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Showing 20 of 26 results by mathx
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Topic
Board Project Development
Re: Theoretically a branch of Bitcoin including IP addresses in the blocks
by
mathx
on 26/06/2011, 02:19:05 UTC
His posts are fine. He's fleshing out ideas. Want longer posts insteaed of many? Whats the diff.

Anyway, I dont understand why allowing identification is going to mitigate a trust issue. We already have a solution in bitcoin to mitigate trust issues. Using another identity one allows people to wear identity badges, like nice little 6 pointed stars that some people were forced to wear in some societies, to grossly detrimental effects.

Anonymity should be a right of the people and every person in this future society - the only difference is that anonymity allows the exploitation or damage of the system in our current society, in the new society there wont be any benefits to this anonymity, just protection from others damaging them. No group will be economically identifiable over any other.

Need a better way than giving up anonymity into the current hegemony to convince bitcoin users to merge into and takeover the existing system.
Post
Topic
Board Project Development
Re: BitCoin-like system for mesh networking - trust mitigation models
by
mathx
on 26/06/2011, 00:37:04 UTC
Bumping this thread.

I am interested in this kind of system. Need to outline some goals here.


Want to blend in bitcoin's aspects into the mesh system more deeply. Not just as a payment system incentive, but as a stand-in for trust.

The forced-work-as-standin-for-trust system is a useful solution to the Byzantine Generals problem, but we need to outline what trust we're trying to mitigate.

Right now centralized internet access is the norm, in a trickle up system. We must trust that the internet we receive from upstream nodes will a) work properly (ie not be shut off)  b) not be filtered in some way.

To avoid the shutting off, we go to an ad hoc model where trust in a particular mesh node is not required. This is done by supplanting work required on part of the node for the quality (uptime? bw rate? lack of filtering 'canary in a coalmine' content?) of the connection. However, in bitcoins the incentive for doign the work is to realise the value of the bitcoins you mine. In this case we have to realise some benefit to the node that does the work. Perhaps in this case then instead of like namecoin which is its own advantage as an alternate system to bitcoin, we actually use bitcoins to generate a payment for the node.

However we must be careful in that very very good nodes dont dominate the local (or larger) tree, or they'll become attackable as single points of failure/access. Not sure what can be done here - if we make an incentive to provide connectivity too large, nodes will dominate. If we make a timeout situation, then we'll be punishing reliable nodes and encouraging large organizations with wider resources to setup multiple nodes in cahoots and dominate. This is a tricky problem for local access - not the same issue as bitcoin dominateing > 50% of computation resources as connectivity may locally expose nodes to >50% (or more) of all connectivity travelling via just a few nodes, making a local attack on the leaf nodes QoS possible.

Throwing some ideas around here. Need input.
Post
Topic
Board Politics & Society
Increasing bitcoin's legitimacy and acceptance - charities?
by
mathx
on 10/06/2011, 14:35:29 UTC
What are the projects in place or that should be started to increase legitimacy?

One easy way I see is to give part of your earnings to charities. Especially larger charities, well known and respected. Though the issue with them is they might not care about a piddling $1M donation, where as smaller ones very much will.

So the goal is to find a highly visible, very publicly-palatable (nothing too political or polarized) but underfunded charity (or a dozen), and give them money.

'sides, this kinda jives with the basic concept of a more community-based economy. a 5% tax/tithe isnt very much for a good cause, and also supports our own future viability with BTCs.

Thoughts?

anyone already organizing such lists and drives to donate?
Post
Topic
Board CPU/GPU Bitcoin mining hardware
Re: Ufasoft Miner Thread - SSE2-optimized for Intel CPUs, version 0.10 (2011-May)
by
mathx
on 09/06/2011, 19:59:14 UTC
Code:
[quote author=speculatrix link=topic=3486.msg179707#msg179707 date=1307455857]

g++-4.5 -std=c++0x -funsigned-char -fno-stack-protector -Wno-invalid-offsetof -I . -I el/inc -g -O2   -o bitcoin-miner bitcoin-miner.o bitcoin-client.o bitcoin-sha256.o bitcoin-sha256-x86x64.o sha256sse.o sha256x86.o ext-text.o ext-protocols.o ext-handlers.o ext-encoding.o threader.o regex.o ext-file.o ext-fw.o datetime.o ext-base.o ext-os.o ext-app.o ext-string.o ext-blob.o ext-stream.o ext-core.o http.o stack-trace.o  -lrt -ldl -lcurl -lpthread -lpcre
sha256sse.o: file not recognized: File format not recognized
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [bitcoin-miner] Error 1


the .o files appear to be corrupted:
Code:
$ file sha*.o
sha256sse.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, x86-64, invalid version, corrupted section header size
sha256x86.o: ELF 64-bit LSB relocatable, x86-64, invalid version, corrupted section header size

any ideas please?

thanks very much
Paul
[/quote]

I think the SSE issue was covered earlier in the thread. I think it has to do with 64 vs 32 bit. I only tried to get it working in 32 bit compile environment. Good luck with 64. See my instrux previously on 32 bit.
Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: Calculating heat generated.
by
mathx
on 04/06/2011, 04:31:51 UTC
Hmm I guess, but isn't it going to take a LOT of heat from the miners to reasonably warm up the house. I guess if you can tolerate colder than what you're used to temps during the winter then it's ok.

I think to reasonably heat up a modestly sized house you're going to need to output multiple kilowatts/h of heat. But if you have good insulation you can maybe slowly warm up the house and it will retain the heat for a while.

Super efficient houses use a 1000W heater at intervals for the whole house. Most space heaters are 1200+W and you'd need 5-10 of them for a regular house (1500-2000 sq ft), more for bigger houses, if they're poorly insulated.

Depends on how many rigs yer running.
Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: BitCoin futurism
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 18:51:43 UTC
Ok getting the ball rolling here a bit:

Governments might not have an issue with bitcoins' "anonymity" - it's fleeting. Consider the richest BitCoin holders - with basic traffic analysis on networks, it would be relatively easy to track one bitcoin address and related transactions - and map them to IPs and IPs of people sending them coins.

This would produce the ultimate in tracing financial transactions. This kind of information would be very powerful, especially in watching for large events, such as large corporations finalizing a deal - a big transfer goes through - this would mess with stock markets (but in a perfect world, the market will build this into the price immediately, along with a speculative value for the timing of the transaction before it actually occurs).

Would this not be a boon to government surveillance, far beyond what is capable now? Psuedonymity can be useful, but once its traced to a particular individual, all future transactions can be tracked against them. And merely generating more addresses isnt always possible - you'll want your contacts to know your current BTC address to pay you and not have to go find another.

Perhaps a crypto network escrow service that hides actual addresses, without needing to give a central entity full control of your keys is possible - another p2p identity verification network?

This ability to track and trace all trends and transfers of money will allow for some amazing economic and financial manipulation by large players -- unless the system already prices such risks into itself inherently by its own nature. Perhaps untraceable cash and imperfect knowledge, in a currency with imperfect liquidity is required -- is BTC actually the libertarian's nightmare disguised?
Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Vanity bitcoin addresses: a new way to keep your CPU busy
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 18:27:55 UTC
I have a simple handshake scheme which allows me to generate a new address for you without me finding out your private key.

How does this work? You HAVE to explain it or the public wont trust your keys. Furthermore, some segment of the population has to understand it fully, the rest will follow the herd of smart people.

Til then tho, there's no market.
Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
BitCoin futurism
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 18:18:41 UTC
This is a very vague discussion level post.

Im wondering what kind of societal, economic, market, political and psychological changes might come about to society, business and various other facets of life if BitCoin was to become a widely used currency. (We can also talk about what's going to stop it from being so, tho that's widely covered elsewhere too.)

Im thinking a few very vague notions:

 - bitcoins are nominally worth current technology x current cost of power. What would this do to the cost of power if massive mining by members of an electricity market was undertaken?

 - since power is loosely related to the cost of oil and gas, what does this mean for the heating market and energy markets?

 - attaching microvalues to all messages sent/actions undertaken by all people, to underscore their sincerity - will this result in the (nearly) infinitely-divisible fractal monetization of much of  human activity even down to the interpersonal level? What does that mean for fuzzy-valuations of common-goods and community that we all intuitively understand and engage in - will they be strictly monetized? What will markets in such fora look like?

- economics 101 - when a currency is infinitely liquid (as btc may become with cell phones automatically chattering payments to eachother at high rates during normal social or commercial intercourse), what happens to economies that run on them?

- how about competing BitCoin networks? How about an huge number of different semi private BitCoin networks/currencies?

Cmon, get your thinking caps on, i wanna see the next Neil Stephenson novel taking shape in this forum Tongue
Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Vanity bitcoin addresses: a new way to keep your CPU busy
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 17:54:48 UTC
Wow... i should be a little less gluttonous though... or really lucky :p
Thanks for the estimation.

Is your software using the GPU too? Whats the nominal market value for this derivative market? Smiley

You sharing your vanity generation code? Smiley
Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: Please test: New Experimental Pool "Eligius"
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 17:43:32 UTC
I've been mining for over a 4 days now on eligius and I still havent seen a drop of bitcoins.... what gives? I realize I'm mining with a really bad GPU (GTX 258) and getting only 60 mhash/s but shouldn't I atleast be getting SOME bitcoins? like some change? I have a high number of stales too 196 at the moment, but I have 4,383 accepted. Am I misunderstanding how bitcoin mining works? Should I even try to mine with 60 Mhash/s?

You get paid out when you hit 1.0 BTC _AND_ a block is found to pay people out from. We're still finding blocks regularly, so its not too long to get paid out.

As for worth mining with 60Mhash - check the mining calculators for your cost of power (dont forget to x 1.6-1.9 if you have to run AC too) and if you leave your computer on anyway (take away that base power level from your increase for bitcoin to find the extra power and its cost) -

the only thing that determines value of mining isnt the difficulty, it's your ratio of MH/s to the whole market indexed against the value of a BTC in USD or other.
It floats up and down between worth it and not for any particular rig.
Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: Huge ~40% Drop in Network Hashing Power (5/27/2011)
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 11:00:46 UTC

Mmmm, good point about the heat.  I have a friend in CA who is jealous of my mining, and he has a card that would do 100MH/s at least, but he won't mine because he said his room is already too hot.

Those of us who are adults can just go out and buy something to cool the room with, but some younger miners might not have that option available, and would just shut down the miners instead.

Adults like to lose money?

The only thing that determines profitability isnt how absolutely fast your rig is, but how fast your rig is compared to the total hash rate. Bitcoins increase in value relatively in step with difficulty of course, so you get more for more difficult coins. What matters is your chance of being the one to find it/being part of a pool that does.

The more people that drop off, the better it is for all miners, regardless of difficulty. In fact, mtgox might even show value vs other currencies increasing for BTC because its so hard to generate more - the money supply just slowed down, value goes up. And on top of that your chances just increased because people left - best time to mine, evar. But please dont, cuz Im mining right now. Let you know when Im done kthxbai.
Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: Please test: New Experimental Pool "Eligius"
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 10:30:45 UTC
I had problems with phoenix when I first joined. Might be because I was using bare 1.4 and didnt patch up to 1.46 or 1.47 (.48?)

ufasoft was working fine with shares, but this is what i got with phoenix (runing at the same time):

Code:
[29/05/2011 04:15:06] Connected to server
[29/05/2011 04:18:33] Result: bd073ad5 rejected
[29/05/2011 04:22:36] Result: 89a48906 rejected
[29/05/2011 04:28:51] Result: fd7dd4fe rejected
[29/05/2011 04:29:42] Result: 6e8fc933 rejected
[29/05/2011 04:34:38] Result: 455523db rejected
[29/05/2011 04:39:58] Result: 38871b48 rejected
[29/05/2011 04:40:00] Result: 0e546772 rejected
[29/05/2011 04:43:58] Result: a4e59700 rejected
[29/05/2011 04:46:58] Result: b99add02 rejected
[29/05/2011 04:53:20] Result: d1672e38 rejected
[29/05/2011 04:55:21] Result: e12761fc rejected
[29/05/2011 04:56:49] Result: 4dfbb76f rejected
[29/05/2011 04:57:08] Result: bdbbbfeb rejected
[29/05/2011 05:06:28] Result: efcec0ff rejected
[2[29/05/2011 05:07:02] Disconnected from server
[21.59 Mhash/sec] [0 Accepted] [14 Rejected] [RPC (+LP)

I stopped it and ran the regular pcolbm miner instead at nearly the same rate.

(however I just got this on it:

Code:
29/05/2011 06:24:13, long poll exception:                   
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/math32/.bitcoin/BitcoinMiner.py", line 259, in longPollThread
    (connection, result) = self.request(connection, url, self.headers)
  File "/home/math32/.bitcoin/BitcoinMiner.py", line 222, in request
    response = connection.getresponse()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 990, in getresponse
    response.begin()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 391, in begin
    version, status, reason = self._read_status()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/httplib.py", line 349, in _read_status
    line = self.fp.readline()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/socket.py", line 427, in readline
    data = recv(1)
timeout: timed out

is that normal?!)

Im  1BTFUtEscdizVPGiqrKhpy5s6QiQ4nNemC if that helps track this down.

Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: Calculating heat generated.
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 10:23:15 UTC


I don't think anyone will realistically use miner heat to warm up the house. I think a smarter solution would be to move mining equipment into a room or area where you can shut off the furnace vents or maybe even open up the windows and let in the cold winter air.

haha, you're missing the point! any money saved by heating your house with your rigs is now LOST to the outside! why not just... HEAT YOUR HOUSE with your rigs?

If the rigs are putting out too much heat however, you could have a distribution issue, and need fans (which cost power too). Better to spread the rigs around the house,
in drafty areas, say under windows Wink

Still you are saving the cost of gas on that electricity only, still going to be 7-10c/kWh in most of the cheaper markets for heating by electricity, and still much more (tho in such markets,
gas tends to be more $ too - there's some friction between gas and electricity prices in each market).
Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: Please test: New Experimental Pool "Eligius"
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 10:18:28 UTC
Payouts of 1.0 BTC might be a bit high.

Someone asked 1BTC or once a week (once the credit is a week old? pool credits from the week? dont know), but 1.0BTC has exploded over the last 6 weeks and is about to get a lot higher.

Of course it's an odd thing - soon it will be downright a waste of power and real money to use anything < 10-20MH/s, if it isnt already (unless it's people at work or school leveraging employer's/school's power lol). Im just playing around with BITCOIN and dont have real gear here, a whole 30-35MH/s woot lol. (possibly not economically viable with airconditioning on in the summer...)

If the market keeps climbing like it is, it's quite possible to asymptotically never get paid - until you stop contributing to the pool. That's a strange incentive to provide to pool members - to leave the pool!

Unless it keeps load on the server down by not having to service pissant miners like me - a nice incentive to GTFO and let the big boys do the real work?

Just wondering whats going to happen when the minimum payout of 1.0BTC is on avg 50 6990's running for a month and is worth $1200 USD. (Sorry thats a top of my head guess, i could be off by a magnitude or 3 -- there's some relatively linear range of values for difficulty:$USD exchange rate on mtgox, bitcharts has the data). You get what I mean.

perhaps payouts should be when they're equivalent to one USD according to MTGOX or average of the largest 3-5 exchanges or something.

Feel free to base it on Euros too, or some basket of currencies. Maybe we should base it on the price of oil, since electricity tracks that somewhat too... lol. Economics 101 fun!

really, it should just be based on the current difficulty, relative, say, to what 1 BTC:cur difficulty is right now. (434883, for reference when this topic is another 3-6 weeks old...)

Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: Please test: New Experimental Pool "Eligius"
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 09:46:00 UTC

In the meantime, the stats main page has been improved : there's a hashing power graph and a list of recently found blocks. Check it out here !

Edit: done. I had to reset the individual graphes, but this time should be the last.

Awesome page!

Do you have a hashrate distribution diagram? Like showing the statistical distribution and stddevs for the population.  That'd be interesting to see. Also would be interesting to see is the movement overtime of 2std devs or so of the hashrate population above and below the mean, graphed over time. This will show how fast the pool is increasing its power per individual contributor (not that contributors cant generate more addresses for themselves to mine with..)

Awesome work thanks! Soon as I have some BTC's ill start donating lol.
Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: Please test: New Experimental Pool "Eligius"
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 09:39:41 UTC
US MySQL is taking forever to add an id column. Europe should be fine in the meantime.
MySQL? What are you using that piece of shit for? Grin I guess it's simpler than Postgres.
I'd probably use Postgres if I knew it. But MySQL has phpMyAdmin, so... I did consider switching anyway when the MySQL people told me I couldn't do replication that wasn't 1:1, but then the Postgres people said the same thing.

Stats are being moved to http://eligius.st/~luke-jr/raw/ but it isn't done yet.

phppgadmin - web-based administration tool for PostgreSQL

course, real men just use really huge xterms instead and alot of scrollback... Smiley
Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: Please test: New Experimental Pool "Eligius"
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 09:36:05 UTC
US MySQL is taking forever to add an id column. Europe should be fine in the meantime.

MySQL? What are you using that piece of shit for? Grin I guess it's simpler than Postgres.

SRSLY, responsible financial institutions use postgres. It's a question of how serious
your local bank-pool is about transactions! Smiley

Then again, replication between nodes is a lot easier with mysql, at my last look. Could be better now in pgsql...
Post
Topic
Board Pools
Re: Please test: New Experimental Pool "Eligius"
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 09:23:29 UTC
idea: take email address as password, send periodic emails (on block solves and payment sent)
If, then please only optional + with unsubscribe feature (as this might be an easy way to spam people by subscribing them via this system to a mailing list)

except we've finally invented the proof-of-work-to-spam system. You have to mine to spam them. And the spam isnt very interesting.

It'd be great if spammers joined the pool to spam out block solves and payment information, and contributed GH/s to the pool! not likely tho.. Smiley

maybe "-- This payment info message brought to you by [1a|_iS!!!!"

lol.
Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: Return of Mystery Miner?
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 07:43:15 UTC

So just artifact of the averaging ... how boring.

Edit: Would be good if we got some kind of measure for how extreme the variance of the current block generation rate is ...

This is actually troubling. Law of averages say that random wild excursions from the mean without any other input (like someone turning off the NSA's rig Smiley ) should be very rare, and the larger the excursion, the more rare.

Im sure someone is doing some stats analysis to see if this the fluctuations are expected or a very rare anomaly - if they're happenign too frequently, then either ther'es very large flux in computation rate for a reason (NSA, or a major blackout somewhere, or internet outrage), or someone's not aggregating hashrates properly.

as you say, tracking the variance and assigning a statistical value to its probability would be useful. cept i failed stats class.
Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: Calculating heat generated.
by
mathx
on 29/05/2011, 07:36:43 UTC

I'm in Canada. You know what let me check my gas bill cause I may have spoken with my ass lol :p..one moment plz..nope I was correct..I pay $0.14 per cubic meter of gas, but pay only $0.06 in the winter for electricity.



Do you tihnk 1 cu m of gas = $0.06 whatevers of electricity? Need some units please. kWH are fine. its a unit of energy. Throw in efficiency of device after that too (as someone said, gas furnace is
about 40-98%, then there's 300W furnace fan for my 1800 sq ft house, but all of its waste heat goes into the house too, for the most part...)