stored 'age' or weight.

[paulc010]

Thank you for the well written explanation......i didn't see anything about unstaked coins

Any pile of coin that's available as an input to a transaction is "unstaked" - it's either too young or it's currently "staking" (trying to solve a block). The chance of those piles "staking" is based on the number of coins and the "age" (i.e. time, number of confirms etc.) which combine to give the "weight". In that coin control screen you can see how the coins are split up (number of inputs per address) and the number of confirmations. This gives you an insight into their weight. Every pile of coins can potentially stake, although it has been pointed out that if less than (or equal to?) 0.1 coins it effectively has 0 chance.

As Superclam says, when you send coins you might "break up" a partially used input and the "age" for that input (chance it will earn a reward) resets. This is not good and should be avoided, as it will mean that these coins will take that much longer to stake.

What's unique about CLAMs over traditional POS is that while logic might suggest that you should have all your coins in one pile (number of coins adds weight) that doesn't work out so well in practice because the reward is fixed(*). While your larger pile of coins has a better chance of solving a block than a smaller one (at the same age), a set of smaller blocks will all eventually stake anyway, potentially giving you a higher return (multiple rewards rather than just one). How you split up your coins to maximise returns is up to you to decide.

"Staked" coins don't appear as available as inputs in the coin control window - their total is displayed on the main screen as "Stake" and are unavailable to spend for 510 confirms.

(*) Although the standard reward is fixed (0.1 CLAM) there is a chance of a (much) higher payout should you be lucky and hit a lotto block (up to 1,000 CLAM). Each time you solve a block there's the potential to "win" one of these, so it's another reason why multiple smaller piles of staking coins is much better than a single larger one.

Hope the above helps!

[jd1959]

Thank you for the well written explanation......i didn't see anything about unstaked coins

Any pile of coin that's available as an input to a transaction is "unstaked" - it's either too young or it's currently "staking" (trying to solve a block). The chance of those piles "staking" is based on the number of coins and the "age" (i.e. time, number of confirms etc.) which combine to give the "weight". In that coin control screen you can see how the coins are split up (number of inputs per address) and the number of confirmations. This gives you an insight into their weight. Every pile of coins can potentially stake, although it has been pointed out that if less than (or equal to?) 0.1 coins it effectively has 0 chance.

As Superclam says, when you send coins you might "break up" a partially used input and the "age" for that input (chance it will earn a reward) resets. This is not good and should be avoided, as it will mean that these coins will take that much longer to stake.

What's unique about CLAMs over traditional POS is that while logic might suggest that you should have all your coins in one pile (number of coins adds weight) that doesn't work out so well in practice because the reward is fixed(*). While your larger pile of coins has a better chance of solving a block than a smaller one (at the same age), a set of smaller blocks will all eventually stake anyway, potentially giving you a higher return (multiple rewards rather than just one). How you split up your coins to maximise returns is up to you to decide.

"Staked" coins don't appear as available as inputs in the coin control window - their total is displayed on the main screen as "Stake" and are unavailable to spend for 510 confirms.

(*) Although the standard reward is fixed (0.1 CLAM) there is a chance of a (much) higher payout should you be lucky and hit a lotto block (up to 1,000 CLAM). Each time you solve a block there's the potential to "win" one of these, so it's another reason why multiple smaller piles of staking coins is much better than a single larger one.

Hope the above helps!

OK thank you once again

Just so I've got it right...... I just leave wallet running with a positive balance......eventually next to Stake it will change from 0.00 clams to positive number clams, and should remain active until clams balance changes

[paulc010]

When they stake, yes the number of coins staking will move to there. You'll also see a transaction entry in the transaction list marked "Mined" (most likely with a value of 0.1 but you never know it could be more!). When that reaches 510 confirms the "Staked" coins will become available in your spend balance again and be ready to start staking all over again.

[almightyruler]

OK thank you once again

Just so I've got it right...... I just leave wallet running with a positive balance

Is your wallet unlocked?

[SuperClam]

OK thank you once again

Just so I've got it right...... I just leave wallet running with a positive balance......eventually next to Stake it will change from 0.00 clams to positive number clams, and should remain active until clams balance changes

"...and should remain active until clams balance changes..."
Not quite.

The CLAMS used to stake are the CLAMS listed on the "Spendable" line.

The "Stake" line of your balance are the CLAMS which have RECENTLY staked.

Edit:
dooglus made a good point. (already:recently).

[dooglus]

I'm not sure about staking at all. I've got 20 odd clams in wallet 3500+ confirmations. I have 0 clams staked...I just leave wallet online.....am I missing something here?

help > debug > console > listunspent

What does that show?

Your 'weight' looks wrong - too low.


[
{
"txid" : "4d5d45c7b3d575076a2a1446584d1ba1e25d696be01f787436cd750cf299e33f",
"vout" : 1,
"address" : "xCcU9AdyheZjG8jtV99MfHzv6Fm5t1hrsf",
"scriptPubKey" : "210311ca668d61be81fcf0fd9caa6767904fd7b91739c1ad1f7c886f12f2ae7abb23ac",
"amount" : 8.99500000,
"confirmations" : 3026
},
{
"txid" : "5a081ca523afbedcd6b9d6c85ee2a13681285a96f57622f39d367ac310e28031",
"vout" : 1,
"address" : "xP89XQ78Kx3NhctY9mHgc9t4kKSgooWeak",
"scriptPubKey" : "21023199d5c2ba730dda0c03c3aa720456dc498849c1cf26f7e2ef0f04b8606b8657ac",
"amount" : 5.10545574,
"confirmations" : 2078
},
{
"txid" : "6af7c7de2b3e7a2052cf48e80b3795bd677f218495c2768a2dba31c1ed42928d",
"vout" : 1,
"address" : "xST4HRa4Z5hEHUKv6SkamtEXyxLSRMpst8",
"scriptPubKey" : "2102c865890393db82b8d03072c7937648c04143edcf361b8e89c7e525f143e88b80ac",
"amount" : 6.60421825,
"confirmations" : 7230
}
]
my
"weight" : 37,
Why at 40 clam weights over 500
I can transfer all Clam in a new purse

Your "weight" is what you get when you add up ((the age of each output in days minus 4 hours) multiplied by the size of each output in CLAMs)

Each time you move coins around, their age goes back to zero, and so you lose weight, and your chance of staking goes back down. So it's best to leave them alone.

With 20 CLAMs, your weight should go up by 20 every 24 hours. Is that what you are seeing?

[dooglus]

The "Stake" line of your balance are the CLAMS which have ALREADY staked.

In fact, the "Stake" line is the total of all the CLAMs which have RECENTLY staked, and so are currently unavailable for spending until they mature (which takes 510 blocks, or about 9 hours).

[jd1959]

Thank you to every who has responded to my questions
1) wallet is open
2) I now see staked coins and have received .1 mined
3) I have much better idea of whats going on with Clams......I could not find any tutorials here or reddit
4) weight is changing as " dooglus " suggested

thank you all once again
Jon

[ari14]

Thank you for the well written explanation......i didn't see anything about unstaked coins

Any pile of coin that's available as an input to a transaction is "unstaked" - it's either too young or it's currently "staking" (trying to solve a block). The chance of those piles "staking" is based on the number of coins and the "age" (i.e. time, number of confirms etc.) which combine to give the "weight". In that coin control screen you can see how the coins are split up (number of inputs per address) and the number of confirmations. This gives you an insight into their weight. Every pile of coins can potentially stake, although it has been pointed out that if less than (or equal to?) 0.1 coins it effectively has 0 chance.

As Superclam says, when you send coins you might "break up" a partially used input and the "age" for that input (chance it will earn a reward) resets. This is not good and should be avoided, as it will mean that these coins will take that much longer to stake.

What's unique about CLAMs over traditional POS is that while logic might suggest that you should have all your coins in one pile (number of coins adds weight) that doesn't work out so well in practice because the reward is fixed(*). While your larger pile of coins has a better chance of solving a block than a smaller one (at the same age), a set of smaller blocks will all eventually stake anyway, potentially giving you a higher return (multiple rewards rather than just one). How you split up your coins to maximise returns is up to you to decide.

"Staked" coins don't appear as available as inputs in the coin control window - their total is displayed on the main screen as "Stake" and are unavailable to spend for 510 confirms.

(*) Although the standard reward is fixed (0.1 CLAM) there is a chance of a (much) higher payout should you be lucky and hit a lotto block (up to 1,000 CLAM). Each time you solve a block there's the potential to "win" one of these, so it's another reason why multiple smaller piles of staking coins is much better than a single larger one.

Hope the above helps!

I have a doubt.
"Coin Control" screen can be seen in tree mode or in list mode. When I see it in tree mode I notice that there are addresses with 1 node inside and addresses with more than 1 node inside. The question is: Which is called "pile" (or "output") ?  Is it each one of the nodes belonging to one address, or all the nodes of an address ?.  If I have the address A with 2 nodes, one with 5 CLAM and other with 3 CLAM; if I select the node of 3 CLAM and send it to another address, the age of node of 5 CLAM will be reseted ?

Thanks.

[istvandv]

I have a doubt.
"Coin Control" screen can be seen in tree mode or in list mode. When I see it in tree mode I notice that there are addresses with 1 node inside and addresses with more than 1 node inside. The question is: Which is called "pile" (or "output") ?  Is it each one of the nodes belonging to one address, or all the nodes of an address ?.  If I have the address A with 2 nodes, one with 5 CLAM and other with 3 CLAM; if I select the node of 3 CLAM and send it to another address, the age of node of 5 CLAM will be reseted ?

Thanks.

No, the age of the 5 CLAMS will not reset

[dooglus]

If I have the address A with 2 nodes, one with 5 CLAM and other with 3 CLAM; if I select the node of 3 CLAM and send it to another address, the age of node of 5 CLAM will be reseted ?

Thanks.

Addresses almost never matter. It's all about the individual outputs. Your 3 and your 5 are separate things with their own ages.

The client will probably merge them into a single output when either of them stakes, so you might want to keep them in different addresses. That will stop them being merged.

[ari14]

I have a doubt.
"Coin Control" screen can be seen in tree mode or in list mode. When I see it in tree mode I notice that there are addresses with 1 node inside and addresses with more than 1 node inside. The question is: Which is called "pile" (or "output") ?  Is it each one of the nodes belonging to one address, or all the nodes of an address ?.  If I have the address A with 2 nodes, one with 5 CLAM and other with 3 CLAM; if I select the node of 3 CLAM and send it to another address, the age of node of 5 CLAM will be reseted ?

Thanks.

No, the age of the 5 CLAMS will not reset

Thanks

[istvandv]

looks like the address x9S2gMQQ5iKrP9SwRJ6PF9Q3wqDxRegc2w has a ton of 2.6 clam piles

when i try to check http://khashier.com:2750/address/x9S2gMQQ5iKrP9SwRJ6PF9Q3wqDxRegc2w
it says "I'm sorry, this address has too many records to display."

this address has lots of POS blocks, i would have thought the client would combine the clams since they are staking in less than 24 hrs

[dooglus]

this address has lots of POS blocks, i would have thought the client would combine the clams since they are staking in less than 24 hrs

The client is open source. I changed my copy to stop it combining outputs when they stake. The default behaviour is to combine all the outputs at the address that is staking into a single large output (up to 1000 CLAMs), thereby destroying the age of all those outputs for no benefit.

That may have made sense when the reward for staking was proportional to the amount being staked, but now that staking rewards are independent of the amount being staked it makes no sense at all the combine your outputs.

Edit: if you want the same behaviour without modifying your client, you can put each of your outputs at a different address. Combining only happens to outputs which share the same address.

[paulc010]

Edit: if you want the same behaviour without modifying your client, you can put each of your outputs at a different address. Combining only happens to outputs which share the same address.

Which is what I've done, although it begs the question - is there a limit to the number of addresses per wallet?

[dooglus]

Which is what I've done, although it begs the question - is there a limit to the number of addresses per wallet?

The wallet gets slower the more addresses you have, because it has to scan all incoming blocks and transactions against its list of addresses to see if any of them affect any of the addresses it owns. You probably won't notice that being a problem until you have thousands of addresses.

One thing I have noticed is that splitting your CLAMs into lots of small outputs puts quite a load on your CPU (whether they're at the same address or not doesn't make a difference here) since each output gets checked every second to see whether it is able to stake a block in that second. At a certain point it starts taking more than a second to check each output for stakability...

I currently have over a thousand separate outputs being checked each second and it's beginning to use all available CPU doing the checking.

That surprises me, since each 'check' is an sha256 (I think) hash. My CPU should be capable of doing a thousand hashes per second with no trouble I would have thought. Maybe hashing isn't the slowest bit, and there's some bottleneck in the client that could be improved upon.

[dooglus]

I don't think I ever posted this:

http://pastie.org/9456438

It's a small Python script that takes any number of BTC, LTC, DOGE, and CLAM addresses and gives links to the corresponding blockchain explorer pages for the equivalent BTC, LTC, DOGE, and CLAM addresses.

When there was a giant influx of newly dug CLAMs about a week ago, I ran this script on a bunch of the CLAM addresses that were staking, and discovered that the new CLAMs were being dug from DOGE addresses.

Here's an example of it in use:

$ ./clam.py 18KSgPcNRPi9K4bp91Vb3pVNygPon4y5Pw x9S2gMQQ5iKrP9SwRJ6PF9Q3wqDxRegc2w

   BTC: http://blockchain.info/address/18KSgPcNRPi9K4bp91Vb3pVNygPon4y5Pw
  DOGE: http://dogechain.info/address/DCTYDeZ1iocRr4nQsbV9baeyrp878jRzaG
   LTC: http://block-explorer.com/address/LSYPwbvCW3xCZsHyK9UtKqZ9Btm5wrJXxa
  CLAM: http://khashier.com:2750/address/xFd5aGSqh7CBMShgVV8FUznACnh3DALPss


   BTC: http://blockchain.info/address/128PnUZvozqpLmM54pTioy7Giivj44ketX
  DOGE: http://dogechain.info/address/D6GVKjWa7Qk6smXfoQTHMjGsbrf2Nvx5Po
   LTC: http://block-explorer.com/address/LLMM3gsktf5sba3EExT25zB2vwJ17S9JV2
  CLAM: http://khashier.com:2750/address/x9S2gMQQ5iKrP9SwRJ6PF9Q3wqDxRegc2w


It uses https://github.com/jgarzik/python-bitcoinlib.git to do the heavy lifting, so you'll need to fetch that using git, and update the path to it in the script itself.

Edit: I forgot to say why this is useful... If you only just heard about CLAMs, and are worried about sharing your Bitcoin wallet with the CLAM client, you can use this script to convert your BTC addresses to CLAM addresses and look up the balance on the CLAM address without needed to give anyone your private keys at all. Bear in mind that your wallet probably has a bunch of "change" addresses in it which it carefully hides from view, and those change addresses may have CLAMs on them too, so you probably have more CLAMs than you think...

Edit2: the two addresses I gave in the example aren't great. The first is a BTC address that wasn't funded for the initial CLAM distribution, and the second is a CLAM address that I created in the CLAM client. But you get the idea!