Vanity Pool - vanity address generator pool

[ThePiachu]

I'm glad everything is working fine for you now and congratulations on the difficult address!

I've been adding new features to the next update of the Vanity Pool. I will launch it on Bitcoin Friday (9th of November), or a bit before that along with some bonus for the day for the miners. The following day the bonus will be gone, but the changes will stay .

[molecular]

Hey guys, I'm still following what's happening here and I still very much like vanitypool.

One question: Would it be technically feasable to reduce the dependance on luck by accepting solutions to "lower-difficulty" sub-patterns (for example by omitting the last character) and then, once one of these solutions also matches the "real pattern", distribute the reward amongst the providers of these lower-difficulty solutions.

I'm sure you've pondered this, right?

It would probably make me contribute again. Currently, there's just too much luck involved for me.

[ThePiachu]

Hey guys, I'm still following what's happening here and I still very much like vanitypool.

One question: Would it be technically feasable to reduce the dependance on luck by accepting solutions to "lower-difficulty" sub-patterns (for example by omitting the last character) and then, once one of these solutions also matches the "real pattern", distribute the reward amongst the providers of these lower-difficulty solutions.

I'm sure you've pondered this, right?

It would probably make me contribute again. Currently, there's just too much luck involved for me.

Yes, it is possible, but at the moment I don't have the time to implement it, not to mention that it could potentially drive up the costs of running the website a bit. Since I'm hosting this on Google App Engine, every read/write operation needs to be paid for. I tried implementing a pool on GAE that was keeping track of shares and my free quota didn't last very long with one miner. When the Pool will start generating a viable traffic I will look into implementing this solution.

For now I'm looking into more fair work pricing, so that smaller addresses that don't take too long to mine would be more encouraged.

[molecular]

Hey guys, I'm still following what's happening here and I still very much like vanitypool.

One question: Would it be technically feasable to reduce the dependance on luck by accepting solutions to "lower-difficulty" sub-patterns (for example by omitting the last character) and then, once one of these solutions also matches the "real pattern", distribute the reward amongst the providers of these lower-difficulty solutions.

I'm sure you've pondered this, right?

It would probably make me contribute again. Currently, there's just too much luck involved for me.

Yes, it is possible, but at the moment I don't have the time to implement it, not to mention that it could potentially drive up the costs of running the website a bit. Since I'm hosting this on Google App Engine, every read/write operation needs to be paid for. I tried implementing a pool on GAE that was keeping track of shares and my free quota didn't last very long with one miner. When the Pool will start generating a viable traffic I will look into implementing this solution.

For now I'm looking into more fair work pricing, so that smaller addresses that don't take too long to mine would be more encouraged.

Cool to see it's viable. Thanks for your hard work!

EDIT: I wouldn't mind a fee to help paying for site operation.

[ThePiachu]

Cool to see it's viable. Thanks for your hard work!

EDIT: I wouldn't mind a fee to help paying for site operation.

Well, the site has a donation address and a fee is taken from each solved work. If you want to help the website grow, you can either donate or place some orders for a vanity address or a couple;).

I don't expect the site to be making much of a profit for awhile, but I'll continue to improve it slowly in my spare time based on feedback. On the plus side, hosting everything on the cloud makes my startup and operation costs low for now...

[ThePiachu]

Bitcoin Friday update!

https://vanitypool.appspot.com/

Special promotion for the Bitcoin Friday - 1% fee, new address pricing model (get your vanity address for as low as 0.01BTC), some other updates. Mine those addresses while they are hot!;)

[sangaman]

Is it just me or is it impossible to find the NPhaux Namecoin address that is currently setting the mining ratio to 7812? Is an address starting with NP invalid for namecoin?

[ThePiachu]

Is it just me or is it impossible to find the NPhaux Namecoin address that is currently setting the mining ratio to 7812? Is an address starting with NP invalid for namecoin?

Hmm, I don't see why not. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/List_of_address_prefixes appears to match up, but then again, this is the first non-Bitcoin address. It could be that my Pool is not handling it properly, or perhaps the miner defaults to mining addresses with a prefix of 1.

[gyverlb]

At least oclvanityminer doesn't recognize it (it isn't in the list of minable adresses it dumps when I use it).

http://fizzisist.com/mining-value/api/vanitypool-value doesn't seem to like it (in fact I was made aware of this address pattern when I found out that vanitypool-value was not available anymore).

[sangaman]

Using vanitygen, vanitygen64, or oclvanitygen, I get an error saying something like "valid namecoin addresses start with M or N" when I try NP followed by anything. However if I just try N, M, or N followed by a few random keys I tried (like 1 and x I think along with a few others) I can generate a Namecoin address. Using oclvanityminer doesn't even attempt to mine the namecoin address at all it seems.

Mining something that's 7812 times as profitable as regular bitcoin mining is turning out to be too good to be true.

[molecular]

Mining something that's 7812 times as profitable as regular bitcoin mining is turning out to be too good to be true.

how do you come up with that number?

[ThePiachu]

Mining something that's 7812 times as profitable as regular bitcoin mining is turning out to be too good to be true.

how do you come up with that number?

From Pool's main page. I calculate the mining ratio with equations that can be found here:

https://vanitypool.appspot.com/faq

[molecular]

Mining something that's 7812 times as profitable as regular bitcoin mining is turning out to be too good to be true.

how do you come up with that number?

From Pool's main page. I calculate the mining ratio with equations that can be found here:

https://vanitypool.appspot.com/faq

currently when I start the miner, it says: 0.000008 BTC/Gkey.

using the 16MKey/s my lowly card puts out, I get: 0.000008 * 0.016*60*60*24 = 0.011 BTC/day

comparing that to 0.0896 BTC/day (300 MHash/s) traditional mining it looks to me vanity mining is currently 11% as profitable as traditionl mining.

Am I making some mistake?

[ThePiachu]

currently when I start the miner, it says: 0.000008 BTC/Gkey.

using the 16MKey/s my lowly card puts out, I get: 0.000008 * 0.016*60*60*24 = 0.011 BTC/day

comparing that to 0.0896 BTC/day (300 MHash/s) traditional mining it looks to me vanity mining is currently 11% as profitable as traditionl mining.

Am I making some mistake?

This ->

At least oclvanityminer doesn't recognize it (it isn't in the list of minable adresses it dumps when I use it).

[fizzisist]

At least oclvanityminer doesn't recognize it (it isn't in the list of minable adresses it dumps when I use it).

http://fizzisist.com/mining-value/api/vanitypool-value doesn't seem to like it (in fact I was made aware of this address pattern when I found out that vanitypool-value was not available anymore).

Thanks for the heads up. Unfortunately, I can't figure out what's going wrong here. Initially, I thought it was just that bkkcoins' vanitycalc module doesn't accept namecoin addresses, but I modified it just now and it still doesn't like 'NPhaux' with addrtype = 52. Since the vanitycalc module is a python wrapper for the difficulty checker in vanitygen, I think this is an issue with vanitygen. Or, NPhaux isn't a valid namecoin prefix (although I don't see why not).

ThePiachu, how are you calculating "complexity?" Did you write some tool of your own to do this? On another note, why oh why do you multiply the value by 2^32 to get "lavishness?" As I tried to plead before, the terms "difficulty" and "value" are perfectly applicable here, and are an established convention in vanitygen. Furthermore, value, as defined in vanitygen, is a meaningful quantity: reward / key. A user can take this number and multiply it by their key/s rate and figure out their expected reward. Multiplying by 2^32 just makes it that much harder for the user. Creating some new, arbitrary units when there are perfectly good ones already is almost a sin in the scientific community. Of course, if you can justify the creation of some new units, fine, but I don't see the justification for these ones.

[ThePiachu]

ThePiachu, how are you calculating "complexity?" Did you write some tool of your own to do this?

Yes, it's a part of my Vanity Pool webapp. I consulted with samr7 on the subjct of how the initial character (after net byte) affects the final result (See here http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/3858/323).

On another note, why oh why do you multiply the value by 2^32 to get "lavishness?" As I tried to plead before, the terms "difficulty" and "value" are perfectly applicable here, and are an established convention in vanitygen. Furthermore, value, as defined in vanitygen, is a meaningful quantity: reward / key. A user can take this number and multiply it by their key/s rate and figure out their expected reward. Multiplying by 2^32 just makes it that much harder for the user. Creating some new, arbitrary units when there are perfectly good ones already is almost a sin in the scientific community. Of course, if you can justify the creation of some new units, fine, but I don't see the justification for these ones.

Hmm, I suppose lavishness if useful when determining the mining ratio. From my FAQ page:

MR = L * (d/r) * (k/m) = 2^32 * (b/c) * (d/r) * (k/m)

(b/c) is as you said, value of the address. If you want to compare that to how much you would earn by mining blocks, you would have to multiply that by 2^32 * (d/r) * (k/m), which can be quite complex. Value would be a really small number, 2^32 is a really large number, and the other two are somewhere in between. If, however, you would take Lavishness, it would give most parts of the equation values that can be understood by people.

I suppose I should start using the Value once GPU mining stops becoming a thing and nobody will be comparing the two.

As for the complexity and bounty instead of difficulty and reward - I mainly use it to distinguish between key mining and block mining. I use "bounty", because people are setting their bounties for solving their work. Complexity I use because it is a bit of a different thing. Difficulty is an arbitrary construct in itself - a ratio of the maximum Target (2^32) to the current Target. So when talking about creating blocks we should be using Target at all times, but we don't, as the values are really big. To get the number of hashes required to solve a block of given Difficulty (well, at 50% chance), you need to multiply it by 2^32. Alternatively, we could be using Difficulty and shares per second as the mining speed, but shares are also a construct brought about by the pools and are arbitrary (not all of them need to be ~~Difficulty 1). In Complexity, it's the actual number of keys you need to generate in order to have a 50% chance of solving the work.

[jtibble]

Is there any way to know how much effort is being exerted by the pooled vanity-address-miners (in Mkey/sec) in total? For example, is there any way to know if the current target (JohnGALT) will get solved sooner or later, or if my efforts are contributing in any meaningful way compared to the whole?

I would love to see a little bit of text on the mining pool page saying "

• miners connected for [y] Mkey/s", so I could know (out of curiosity) if I'm the only one working on the pool at the moment, or if there are hundreds of folks.

Cheers

[ThePiachu]

Is there any way to know how much effort is being exerted by the pooled vanity-address-miners (in Mkey/sec) in total? For example, is there any way to know if the current target (JohnGALT) will get solved sooner or later, or if my efforts are contributing in any meaningful way compared to the whole?

I would love to see a little bit of text on the mining pool page saying "

• miners connected for [y] Mkey/s", so I could know (out of curiosity) if I'm the only one working on the pool at the moment, or if there are hundreds of folks.

Cheers

I will look into incorporating that metric in when I will switch over from simple http requests to JSON RPC. For now, I know that there are miners constantly checking for work, but I am not able to determine the speed.

Any contribution to the pool is meaningful. If you are mining at a profit to yourself and that profit is higher than mining for blocks, everyone is benefiting.

[Lobstertorch]

Is there any way to know how much effort is being exerted by the pooled vanity-address-miners (in Mkey/sec) in total? For example, is there any way to know if the current target (JohnGALT) will get solved sooner or later, or if my efforts are contributing in any meaningful way compared to the whole?

I would love to see a little bit of text on the mining pool page saying "

• miners connected for [y] Mkey/s", so I could know (out of curiosity) if I'm the only one working on the pool at the moment, or if there are hundreds of folks.

Cheers

I'm working at 19 - 20 Mkey/sec

[maqifrnswa]

Using vanitygen, vanitygen64, or oclvanitygen, I get an error saying something like "valid namecoin addresses start with M or N" when I try NP followed by anything. However if I just try N, M, or N followed by a few random keys I tried (like 1 and x I think along with a few others) I can generate a Namecoin address. Using oclvanityminer doesn't even attempt to mine the namecoin address at all it seems.

Mining something that's 7812 times as profitable as regular bitcoin mining is turning out to be too good to be true.

Something might be wrong in vanitygen, the following combinations don't work:
Na, Nb, Nc, Nd, Ne, Nf, Ng, Nh, Ni, Nj, Nk, Nm, Nn, No, Np, Nq, Nr, Ns, Nt, Nu, Nv, Nw, Nx, Ny, Nz, NL, NM, NN, NP, NQ, NR, NS, NT, NU, NV, NW, NX, NY, NZ

but the rest do - this is probably a bug in vanitygen, i'll report it

Code:

for charact in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
do
./vanitygen -N N$charact 2>> test.txt
done