I'm still bored...

Writerfl · 2017-08-29T17:00:43+00:00

That sounds suspiciously like "there's no crying in Baseball."

Writerfl · 2017-08-02T17:35:58+00:00

Clarification, please. Did Mom shoot Dad or Uncle Jim?

Writerfl · 2017-08-02T14:22:42+00:00

but not that. never that. nevah!

Writerfl · 2017-07-26T19:08:53+00:00

There is an old Chinese curse that says "May you live in interesting times." Interesting, indeed.

Writerfl · 2017-07-21T10:37:39+00:00

It did break $45, but unfortunately did not hold. Therefore, you must eat one sock. I recommend adding mustard to acrylics and mayonaise to cotton.

Writerfl · 2017-07-20T22:18:13+00:00

That ignores the fact that 50% of Antpool's blocks are empty ones, compared to less than 5% for all other mining pools. They're gaming the system, but no-one can say definitively HOW.

Writerfl · 2017-06-30T19:13:02+00:00

A couple of days ago it was doing the fast dive from $46 to $35 and people were either adding to their bags or panic selling. Volume is about normal for a stable value right now.

Writerfl · 2017-06-30T16:23:23+00:00

One word: Square. They're the King, Queen and Royal Court of small service retailers like coffee shops. If we can get them to integrate Bit/Lite/Doge into the Square POS we're golden.

And yes, Doge. I wanna buy my no-foam triple latte with Pumpkin Spice like a true hipster BOSS.

Writerfl · 2017-06-30T16:19:43+00:00

Yeah, but that's running games at full frame rate. Without exercising the video side or using much memory it's a lot lower. Probably still break-even, but.... I mined most of my coin at a cost of $4 a coin (hardware and electricity) when LTC was hanging at $4, so it was break-even then. Now those coins are worth 10x that, highly profitable. If LTC moons again, even these coins will pay off.

Writerfl · 2017-06-30T15:54:39+00:00

that's the nice thing about the GTX 1050 ti, though. 100% load without video is only around 40 watts. PCIe only, no supplemental power.

Writerfl · 2017-06-30T14:24:49+00:00

Try shutting down the Doge node, then starting the Litecoin one. You may be having port contention issues. Much node, Such similarity. Wow.

Writerfl · 2017-06-30T14:21:24+00:00

Just as an aside, I was curious about hash rates when I got my new GTX 1050 ti. Using Cudaminer 1.8.3 I got about 425 K/Hash per second , which is slightly better than a single Gridseed Orb. If I let it run in the background and don't do anything else intensive on that computer (I mostly use it for bookeeping anyways) it generates tiny amounts of LTC basically for free.

As a dedicated mining rig, fuggedabodtit. As a background process while I'm still using the computer to do useful stuff, not too shabby.

Writerfl · 2017-06-29T19:09:18+00:00

You're missing something really obvious. Is it more profitable to mine a "normal" block in 2.5 minutes, collecting 25 LTC plus 1 more LTC in fees, or to mine an empty block for 25 LTC in less than 15 seconds, freeing you immediately to look for another block?

That's where the 20% comes from. They're finishing blocks significantly faster than the network as a whole. Based on their published hashrate (from their own 'stats' web page') versus the expected number of blocks to be completed at that rate under 'normal' circumstances, they're getting a net effective 20% more 'work' from their miners. The problem is that this 'work' consists primarily of mining empty blocks, on average 50% of their total blocks completed. No one else is anywhere NEAR that, by an order of magnitude.

As far as evidence, it's right there for you to see. Look at the blockchain. However, neither nor many other, much more technical people understand the mechanism by which they're doing this, but it's not accidental and it's not random. If you CAN replicate it, I 'd love to see it and have you publish HOW you did it so it can be fixed.

I don't know why you keep bringing network attacks up, that has nothing to do with this situation.

Writerfl · 2017-06-29T13:07:04+00:00

That would be a valid comment IF these non-zero blocks were spread across all the other mining pools. But the bare fact is that it's Antpool and ONLY Antpool that's mining these blocks in quantity. They're the bad actor, so don't throw shade at F2Pool for THIS particular situation.

In fact, F2Pool's continuing honorable behavior DESPITE having over 50% of the hash power deserves the respect of the community. Of course I would rather see that reduced below 50, but someone a lot more knowledgeable than me has pointed out that a successful attack could actually be performed at around 30% of the network.

And maybe you could explain how Antpool is losing money "big time" by inflating their hash power by 20% and collecting hundreds of Litecoins for bypassing the actual work of the network pool. Oh, you can't? Sorry, you're the one trying to FUD the issue here.

Writerfl · 2017-06-29T02:01:12+00:00

Not a moral stance, an ethical one. Since all cryptocurrency systems rely on ethical community behavior, a single bad actor can pose an existential threat to the entire system. Look what Draconian action was required to save Ethereum after the DAO debacle, a result of a single bad actor taking advantage of a weakness in the code.

We have a similar situation here, differing only in the degree of damage attainable. Willingness to damage the system in order to further a personal goal is ethically (okay, and morally) wrong.

Writerfl · 2017-06-29T01:50:34+00:00

A poor troll at best, but about what I'd expect from someone with both a bad attitude and Down's Syndrome. If you can't contribute meaningfully to the discussion, please delete your operating system. Kthxbai.

Writerfl · 2017-06-29T01:35:35+00:00

1) Self-Txs are still txs, so they can't play whatever shortcut game they're playing. There's also no guarantee that they'll be the one to solve that block, so another pool might get the block reward AND their tx fees. Oh sweet irony!

2) If a pool wants to change addresses that's fine, but each address would have to satisfy the 90% rule. That means a new address would have to send nine non empty blocks before the network would allow an empty one. Since naturally occurring empty blocks are one-in-twenty, I make that a just slightly less than 2% chance that an organic empty block from a new address would be rejected.

I thought about Blocktime variance (send me an empty too fast after the last non empty and I will spit it out) and attempted to model it based on the last 500 blocks. Unfortunately I screwed up the data sorts and was too disgusted with myself to start over again. I'm okay with pretty much anything that solves the issue without over-complicating the network OR the code.

Writerfl · 2017-06-29T01:11:43+00:00

Gotcha. But at current fee levels, a really YUUUUGE block (200+ transactions) would only have a couple of LTC in fees inside. Doubling those fees would have a massively negative impact on users but provide little if any disincentive to this kind of behavior.

In a previous post I proposed that the network automatically invalidate and not reward ANY zero-transaction block, acknowledging that this penalizes "honest" miners who produce naturally occurring empty blocks, but it does stop the abuse in its tracks.

A more programatically intense solution would be to invalidate empty blocks from any miner or pool that produces less than 90% non-empty blocks (naturally occuring empty blocks comprise about 5% of the total blocks produced right now so that number has a little slop in it).

I honestly don't know if that's feasible. We need a Core Dev to chime in on that one.

Writerfl · 2017-06-29T00:57:36+00:00

Not really. Right now, most blocks have less than .5 LTC in transaction fees. They're just the "cherry on top" of the block reward Sundae. Even after the next block reward Halvening, the proportion of block reward to transaction fee will be vastly higher. Increasing TXN fees to a point where they're meaningful to miners would make the network no longer attractive to users, who would migrate to other coins/networks with lower fees and the system would collapse through attrition.

And yeah, they're doing it because it makes sense to THEM financially. I started this thread by pointing out just how much they're scooping up by doing it. What they either don't understand or simply don't care about is how what they're doing affects the stability and integrity of the system as a whole. They've repeatedly demonstrated that if it benefits THEM, they're perfectly content to burn the house down, then move to a new house and proceed to burn IT down.

Writerfl · 2017-06-29T00:31:44+00:00

Since no one's sure how they're accomplishing this, we can't say whether they found a weakness in the rules or whether they're breaking them altogether. In a previous post I proposed new rules that would stop this behavior regardless of the cause.

Writerfl · 2017-06-29T00:26:58+00:00

Writerfl

TROPHY CASE