First of all, let me tell you that the Bitcoin Exhibition at the Zürich MoneyMuseum is most likely the biggest and most diverse of it’s kind. Please read more about the museum and the exhibition below.
Help us solve the following problem we experience with our “Muscle Powered Proof of Work” installation:
Me and a friend have invested a lot of time to build an installation for the Museum. It is basically a 10GHash/s miner and RapberryPi which is powered by a hand generator (Maxon DC motor with planetary gear). Here are some pictures of the installation, although not entirely put together yet. There are still some changes planned.
Now let’s get to the core of our problem:
We are mining at the getwork diff1 pool btcmp.com as it is a true pps pool with getwork diff1. The visitors in the museum can power the generator for 2-3min and see directly how many Satoshis the "network" (actually pool but we don't want to confuse the visitors to much at that point) has given the museum for their work. This all works well so far but one problem remains. Sometimes the pool does not get a share from us for more than 40 seconds or even more than 60 in some cases. I have calculated that with 8.4 GHash/s we should find a share about every 0.5 seconds in average (diff1). I think when the pool gets a share it gets all the hashes as it then accounts for several Satoshis. Statistically we get per minute what we should get in theory. We would very much like to lower the time between the accepted shares by the pool, however. This would help to make the overall experience much smoother for the visitors.
Please look at this screenshot from MinePeon and answer some questions:
We see that we get a lot of diff1 hashes. However, only 11 shares/packages have been accepted. The Is there a possibility to set the miner SW so it submits to the pool as soon as a share is found? It seems to send them in packages which sometimes have 4-5 seconds in between but sometimes a much as 80 seconds. I would like to submit packages of hashes much more often. How can this be influenced?
What exactly are the Getworks (GW)?
What exactly are the Accepted ones (Acc)? This is where the TipBounty is. Help us to get a better Acc/diff1 ratio. Best would be 1:1.
What exactly are the rejected ones (Rej)?
What exactly are the discarded ones (Disc)?
What exactly are the difficulty one hashes (diff1)?
Now some of these questions seem very very basic but it is important for us to understand what these are and how we can influence these. We have a 1:1 correlation between the Acc and the pool side acknowledgement of shares/packages. So whenever the MinePeon shows one more for this value the pool value for last submitted share goes to “moments ago”.
Does the miner SW have a setting where we can set after how many diff1 hashes a package of hashes is sent to the pool? If no, do you have another idea why so few are sent? Ideally we would set it so the diff1 hashes are sent every 5 seconds or so, probably even more often.
Is stratum with fixed diff1 possible? If so, would it be better to use stratum?
Are there critical settings if we should know of? (we have tried --request-diff and --no-submit-stale)
We are using BFGMiner on MinePeon if that matters. We could switch to CGMiner if that would help. Any help is very much appreciated. The museum is doing a great job explaining Bitcoin basics. We had special focus on interactive learning and have several things to underline this.
I hope to hear back from you so we can improve our installation. Please don't hesitate to ask if you have further questions. We are both not mining experts.
Thanks for reading and AMA.
SimonBelmond
Current features of the Bitcoin exhibition at the Zürich MoneyMuseum:
Current Features:
Life screen with various stats/charts/parameters/transactions…
Printed infographics.
Muscle powered PoW: Hand generator with 5v and 3.5-5A output, Raspberry Pi, MinePeon, 5x Antminer U2+ plus a screen to show the hash-rate at the pool and/or in MinePeon web interface. This screen will not be hand powered. This installation will complement their coining die (go to 1:27 to see what I mean).
The Bitcoin mining evolution (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC)
A few short (2-3 minutes) interviews.
Other wallets, Trezor, PiperWallet
ATM Prototype, functional
MoneyMuseum Bit-Cards
PiperWallet to use.
Casascius and other physical Bitcoins, Wallets (also some commemorative coins), Paper wallet like one out of the first Bitcoin (A)TM ever
Bitcoin Quiz
12 Picture tours
- Bitcoin for beginners
- Bitcoin advanced
- Debunking 13 Bitcoin myths
- What you definitely have to know
- The history of Bitcoin
- Bitcoin und traditional forms of money
- Alternatives to Bitcoin
- Citations about Bitcoin
- How do I open an account?
- How do I get Bitcoin?
- Bitcoin community and economy
- Bitcoin as a platform
I see this as a good opportunity for Bitcoin, so let’s embrace it. I am especially excited to compare the traditional forms of money which used proof of work to the new money which also uses proof of work. I think in that context it will be much easier for the visitors to value this concept.
A lot of schools and other groups book guided tours at the museum. It is open on every Friday from December 05. On. Entry is free of charge.
Edit:Markdown, typos
Submitted November 19, 2014 at 06:10PM by SimonBelmond http://ift.tt/1qX7uyV