Quote from: dooglus on July 03, 2015, 04:30:54 AM

Quote from: SebastianJu on July 02, 2015, 10:21:04 AM

Though i wonder how blocks are found at all. It sounds like calculating like with bitcoin but its not the case. I heard its random but that doesnt account for how orphaned blocks can happen then. You dont need to explain when you think i should investigate myself. Wink

It's not particularly easy to find out.

When I first discovered CLAM, I couldn't find out how staking worked, so I read the source code and summarised it like this:

Quote from: dooglus on July 16, 2014, 05:54:37 AM

you work out the "clam days" of your outputs. If you have 0.13 CLAM that hasn't moved for 3 days, you have 0.39 "clam days" (multiply value by age). I think that 0.39 is then rounded down to an integer, which might be your problem, since it will go to 0 for you. But suppose you had 13 CLAM that hadn't moved for 3 days. That's 39 clam days. That gets multiplied by about 4000 (depending on the current difficulty). So you get 39*4000 = 156,000. Then every second your client hashes a bunch of stuff and gets an effectively random number between 0 and 4.3 billion. If the number is less than your 156,000 then you get to stake. 156,000 is about 27,500 times smaller than 4.3 billion, so you get to stake about once per 27,500 seconds (458 minutes, 7.5 hours).

So 13 CLAM that's 3 days old stakes every 7.5 hours or so. As it gets older, its chance of staking increases.

And I think your 0.13 CLAM needs to be 1/0.13 = 7.7 days old before it gets over 1 "clam day", and so even has a chance of staking, though I might be wrong on that point.

*lol* Sounds like a currency that rewards you for NOT using it as a currency. If i would have read it without knowing clams i would think this is a scamcoin and the creators did this to become rich. Tongue

Quote from: dooglus on July 03, 2015, 04:30:54 AM

It has changed since then. There is no longer the concept of "age" - the weight of an output is simply its size (once it has matured and not been involved in a transaction for 4 hours). And the "every second" changed to "every 16 seconds". And the difficulty became about a million times easier.

But basically, every 16 seconds your client looks at each of your unspent outputs, finds the ones which are mature and haven't moved in the last 4 hours, and hashes a bunch of information together (including the current time, the txid, etc.). If the hash is smaller than the current network-wide target times the value of the output then that output gets to stake a block. Multiplying the target by the size of the output makes the ease of staking proportional to the size of the output.

It's "random" in the same way that Just-Dice rolls are random: it isn't, but it appears to be due to the nature of hashing. Imagine hashing "abc123"+current_time_in_seconds with sha256 until you got a number less than a million as the hash result. There's a particular time in the future when that will happen, but without trying it for every current_time_in_seconds you can't predict when it will happen.

Thanks for the explaination. So the sets of parameters for each second are fixed. You cant try different hashes in one second. Or 16 seconds, now. Would one have an advantage when calculating hashes in advance? I guess so since finding hashes for the same second should be hard. I mean where do you take the second from? Your second can be some seconds after the seconds of other miners, so you would be late all time, not finding a block ever.

And you said the wallet checks each of your addresses. Does this mean you can have different addresses in your wallet and you could try out each one if it creates a correct hash?