Vanity Pool - vanity address generator pool

[mskwik]

Something odd is going on.

The reward for the 1Piachu and 1ThePiachu patterns make it worthwhile to mine them, (in fact 1Piachu alone is the profitable one).

I've seen my miners submit several solutions to the 1Piachu pattern that seemed accepted (the miners then switched to the next most profitable pattern) but the 1Piachu pattern keeps coming back and I've not received any reward.

It doesn't seem to handle short patterns like that too well, I wasn't around to watch it at the time but my logs show that my machines alone sent a couple hundred solutions in during the time it was up.  Seem to recall the same thing happened last time there was a very short pattern as well, kind of acting like a load issue but you'd think if it accepted the first one properly and removed it from the work list it wouldn't be a problem.

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[ThePiachu]

Hmm, I guess the pool is having problems with many solutions being submitted for the same work in a short period of time. It is probably caused because the pool is running on Google App Engine and multiple instances of the app can be active at the same time and each has its own RAM. I will have to look into patching it up.

[jago25_98]

How do we convert an estimated difficulty to an estimated timeframe that it might complete in assuming the pool remains at the size it is now?

Don't want to go for something too ambitious, send the coins when it will take hundreds of years to compute, no?

[ThePiachu]

Well, if you request a work you will be given a price quote. The honest price shows how long you'd need to mine with a normal mining software to achieve a similar result.

Generally, aim under 9 characters total and you'll be fine .

[jago25_98]

Well, if you request a work you will be given a price quote. The honest price shows how long you'd need to mine with a normal mining software to achieve a similar result.

Generally, aim under 9 characters total and you'll be fine .

 Here's an example:

Code:

Work accepted!

Your work has been prepared!

Please send a reward you want to pay for it to this address: 1HPttAE1VEXZ7ggAd8aTB3SkXGbWuaPg2e

Minimum fee for your work is 0.01500000BTC.

Honest fee for your work is 1.45018819BTC.

If you want your work to be a priority, please pay at least 2.20000000BTC.

Upon receiving a payment with enough confirmations, we will send out the work to miners to solve.

You can check the status of your request here

If no fee is paid within a week, your request will be forgotten by the system.

Go back

If you like this site, please consider sharing or sending some Bitcoins over to:

1YXA3E8nmyQrST9zH6S3NaEGF76ByPpPJ

I know it's 1.45018819BTC "Honest" but how much time does that equate to? Almost one and a half blocks of the blockchain?

Sorry, I'm not a miner.

[ThePiachu]

Well, I don't really have data on how fast the miners are on the pool. Moreover, it is a game of luck at times. 1.5. BTC is still sane, but can take a couple days or weeks still.

[stevegee58]

I solved one of the pool's work items offline using oclvanitygen but the submission page says it doesn't accept it.
Did I miss something?  I did in fact find the pattern.

[ThePiachu]

PM me the work and the solution and I can see what's wrong.

[galaxyAbstractor]

Sorry for sounding stupid: What should I enter as public key? I rarely use keys so I keep forgetting how to use them <.<. I have a gpg key generated for use in the #bitcoin-otc channel, and I guess I could use that? Though when I enter it, it says the key is too short, but it's a bit over 3000 characters. What am I supposed to do?

[Winterfrost]

Sorry for sounding stupid: What should I enter as public key? I rarely use keys so I keep forgetting how to use them <.<. I have a gpg key generated for use in the #bitcoin-otc channel, and I guess I could use that? Though when I enter it, it says the key is too short, but it's a bit over 3000 characters. What am I supposed to do?

You can use the keyconv utility that's packaged with vanitygen to create the public key.

[galaxyAbstractor]

Sorry for sounding stupid: What should I enter as public key? I rarely use keys so I keep forgetting how to use them <.<. I have a gpg key generated for use in the #bitcoin-otc channel, and I guess I could use that? Though when I enter it, it says the key is too short, but it's a bit over 3000 characters. What am I supposed to do?

You can use the keyconv utility that's packaged with vanitygen to create the public key.

Do I have to compile that myself? It isn't included in the binaries

[Winterfrost]

Sorry for sounding stupid: What should I enter as public key? I rarely use keys so I keep forgetting how to use them <.<. I have a gpg key generated for use in the #bitcoin-otc channel, and I guess I could use that? Though when I enter it, it says the key is too short, but it's a bit over 3000 characters. What am I supposed to do?

You can use the keyconv utility that's packaged with vanitygen to create the public key.

Do I have to compile that myself? It isn't included in the binaries

Looks like it wasn't included in the last few sets of binaries. If you replace the 0.22 with 0.20 it's in there. https://github.com/downloads/samr7/vanitygen/vanitygen-0.20-win.zip

[galaxyAbstractor]

I think I got it at last. My new address is 1gaLaxy9csuBTvNLJYoUy6sengQbh1TpV

[ThePiachu]

Sorry for sounding stupid: What should I enter as public key? I rarely use keys so I keep forgetting how to use them <.<. I have a gpg key generated for use in the #bitcoin-otc channel, and I guess I could use that? Though when I enter it, it says the key is too short, but it's a bit over 3000 characters. What am I supposed to do?

http://gobittest.appspot.com/Address

Go here, click random a few times, save number 0, 1 and 9.

[galaxyAbstractor]

Sorry for sounding stupid: What should I enter as public key? I rarely use keys so I keep forgetting how to use them <.<. I have a gpg key generated for use in the #bitcoin-otc channel, and I guess I could use that? Though when I enter it, it says the key is too short, but it's a bit over 3000 characters. What am I supposed to do?

http://gobittest.appspot.com/Address

Go here, click random a few times, save number 0, 1 and 9.

Yeah I figured, but I didn't need the 9 (I forgot to save it but I got my address anyway)

[scintill]

I've been kicking around the idea of applying shares to this pool.  One thing that comes to mind is how with standard pooled mining, a share is the same type of proof of work but of lesser difficulty.  Maybe a "share" for vanity mining would be an address whose first N bytes match the desired prefix (the value of N might vary depending on the difficulty of the vanity address.)  These could be submitted as proof of doing work, and by seeing how fast they're coming from clients an estimation of hashing speed could be made.  This seems like it might be useful to clients wondering if they're going to get their money's worth out of the pool, or if they'd be better off generating it themselves.

You might even be able to pay-per-share, too.  I don't know how the math would work but it seems like you should be able to divide the vanity reward up among shares so that there's a high probability that by the time the reward has been completely paid out, a matching address has been found.  Maybe be extra-conservative with the share payments and the person who finds the address gets the remainder of the reward as a bonus.  I suppose the share value could get very small, perhaps too small to be worth tracking.

Obviously the pool and clients get more complex, especially with PPS, and the PPS could be risky, but I'm curious what people think.

[ThePiachu]

Well, it's all possible, but with the project being so small I just can't bring myself to commit too much time to it at the moment.

[Ente]

I've been kicking around the idea of applying shares to this pool.  One thing that comes to mind is how with standard pooled mining, a share is the same type of proof of work but of lesser difficulty.  Maybe a "share" for vanity mining would be an address whose first N bytes match the desired prefix (the value of N might vary depending on the difficulty of the vanity address.)  These could be submitted as proof of doing work, and by seeing how fast they're coming from clients an estimation of hashing speed could be made.  This seems like it might be useful to clients wondering if they're going to get their money's worth out of the pool, or if they'd be better off generating it themselves.

You might even be able to pay-per-share, too.  I don't know how the math would work but it seems like you should be able to divide the vanity reward up among shares so that there's a high probability that by the time the reward has been completely paid out, a matching address has been found.  Maybe be extra-conservative with the share payments and the person who finds the address gets the remainder of the reward as a bonus.  I suppose the share value could get very small, perhaps too small to be worth tracking.

Obviously the pool and clients get more complex, especially with PPS, and the PPS could be risky, but I'm curious what people think.

Definitely possible!
Yes, just how you say - almost the same as regular mining pools.
However, people don't "work toward" solving a block or finding an address, it is strictly random. It's getting more probable to find a solution the longer you or the pool works on it, but only because more tries were done. Every single hash-generation has the same chance to find the jackpot, no matter if it is the third try or a try after a billion.
So, in short: don't pay out until the address was actually found. And then you know exactly how many shares everyone submitted.

Also, vanitymining rarely pays in the range of direct bitcoin mining. Until that is "solved", there isn't much going on here.. ;-)
Still, I am fascinated by all this.

Ente

[scintill]

So, in short: don't pay out until the address was actually found. And then you know exactly how many shares everyone submitted.

Good point, then just pay each miner bounty * (their_shares / total_shares).

Also, vanitymining rarely pays in the range of direct bitcoin mining. Until that is "solved", there isn't much going on here.. ;-)

How is this?  The pool gives a mining ratio that is supposed to represent how many more times profitable it is to mine vanity addresses than bitcoins, and it's currently 2.78.  I can see how the variability of this would be higher than a PPS or geometric method pool, but over long periods it should still pay better, right?

Well, it's all possible, but with the project being so small I just can't bring myself to commit too much time to it at the moment.

No problem, and thanks for what you have done.

[ThePiachu]

How is this?  The pool gives a mining ratio that is supposed to represent how many more times profitable it is to mine vanity addresses than bitcoins, and it's currently 2.78.  I can see how the variability of this would be higher than a PPS or geometric method pool, but over long periods it should still pay better, right?

That ratio is a bit idealised and assumes you are mining all the addresses at the same time (additive rather than multiplicative address generation). From what I understand, samr7's miner just uses a few of the most profitable addresses and that's it.