Quote from: adambeazley on July 12, 2013, 09:07:44 PM

Quote from: ivanlabrie on July 12, 2013, 08:45:34 PM

Quote from: adambeazley on July 12, 2013, 08:40:24 PM

So, i have a question about primecoin mining, how exactly does each block gets mined.

Are basically all blocks open until they are solved? In other words, if my miner finds a block and is working on that block to solve it, then can Joe Blow's miner finds that same block and solve it quicker and earn the coins? Or do i have a flawed understanding of a "block"?

What Im getting at, is it better (not taking electricity into consideration) to have a bunch of separate slower pps computers (or miner instances) or one beast computer (one mining instance) with the same combined pps as all of he smaller ones?

I would think, that if a little luck is involved in finding blocks, then the more instances, the higher your probability of "finding" a block right?

Thanks, I'm a little bit of a mining noob, just trying to learn the terminology and technology better.

Thanks,

Your question is a bit offtopic in this thread, but I'll try to answer to it.

You can find a block at the same time, or slightly after someone else, but you won't get rewards, blocks are mined and the whole network knows it has been mined thanks to the proof of work algorithm which makes sure all the network is synced, since it takes certain amount of work to figure out the correct prime number chain for each block. Thus no miner can get ahead of the whole network unless it surpasses its power by 51%+.

Sorry for the off-topic question, but thanks for your prompt answer. I get it now... So if everyone is working on the same block at any given time, would'nt it be better to have a more powerful pps machine than a bunch of smaller instances?

Maybe, but it depends...also, it depends on how well the code works spread through different threads of the same cpu.
Apparently it stops scaling at 10 cores per cpu, and a 32 core cpu is slower than a few 10 core ones.