Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[cypherdoc]

...
why haven't i seen Eligius mining 0 tx blocks, or have i just missed it?  so this SPV mining is not confined to China?  i thought this was primarily an inferior connectivity issue behind the GFC?  why haven't we seen it before with Eligius if this is his norm?

They do >2% since they started according to
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085800.msg11805900#msg11805900

I not sure how much verification eloipool does but it does enough to avoid the v2/v3 fork that happened so it's not completely without verification.

wouldn't it be enough to just ask Luke how much verification he does?

Because his answers are often misleading

A good example of this in the "Empty Block" discussion is how people were saying they aren't confirming transactions.
His answer was that they are confirming transactions ... previous transactions.
So the statement needed to be "they aren't confirming new transactions" which of course is what was meant, but he decided to avoid the issue with a technicality

does BCT allow stickies for this post? 

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[cypherdoc]

...
why haven't i seen Eligius mining 0 tx blocks, or have i just missed it?  so this SPV mining is not confined to China?  i thought this was primarily an inferior connectivity issue behind the GFC?  why haven't we seen it before with Eligius if this is his norm?

They do >2% since they started according to
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085800.msg11805900#msg11805900

I not sure how much verification eloipool does but it does enough to avoid the v2/v3 fork that happened so it's not completely without verification.

wouldn't it be enough to just ask Luke how much verification he does?

Because his answers are often misleading

A good example of this in the "Empty Block" discussion is how people were saying they aren't confirming transactions.
His answer was that they are confirming transactions ... previous transactions.
So the statement needed to be "they aren't confirming new transactions" which of course is what was meant, but he decided to avoid the issue with a technicality

hey, since everybody and their mother now knows i'm an eye doc, how's your diabetic retinopathy?  i was dying to ask you that 3 yr ago back in my cgminer days when you first revealed that.  but that was before HF.    that's right up my alley you know.

[cypherdoc]

back with a vengeance:

[Adrian-x]

Coz someone linked a post earlier in this thread ...

For pools that normally mine full blocks as well as uncommon empty blocks, the empty blocks are the work the pool sends every block change.
They are of the opinion that because Luke-jr's eloipool is shit slow at handling block changes, they should send out empty work first and then full work soon after it.
Obviously the empty work is mined for a small % of the average block change length so it would also mean that the miners finding block with the empty work would be a smaller % of all the blocks found by the pools that do this.

As I've explained in the empty blocks thread, when comparing eligius with it's empty block change work and my pool https://kano.is/ with our full block change work, my pool beats eligius on average sending out block change work.
During normal times when the relay is working and there isn't a massive spam test running, my pools beats eloipool >90% of the time with block changes.

hey, the great kano.  thx for the explanation.

why haven't i seen Eligius mining 0 tx blocks, or have i just missed it?  so this SPV mining is not confined to China?  i thought this was primarily an inferior connectivity issue behind the GFC?  why haven't we seen it before with Eligius if this is his norm?

I was chatting with Luke-jr last night on Reddit, Eligius mines lots of 0tx blocks he said they don't SPV mine so it's just Kano is saying, they are just slow to transition.

Eligius does not do any SPV mining. Empty blocks are generated only after the previous block has been fully verified, but before the next block's transaction set has been calculated.

[cypherdoc]

there's a real battle going on at Bitstamp.  aren't they close to Greece?  i wouldn't be too pessimistic.

[tvbcof]

ok, i'm not getting the bolded part.  this graph shows 37 MB worth of unconf tx's, no?:

No clue, no node I have access to is seeing that much-- they may have turned off the minfee rules (not unreasonable for a metrics thing)...

Even given that, again, 37MB doesn't explain your swap.

yeah, i had noticed that.  strange...

Maybe a bloated swap file is a surprise Easter egg 'feature' of XT nodes?

As I said weeks ago, good luck getting BTC core devs to help fix it when your Gavinsista troll fork goes haywire.   

LOL (as usual.)  I wonder if anyone has even build XT for themselves rather than simply running someone else's build.

Cypherdoc noticed significant swap usage but went on to state that his machine was woefully 'underutilized' anyway.  Typical.

It's bizarre to me that RAM use is so low while swap is significant, but I'm not familiar with whatever tool it is that produces the GUI he screencap'd.  I wonder if he'd just triggered some sort of preen operation or killed an auxiliary analysis process or something to try to produce numbers which he could pass off to the (even more) ignorant that his machine was running fine.

[Peter R]

I had to go back 500 days to get enough data for Eligius, but it looks like they have historically produced more empty blocks when the previous block was large, similar to F2Pool. 

[Peter R]

I was chatting with Luke-jr last night on Reddit, Eligius mines lots of 0tx blocks he said they don't SPV mine so it's just Kano is saying, they are just slow to transition.

Why would a pool ever mine an empty block if they weren't SPV mining (at least for a short amount of time while they validate the previous block and before they re-assign the hashers a new non-empty block to work on)?

Personally, I find it difficult to communicate with Luke-Jr because he will often argue based on a technicality due to his own personal definitions of some word, rather than talking about the thing everyone is actually trying to talk about.  It looks like he does this in other sub-reddits too, for example, he claims that the Pope is not the Pope.

[cypherdoc]

I was chatting with Luke-jr last night on Reddit, Eligius mines lots of 0tx blocks he said they don't SPV mine so it's just Kano is saying, they are just slow to transition.

Why would a pool ever mine an empty block if they weren't SPV mining (at least for a short amount of time while they validate the previous block and before they re-assign the hashers a new non-empty block to work on)?

Personally, I find it difficult to communicate with Luke-Jr because he will often argue based on a technicality due to his own personal definitions of some word, rather than talking about the thing everyone is actually trying to talk about.  It looks like he does this in other sub-reddits too, for example, he claims that the Pope is not the Pope.

a couple others do exactly that too.

[cypherdoc]

oh Lordy.  trusty SLW off the cliff!:

[cypherdoc]

if you're a goldbug, you have GOT to be concerned:

[cypherdoc]

growth?  what fricking growth?

copper:


Freeport:


BHP:


oil:



Chevron:

[cypherdoc]

hmm, i wonder if those 2 SPV blocks could cause a fork?

[Adrian-x]

I was chatting with Luke-jr last night on Reddit, Eligius mines lots of 0tx blocks he said they don't SPV mine so it's just Kano is saying, they are just slow to transition.

Why would a pool ever mine an empty block if they weren't SPV mining (at least for a short amount of time while they validate the previous block and before they re-assign the hashers a new non-empty block to work on)?

Personally, I find it difficult to communicate with Luke-Jr because he will often argue based on a technicality due to his own personal definitions of some word, rather than talking about the thing everyone is actually trying to talk about.  It looks like he does this in other sub-reddits too, for example, he claims that the Pope is not the Pope.

Here is his answer to: I've notice eligius mining multiple empty blocks in a row, is that because they are SPV mining too, and if you know and it's open, what is the SPV mining policy?

Eligius does not do any SPV mining. Empty blocks are generated only after the previous block has been fully verified, but before the next block's transaction set has been calculated.

It may come down to how you defined SPV mining I guess he is saying they try to mine on top of valid blocks and not empty ones.but if you get lucky you may have empty blocks in a row?

Would that be SPV mining?

[cypherdoc]

I was chatting with Luke-jr last night on Reddit, Eligius mines lots of 0tx blocks he said they don't SPV mine so it's just Kano is saying, they are just slow to transition.

Why would a pool ever mine an empty block if they weren't SPV mining (at least for a short amount of time while they validate the previous block and before they re-assign the hashers a new non-empty block to work on)?

Personally, I find it difficult to communicate with Luke-Jr because he will often argue based on a technicality due to his own personal definitions of some word, rather than talking about the thing everyone is actually trying to talk about.  It looks like he does this in other sub-reddits too, for example, he claims that the Pope is not the Pope.

Here is his answer to: I've notice eligius mining multiple empty blocks in a row, is that because they are SPV mining too, and if you know and it's open, what is the SPV mining policy?

Eligius does not do any SPV mining. Empty blocks are generated only after the previous block has been fully verified, but before the next block's transaction set has been calculated.

It may come down to how you defined SPV mining I guess he is saying they try to mine on top of valid blocks and not empty ones.but if you get lucky you may have empty blocks in a row?

Would that be SPV mining?

yes, the defiinition is important.  all these guys are trying to shave milliseconds of the time to start hashing the next block after arrival of a block. 

before Luke, we had been talking about starting hashing of a 0tx blk immediately upon receipt of a "large" block, however that's defined by the pool to attempt to save the time of validating that large blk.  once validated, they sub out the 0tx with a blk with tx's and resume hashing.

Luke apparently gets a blk, large or small, validates it, then routinely sends out a 0tx blk to start hashing, just b/c he wants to save the milliseconds it takes to construct the tx template for a blk with tx's.  once constructed, he resends that blk out with the tx's.

[Peter R]

Eligius does not do any SPV mining. Empty blocks are generated only after the previous block has been fully verified, but before the next block's transaction set has been calculated.

It may come down to how you defined SPV mining I guess he is saying they try to mine on top of valid blocks and not empty ones.but if you get lucky you may have empty blocks in a row?

Would that be SPV mining?

Let's call it "empty block mining" instead.  He's right that it's not strictly SPV mining if you've indeed verified the previous block, but I think people are interested in the behaviour of Miners in the time between when a miner could begin hashing on an empty block, and when the hashers are actually working on a new non-empty block.  

So then there's:

   (1) empty block mining (previous block verified but new transaction set not built).
   (2) empty block mining (previous block not verified).  

EDIT: it would be nice to make a diagram to visualize all the steps that take place in the mining process.

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

From the devs' perspective, they have to deal with a lot of non-technical people, so dismissing arguments based on a technicality becomes a go-to tactic. They might justify it based on the fact that the person is clearly completely off-base and has nothing useful to say. This tactic is easier than explaining why.

The problem comes when they use that to justify dismissing someone even when they can't really be sure if they're completely off-base. It becomes a kind of last-ditch "panic button" for when they want to avoid addressing something.

[domob]

there's a real battle going on at Bitstamp.  aren't they close to Greece?  i wouldn't be too pessimistic.

They are in Slovenia.  Not really too close to Greece from a European point of view.  I never heard talk about Slovenia (which is part of the Eurozone), so it probably is at least better off than Italy and Spain.

[Hueristic]

Whether 1MB is ideal or not, it's what we have.

As it happens, 1MB seemed to have been at least quite fortuitous for us, and I wonder if it were not somewhat well considered when Satoshi made the setting as opposed to the perception promulgated by some that he pulled a random number out his ass.

In retrospect, 1MB seems like a pretty ideal setting for the past history of Bitcoin and some distance into the future.  To me.

Exactly this.  Intentionally or not, 1MB turned out to be a serendipitous choice.  Now it has ossified and is ready for the next layers to be built on its solid foundation.

I favor Adam Backamoto's extension block proposal.

The 1MB blocksize limit reminds me of the old 640k limit in DOS.

Rather than destroy Window's interoperability with the rich/valuable legacy of 8088 based software, that limit was extended via various hacks sublime software engineering.

Before resorting to the nuclear option of a contentious hard fork, we should attempt to achieve the desired result with soft forks.

:really off topic but I so rarely can add to the discussions.

Actually in order to address memory out of the address range of the cpu bus a "page swap" method was used which had been used on mainframes for many years, this was called expanded memory and was in 16k chunks which was very slow. with the 286 line extended memory was introduced and the cpu had to go into extended mode in order to access it. That of course if my memory serves me.

[Peter R]

On the topic of block verification times, people on Reddit are saying this block (filled with one huge TX) took up to 25 seconds to verify:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3cgft7/largest_transaction_ever_mined_999657_kb_consumes/