Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: [ANN] [PMC] Premine! - 100% Premine / 100% Distribution - Mining TX fees only
by
creditcoin_CRD
on 28/02/2014, 17:31:27 UTC
So any word on what the problem was? was it a bug that will effect bitcoin as well in a few years? or was it a change made after the fork from bitcoin?



No, it was a bug of my own doing. I believe it is patched, and I'm testing it on an isolated blockchain. I believe everything is ok, But i want to mine more blocks on my testnet before I release the software.


Sorry to bump this from last month, but I have not kept up with the latest events.

What was the bug that allowed more coins to be mined?

Was there a detailed explanation in some post?

Please link of available.

Thanks!

There is some post about it several pages back, the exact location is unknown. The problem appears to exist in all coins. I have tested the anomaly under a number of different parameters and the result is the same. There is a mathematics error in the code where essentially the mining  rewards continue to reduce by half even beyond the 8th decimal. IE: even after the mining reward is cut in half down to 0.00000001 it continues to half even though the result cannot be seen. Eventually this causes a script error, and causes the block rewards to start over from the beginning. The easiest fix is a manual entry to tell the network to never produce coins after BLOCK # "X" ("X" will vary based on how the coin is set up.) I believe this error will effect most (if not all)  current bitcoin / altcoin forks.  

That's odd... I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't repeated halving eventually converge to zero by rounding in any sane decimal library?

One would think so, but that certainly didn't happen in our case.

I was able to repeat the error under different parameters, but I did use my own fork and simply made changes. If you took a fresh fork of bitcoin and ran it to the end it is indeed possible that it would not happen.