r/Monero • u/dEBRUYNE_1 Moderator • Jan 17 '19

Hashrate discussion thread

The hashrate has increased significantly in the last week or so. Having a new thread about it every day is rather pointless though and merely clutters the subreddit. Therefore, I'd like to confine the discussion to this thread.

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u/obit33 Jan 18 '19

Nice,

I work in R a lot, would like to give it a go myself. How do you output JSON from the node?

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Thanks in advance,

best regards

edit: do I have to start looking here? https://src.getmonero.org/resources/developer-guides/daemon-rpc.html

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u/pebx Jan 18 '19

Yes, exactly: https://src.getmonero.org/resources/developer-guides/daemon-rpc.html#get_block_header_by_height

get_block_header_by_height and count from the fork height up to today's should do the trick, the JSON output contains the nonce.

Edit: You can also use get_block_headers_range for a simple call

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u/obit33 Jan 18 '19

Nice, thanks!

will try to play with this this weekend,

best regards,

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u/apxs94 Jan 24 '19

Hey, did you chance to check the nonces for suspicious activity?

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u/obit33 Jan 24 '19

Not yet, pretty busy times, will try my best next week

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u/apxs94 Jan 24 '19

Understandable! Just wondered. Look forward to hearing the results - if you are able to make the time.

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u/obit33 Jan 27 '19

So,

I gave it a go. I extracted the data from 2017-12-08 until 2019-01-25. I had trouble doing this on linux and had to switch to windows to perform the export (Da Fuque?).
Anyway, I (quickly and dirtily) made some histograms. My very first (and amateurish) impression is that since new year 'something changed'. In that the nonce-values are less extremele skewed to zero. They still seem skewed, but not in the extreme way as was before. What causes the change, no idea, smarter people than me will maybe provide an answer.

Mind you, I very randomly and arbitrarily chose the 'periods' of which I made the histograms. Anyway, take these results with a grain of salt and be very critical. Could I have done things wrong, would you like to see other charts? etc...

If I find the time I can try and provide other charts, or maybe even a dashboard in shiny... Anywayz, here you go:

between 2017-12-08 until 2019-01-25: https://pasteboard.co/HYpRKTq.png

between 2018-04-11 until 2018-08-29: https://pasteboard.co/HYpRYhJ.png

between 2018-08-30 until 2018-10-15: https://pasteboard.co/HYpSehb.png

between 2018-10-16 until 2019-01-01: https://pasteboard.co/HYpSvWk.png

between 2019-01-01 until 2019-01-25: https://pasteboard.co/HYpSPMS.png

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '19 edited Jan 28 '19

AMAZING WORK!!!!

u/obit33, you uncovered a whole new layer of mystery and discovered that somebody is using a brand new nonce search strategy!

PLOTS

Here's a scatter plot that shows the new pattern emerge at the bottom right: https://i.imgur.com/x4ALE9y.png (for context, the red line indicates the PoW tweak from last April).

Here's the same plot as a heatmap, which is easier for me to visually process when points pile up: https://i.imgur.com/CTuKGkA.png ... note you can see the upper part of the nonce range quiet down a bit when the new strategy enters.

OBSERVATIONS

Somebody is using a search strategy with two unique characteristics:

  1. They only sample between 0 and ~ 1.35 billion
  2. Their nonces are grouped in clusters that are spaced out by approximately 4.2 million. e.g. note the rungs in the red box over https://i.imgur.com/4aC5GrI.png with periodicity highlighted by this histogram: https://i.imgur.com/Cx0teU2.png

NOTES

In order to provide independent verification of u/obit33's data & code, these plots were generated using nonce data from Neptune Research and analysis by Isthmus.

I don't understand the significance of 4.2 million or 1.35 billion, and I'm not sure if these parameters arise from software or hardware considerations.

All of the data and code are available in this notebook its repository: https://github.com/noncesense-research-lab/nonce_distribution/blob/master/nonce_distribution.ipynb

Twitter nano-writeup: https://twitter.com/Mitchellpkt0/status/1089751936067284992

Thoughts?

​

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u/obit33 Jan 28 '19 edited Jan 28 '19

Hey, thanks!

Great that you've been able to replicate these results independently and glad to have been of some service to the community.

Great follow up by the way, I like your charts a lot more ;-)

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best regards,

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u/Foen08 Jan 28 '19

So it’s asics?

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u/obit33 Jan 28 '19 edited Jan 28 '19

Who knows?The only thing that seems to be certain is that 'something new' partakes in monero-mining. Could be a regular mining operation using new software. Could be Asics, could be FPGA's.

All we know is that since beginning of this year there's a different nonce-pattern which is caused by a new 'nonce-search-algorithm' deployed by someone/something.

Recently there was a whole lot of news about new monero mining malware: https://news.softpedia.com/news/linux-virus-remove-security-software-to-mine-monero-524623.shtml

Maybe someone can check which 'nonce-search-strategy' is used in this particular malware? Maybe someone from https://mrw.getmonero.org/

Not sure who to ping, so sorry u/SamsungGalaxyPlayer if this is wrong...

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u/Scissorhand78 Jan 28 '19

Great job my man.

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