I'm looking at the stratum protocol and I'm having a problem with the nbits value of the mining.notify method. I have trouble calculating it, I assume it's the currency difficulty.
I pull a notify from a dogecoin pool and it returned 1b3cc366 and at the time the difficulty was 1078.52975077.
I'm assuming here that 1b3cc366 should give me 1078.52975077 when converted. But I can't seem to do the conversion right.
I've looked here, here and also tried the .NET function BitConverter.Int64BitsToDouble.
Can someone help me understand what the nbits value signify?
You are right, nbits is current network difficulty.
Difficulty encoding is throughly described here.
Hexadecimal representation like 0x1b3cc366 consists of two parts:
0x1b -- number of bytes in a target
0x3cc366 -- target prefix
This means that valid hash should be less than 0x3cc366000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (it is exactly 0x1b = 27 bytes long).
Floating point representation of difficulty shows how much current target is harder than the one used in the genesis block.
Satoshi decided to use 0x1d00ffff as a difficulty for the genesis block, so the target was
0x00ffff0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
And 1078.52975077 is how much current target is greater than the initial one:
$ echo 'ibase=16;FFFF0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 / 3CC366000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000' | bc -l
1078.52975077482646448605
Related
I mostly get RFC 1951, however I'm not too clear on how to manage the case where (when using dynamic Huffman tables) no distance codes are needed or present. For example, let's take the input:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890987654321ZYXWVUTSR
where no backreference is possible since there are no repetitions of length >= 3.
According to RFC 1951, at least one distance code must be present regardless, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to encode HDIST - 1. I understand, according to the reference, that such code should be of zero bits to signal "no distance codes".
One distance code of zero bits means that there are no distance codes
used at all (the data is all literals).
In infgen symbols, I'd expect to see a dist 0 0.
Analyzing what gzip does with infgen, however, I see that TWO distance codes are emitted (each 1 bit long) for the above input (even though none is actually used then):
! infgen 2.4 output
!
gzip
!
last
dynamic
litlen 48 6
litlen 49 6
litlen 50 6
...cut...
litlen 121 6
litlen 122 6
litlen 256 6
dist 0 1
dist 1 1
literal 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ01234567890987654321Z
literal 'YXWVUTSR
end
!
crc
length
So what's the correct behavior in these cases?
If there are no matches in the deflate block, there will be no lengths from the length/literal code, and so the decoder will never look for a distance code. In that case, what would make the most sense is to provide no information at all about a distance code.
However the format does not permit that, since the 5-bit HDIST value in the header is interpreted as 1 to 32 distance codes, for which lengths must be provided for in the header. You must provide at least one distance code length in the header, even though it will never be used.
There are several valid things you can do in that case. RFC 1951 notes you can provide a single distance code (HDIST == 0, meaning one length), with length zero, which would be just one zero in the list of lengths.
It is also permitted to provide a single code of length one, or you could do as zlib is doing, which is to provide two codes of length one. You can actually put any valid distance code description you like there, and it will still be accepted.
As to why zlib's deflate is choosing to define two codes there, I can only guess that Jean-loup was being conservative, writing something he knew that even an over-simplified inflator would have to accept. Both gzip and zopfli do the same thing. They all do the same thing when there is only one distance code used. They could emit just the single one-bit distance code, per the RFC, but they emit two single-bit distance codes, one of which is never used.
Really the right thing to do would be to write a single zero length as noted in the RFC, which would take the fewest number of bits in the header. I will consider updating zlib to do that, to eke out a few more bits of compression.
I am looking at using the BSD checksum described here at wiki BSD does anyone know if you can use it for basic error correction?
Consider an 8 bit or 16 bit left rotating checksum where all the message bytes are supposed to be zero, but one them has a single bit error. The checksum will detect the error, but you'd get the same checksum for message[0] = 0x01, or message[1] = 0x02, ... , or message[7] = 0x80. The checksum can't determine which of these 8 (or more) possible error cases occurred, so it can't be used for error correction.
You'd need at least something like a Hamming code, BCH code or RS code to be able to correct one more bit errors. Since you have CRC as a tag, a single bit correcting binary BCH code is essentially the same as a CRC using a "primitive" polynomial that is the basis for a finite field, if the message length (including the CRC) is shorter than the number of possible values in the finite field. For example, a 15 bit message would have 11 data bits and 4 "parity" bits, based on a finite field of GF(2^4) (GF(16)).
So I have problem finding the CRC value for a series of commands, I already have the CRC values for some of the commands but I need to figure out how they were calculated. After carefully going over the data stream and attempting to calculate the CRC we cannot get the known CRC value and the calculated one to match. I have never calculated a CRC before but I have read multiple papers on it and it seems easy enough, except for the fact that its not working. The manual I have says the polynomial generator is (x^8 + x^7 + X^2 + X^0) and it gives me a unique non zero value of B1 (hex). The full command is A9E40401 (hex) with a CRC of 1E (hex). The process I am currently using involves converting the data stream from hex into binary, using the LSB first rule, inserting FF(hex) into the command to detect extraneous zeros, adding 00(hex) to the end as a place holder and than performing mod2 division, and than I invert it and apply it to the data stream. Either I'm doing something wrong or I missed a step. I am assuming the polynomial I was provided is correct. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
You can try RevEng, which is for exactly this, to determine the CRC parameters from a set of examples.
Then you can use crcany to generate the code.
I feel like an idiot.
When I calculated my CRC I did every step properly except the very last step where you must perform the LSB first rule and than invert the remainder.
I only performed the LSB first rule (thinking that's what was meant by invert).
So with a remainder of 00011101 I got the wrong CRC value (10111000). when I should have gotten 01000111.
I'm currently using Erlang for a big project but i have a question regarding a proper proceeding.
I receive bytes over a tcp socket. The bytes are according to a fixed protocol, the sender is a pyton client. The python client uses class inheritance to create bytes from the objects.
Now i would like to (in Erlang) take the bytes and convert these to their equivelant messages, they all have a common message header.
How can i do this as generic as possible in Erlang?
Kind Regards,
Me
Pattern matching/binary header consumption using Erlang's binary syntax. But you will need to know either exactly what bytes or bits your are expecting to receive, or the field sizes in bytes or bits.
For example, let's say that you are expecting a string of bytes that will either begin with the equivalent of the ASCII strings "PUSH" or "PULL", followed by some other data you will place somewhere. You can create a function head that matches those, and captures the rest to pass on to a function that does "push()" or "pull()" based on the byte header:
operation_type(<<"PUSH", Rest/binary>>) -> push(Rest);
operation_type(<<"PULL", Rest/binary>>) -> pull(Rest).
The bytes after the first four will now be in Rest, leaving you free to interpret whatever subsequent headers or data remain in turn. You could also match on the whole binary:
operation_type(Bin = <<"PUSH", _/binary>>) -> push(Bin);
operation_type(Bin = <<"PULL", _/binary>>) -> pull(Bin).
In this case the "_" variable works like it always does -- you're just checking for the lead, essentially peeking the buffer and passing the whole thing on based on the initial contents.
You could also skip around in it. Say you knew you were going to receive a binary with 4 bytes of fluff at the front, 6 bytes of type data, and then the rest you want to pass on:
filter_thingy(<<_:4/binary, Type:6/binary, Rest/binary>>) ->
% Do stuff with Rest based on Type...
It becomes very natural to split binaries in function headers (whether the data equates to character strings or not), letting the "Rest" fall through to appropriate functions as you go along. If you are receiving Python pickle data or something similar, you would want to write the parsing routine in a recursive way, so that the conclusion of each data type returns you to the top to determine the next type, with an accumulated tree that represents the data read so far.
I only covered 8-bit bytes above, but there is also a pure bitstring syntax, which lets you go as far into the weeds with bits and bytes as you need with the same ease of syntax. Matching is a real lifesaver here.
Hopefully this informed more than confused. Binary syntax in Erlang makes this the most pleasant binary parsing environment in a general programming language I've yet encountered.
http://www.erlang.org/doc/programming_examples/bit_syntax.html
Is is a follow-up to my previous question:
What are the digits in an ObjC method type encoding string?
Say there is an encoding:
v24#0:4:8#12B16#20
How are those numbers calculated? B is a char so it should occupy just 1 byte (not 4 bytes). Does it have something to do with "alignment"? What is the size of void?
Is it correct to calculate the numbers as follows? Ask sizeof on every item and round up the result to multiple of 4? And the first number becomes the sum of all the other ones?
The numbers were used in the m68K days to denote stack layout. That is, you could literally decode the the method signature and, for just about all types, know exactly which bytes at what offset within the stack frame you could diddle to get/set arguments.
This worked because the m68K's ABI was entirely [IIRC -- been a long long time] stack based argument/return passing. There wasn't anything shoved into registers across call boundaries.
However, as Objective-C was ported to other platforms, always-on-the-stack was no longer the calling convention. Arguments and return values are often passed in registers.
Thus, those offsets are now useless. As well, the type encoding used by the compiler is no longer complete (because it never was terribly useful) and there will be types that won't be encoded. Not too mention that encoding some C++ templatized types yields method type encoding strings that can be many Kilobytes in size (I think the record I ran into was around 30K of type information).
So, no, it isn't correct to use sizeof() to generate the numbers because they are effectively meaningless to everything. The only reason why they still exist is for binary compatibility; there are bits of esoteric code here and there that still parse the type encoding string with the expectation that there will be random numbers sprinkled here and there.
Note that there are vestiges of API in the ObjC runtime that still lead one to believe that it might be possible to encode/decode stack frames on the fly. It really isn't as the C ABI doesn't guarantee that argument registers will be preserved across call boundaries in the face of optimization. You'd have to drop to assembly and things get ugly really really fast (>shudder<).
The full encoding string is constructed (in clang) by the method ASTContext::getObjCEncodingForMethodDecl, which you can find in lib/AST/ASTContext.cpp.
The method that does the size rounding is ASTContext::getObjCEncodingTypeSize, in the same file. It forces each size to be at least the size of an int. On all of Apple's current platforms, an int is 4 bytes.
The stack frame size and argument offsets are calculated by the compiler. I'm actually trying to track this down in the Clang source myself this week; it possibly has something to do with CodeGenTypes::arrangeObjCMessageSendSignature. (Looks like Rob just made my life a lot easier!)
The first number is the sum of the others, yes -- it's the total space occupied by the arguments. To get the size of the type represented by an ObjC type encoding in your code, you should use NSGetSizeAndAlignment().