Starting in a few hours now. I've put a bitaxe on there myself as a show of moral support. Good luck.

Saddest part of this block party is that it will be happening whilst I'm asleep, but I'll be more than happy to congratulate them on any block(s) solved first thing in the morning.

Saturn captured this morning 2024-07-04 UTC.

It's now been just over 15 years since I first contributed patches to cpuminer as my entry into the bitcoin world. What a ride it's been, and it still feels like we're just getting started.

Changed drastically, yes. Think like that specifically, no.

Congratulations to miner bc1qyj7x3d64znz2jdn28k0fxl8pq4q39a3ke79sj3 with 2.3PH for solving block number 301 on the EU http://solo.ckpool.org! A miner of this size has about a 1 in 2800 chance of solving a block every day, or once every 8 years on average. https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000004c918a929cb2710b5376dcdd89e719c521dc5255115c

No, sorry. You'll have to mine elsewhere for that.

A block party aiming for a combined total hashrate of 7EH on solo.ckpool.org is planned for this Saturday the 5th. It's being coordinated here https://upendo.rigly.io/

Thanks. No, so far I've only done planetary imaging.

Brainfart correction: It hasn't been 15 years, it's my 15th year in the space.

I'm often surprised by the reception I get to telling relatively old stories of bitcoin mining but I have to keep reminding myself how dynamic and ever-changing the landscape and audience is that has zero knowledge of the past. The bitcoin audience lifecycle seems to be only about 18 months old, with a fresh batch of bright eyed enthusiastic people who are getting their information purely from social media these days. I also see the same kind of arguments rehashed on a regular basis as has been since day one - each debate being seen as some kind of existential threat when the vast majority of them are almost always a storm in a teacup. The good thing is it's a sign there's always new bitcoiners in the space. The bad thing is the longer we're in the space, the less energy we have for arguing what we see as trivialities. Many of us (me included) have had painful interactions along the way which also makes us take a much more hands-off approach and/or lose enthusiasm for intense development on a scale we once did. Just remember that silence is not a sign we accept that we have lost a debate. It's the two-edged sword of a truly consensus based protocol, but ultimately is a superpower since nothing ever progresses without endless debate, and leads to the best result for bitcoin.

Funny followup story since this seemed to attract attention. Long after I forked cpuminer in cgminer, I was maintaining both source code for linux and osx users, and had to build windows binaries for windows users. I had a domain where I used to host my linux kernel patches for many years. I initially hosted cgminer code and binaries on my personal domain and a few years in google started blacklisting my domain because of "coin miner" executables as they tagged it. The sad thing is by the time it was tagged, the standalone cgminer executable could not even be used to mine anything on its own - it was purely control software for ASICs, and coin miners were used in botnets that infected regular PCs to mine using their CPU and GPU; features which by that stage had been completely removed from cgminer since it had become purely an FPGA and ASIC miner control software. I found there was absolutely nowhere I could appeal this decision apart from posting on the google support discussion forums - where I got absolutely ZERO support from other users who couldn't even understand what I was explaining. I deleted all older binaries available on my site that had any support for GPU and CPU but that didn't deter google, they kept blacklisting my subdomain, so I gave up building windows binaries entirely and removed them all from my site (which I might add was a relief because building and maintaining windows support was proving increasingly a waste of time for any serious mining.) That temporarily kept google at bay, but then they came back even harder and blacklisted my subdomain just for hosting SOURCE code ffs. So google's not so awesome safety features was blacklisting bitcoin mining hardware control software source code, which they then expanded to include my whole domain, not just the subdomain containing the cgminer code. That's when I eventually removed all source code and could only direct people to the github - which is now in archive mode since 2020, as the demand for standalone generic software that could drive any ASIC miner had died off completely by that stage.

Why're they mining before the party starts?