The position I'm considering is in a decent sized datacenter.  The money is pretty good for the location, and the location is pretty much where I want to be (just one county away).  I'm just not sure that it would present a sufficient challenge to keep me interested and afford me the opportunity to maintain and improve my skills.

Many people are happy being drones, doing the same thing day after day without change.  Dear old dad worked the Post Office for 35 years.  I could never do that.  I like network and systems because there's always something to upgrade, as everything is new every couple of years, and I enjoy making sure that the routers and switches do their jobs, keeping the servers up and running, ensuring that everything is backed up, and that the software stays patched and is kept up to date.  Once or twice a year, a massive project comes up as either the swtiches, routers, servers, or softwares come to the end of life and have to be replaced, upgraded, or moved around.

In the bitcoin mine, you're talking about a raspberry pi, a custom rom of linux that someone else has provided for you.  As new ASICs come in, they get installed.  As old ASICs die, they get replaced.  As we run out of room, slow ASICs get replaced by new ASICs.  The network seems like it would be pretty flat.  With thousands of machines all doing the same thing, there's very little need to do much more than plug them in and provide them with an address.  It just sounds so tedious.

Hopefully not too far off topic...

With mining being so specialized, would you consider a full-time mining job a career killer?  I'd hate to wake up in 5 years to realize that my skills have gone to crap and find myself unemployable.

Thoughts?
 

Seriously? no anonymous pools at all? why does any pool need miners to register?

No P2Pool or Eligius style pool?

Why can't pool operators simply allow people to mine with their address and not have to create a friggin account?  I'm tired of creating throwaway email accounts and remembering random passwords and pins.

Just let us mine directly to an address for god's sake!

Merged mining may be a good option in the long term, but the immediate need is to get BEN working again.  For that, we just need to get all the metrics adjusted accordingly.

We seem to be at a 150 second block time between block 0 and block 24243 (last my client has).

Let's get BEN moving again, then worry about merge mining.

Doesn't really matter which block.  Last block is 24223.  If it takes you 8 hours to patch and release, that puts us at block 24225.  If it takes another 24 hours to get the pools and exchanges to update, that puts us at block 24231.  Maybe shoot for block 24240 to be safe.

I'd wait for input from the stakeholders though.  They may be able to act faster or might need more time.

Years of mining being eliminated?  Eh?  Those years of mining were accidental to begin with.  At a 2 minute block time, you're doubling the years of mining.  At 3 minutes, it's triple.

BEN was advertised with 64 second block times.  Personally, I think this is way too fast, but that's beside the point.  For the current problem, I think that both miners and merchants will be happier with a reliable 2-3 minute block time as opposed to 4 hour block times.

For BEN, or any coin, to work, it needs 1) Miners to process transactions and 2) transactions to process

Right now, BEN is on the road to eliminating both requirements for a successful coin.

The time to act is now... the longer you wait, the harder it will be to correct.

PS: I got caught on the wrong side of the cryptsy orderbook and lost over 50% of my coin.  I'm not mad, as this is my first experience trading, but I'm not happy either.  Given the current conditions, I'm not holding my breath on higher prices any time soon.

PPS: As soon as we find a few more blocks on Slush, I'll be moving back to BEN for a while, but will not stay if something's not done soon.

First Block: 2/2 2:07
Last Block: 3/7 14:46  (24214)

Elapsed time: 2896740 seconds

On a 64 second block time, we are 15 days behind.  We should be at block 45261.

On a 300 second block time, we are at 51 days ahead, we should be at block 9655.

In reality, we have an average block time of 119 seconds.  Let's go for it...

I would suggest a fork for block #25000, with a 120 second block time and a weekly readjustment.

2 minute block times would make BEN the fastest on Paysha (considering the current contenders), but is only twice as fast as advertised.

If we wanted to get all the way back to the 64 second block time, you could even implement a mechanism to reduce the block time by 1 second every 5000 blocks (or so), it would take less than a year to get back to the advertised rates.

Make that 19%...

150 statoshi is a nice spread, I just hope it doesn't close too fast.

I'm having fun trading... (my first experience trading currency).  Managed about a 15% increase in my holdings over the last 36 hours.

Fun fun fun!  If it keeps up, I might have enough to diversify!

Any coders out there wanna fork this puppy?

300 second block time minimum
1 coin reward for first 10,000 blocks
25 coin reward for the next 10,000 blocks (blowout)
Then go to PoS with the 4/2/1/whatever rewards.

Call it Version2 [V2]

What's broke?  The code in general, or just the Gravity Well?  I see the adjustments on almost every block, but the blocks appear to be coming in about every 2-5 seconds.  Nowhere near the 20seconds advertised.

Wish I would have caught that 20 second blocktime to begin with... would have skipped right over this thread and this coin... but I'm here, so I'll stick with it until at least the first 10k blocks are mined.

Intent: 20 second blocks - 10k blocks in ~55 hours.
Actual: 3 second blocks - 10k blocks in ~8.5 hours.

After that... PoS (Proof of stake or piece of shit?)

Please feel free to use whichever one of these addresses works as your Payout address in the pools:

69: V5camP6CDTguUGjzo8ZFWbVNphzd9d4E36 
70: VScamr5wyoTJ1taHLfojcUUZRoNSeJPYHN   
71: VscamcGn2fSFhDCanjX7yQgLX3w8ueyXo1   

Seriously though, if the prefix is 71, use this one instead:
VaginaFy7KohMoz6TZzhE9DpiCU4eHWJje

10 mins... hopefully dev is on task!

Are we there yet?

Anyone getting a P2Pool going?

How about the prefix to generate addresses?  69/70/71 for a V?  Hopefully 70 so I can generate VPrayer...

Yeah... way too low.  Wishing I had some free BTC to buy right now

tl;dr

If I were to mine this and get a few thousand coins, where do I redeem them for my barrels of oil?  Who are your backers? BP? Exxon? Valero?

Don't get it...

When I first loaded this a couple weeks ago, I added every node listed in this thread, but was never able to get any peers.

I finally had to add a seed node to benjamins.conf


Dev Guy! (what the heck is your name man?), now that there is an explorer, several pools and exchanges, it is time to set up some DNS seeds and release a new client so that new users will have an easier time connecting to the network.

-Prayer

Don't know how we got here, but I never said that ALL miners would receive DAILY payments.  Shares would grow in size and/or age until they qualified for a payout.  A 1TH miner might get a daily, while a 1GH miner might get a weekly or monthly.  Someone who only ever mined a few satoshi worth might not get a payout for several weeks.

The limits on block and transaction sizes are arbitrary and will need to be increased over time to accommodate an increase in transaction volume.  Considering the arbitrary nature of those limits, there's no reason that the limit on the coinbase transaction couldn't be modified to accommodate enough outputs to pay an equal mix of LARGE and OLD shares to the exhaustion of the block reward.  I don't think that it would take all that many outputs... several hundred at least, but probably not more than a thousand or so, which may not even require a modification of the limit.

Yes, I am oversimplifying the scenario, much like how the banksters and our government oversimplified the issue with Gold as a currency.  The rich wanted gold as a store of wealth, while the common man just wanted something to use for purchasing everyday things like bread and milk.  The two purposes were at odds, and the common man lost.

I'm sorry to have gone off on such a tangent.  It wasn't my intention to get into the intentions of future parties or the ability of Bitcoin to fend off various attacks (monetary, technological, or social).  I was simply trying to express that there are potential threats, and that while implementing P2Pool in the client itself could be part of a solution, it cannot solve any real problem by itself.

In order to eliminate any potential threat of consolidation of power, we would need to eliminate the 'vote by hash' system.  And no, I do not believe that POS is the answer either, as that consolidates power in the hands of whomever controls the most coin.  I really don't know what the answer is.

The daily limit of 660,000 transactions isn't an issue.  Payouts would only be done using one transaction per block, the coinbase transaction, which does not necessarily need to be limited to an arbitrary number of outputs.  The P2Pool payout logic described in the wiki is a little fuzzy, but I can see the payout being divided up between an equal number of outputs for the largest share holders and oldest (qualifying) share holders until the total award has been spent.  The only shares that would expire without compensation, would be those with a value less than a defined threshold or the limit of the monetary unit (less than 1 Satoshi).

To clarify my last post:

Satoshi wrote in his paper that "Nodes will always consider the longest chain to be the correct one..."  To expand on this, wouldn't it be fair to also say that whomever controls the longest chain has the power to impose a tax?

Even if we were to incorporate P2Pool style code directly into the client, we still won't have any way of proving that Alice is only running a single node and that her node wasn't being secretly controlled by Bob, or that Alice and Bob are not colluding towards some nefarious purpose.

I don't know the answer to this problem, or if it even is a problem.  Perhaps the 'central' nodes need to be operated in a completely open and transparent manner with positive identification of all parties involved with it's operation?