Daemons intended for public use can be set up to require payment
in the form of hashes in exchange for RPC service. This enables
public daemons to receive payment for their work over a large
number of calls. This system behaves similarly to a pool, so
payment takes the form of valid blocks every so often, yielding
a large one off payment, rather than constant micropayments.
This system can also be used by third parties as a "paywall"
layer, where users of a service can pay for use by mining Monero
to the service provider's address. An example of this for web
site access is Primo, a Monero mining based website "paywall":
https://github.com/selene-kovri/primo
This has some advantages:
- incentive to run a node providing RPC services, thereby promoting the availability of third party nodes for those who can't run their own
- incentive to run your own node instead of using a third party's, thereby promoting decentralization
- decentralized: payment is done between a client and server, with no third party needed
- private: since the system is "pay as you go", you don't need to identify yourself to claim a long lived balance
- no payment occurs on the blockchain, so there is no extra transactional load
- one may mine with a beefy server, and use those credits from a phone, by reusing the client ID (at the cost of some privacy)
- no barrier to entry: anyone may run a RPC node, and your expected revenue depends on how much work you do
- Sybil resistant: if you run 1000 idle RPC nodes, you don't magically get more revenue
- no large credit balance maintained on servers, so they have no incentive to exit scam
- you can use any/many node(s), since there's little cost in switching servers
- market based prices: competition between servers to lower costs
- incentive for a distributed third party node system: if some public nodes are overused/slow, traffic can move to others
- increases network security
- helps counteract mining pools' share of the network hash rate
- zero incentive for a payer to "double spend" since a reorg does not give any money back to the miner
And some disadvantages:
- low power clients will have difficulty mining (but one can optionally mine in advance and/or with a faster machine)
- payment is "random", so a server might go a long time without a block before getting one
- a public node's overall expected payment may be small
Public nodes are expected to compete to find a suitable level for
cost of service.
The daemon can be set up this way to require payment for RPC services:
monerod --rpc-payment-address 4xxxxxx \
--rpc-payment-credits 250 --rpc-payment-difficulty 1000
These values are an example only.
The --rpc-payment-difficulty switch selects how hard each "share" should
be, similar to a mining pool. The higher the difficulty, the fewer
shares a client will find.
The --rpc-payment-credits switch selects how many credits are awarded
for each share a client finds.
Considering both options, clients will be awarded credits/difficulty
credits for every hash they calculate. For example, in the command line
above, 0.25 credits per hash. A client mining at 100 H/s will therefore
get an average of 25 credits per second.
For reference, in the current implementation, a credit is enough to
sync 20 blocks, so a 100 H/s client that's just starting to use Monero
and uses this daemon will be able to sync 500 blocks per second.
The wallet can be set to automatically mine if connected to a daemon
which requires payment for RPC usage. It will try to keep a balance
of 50000 credits, stopping mining when it's at this level, and starting
again as credits are spent. With the example above, a new client will
mine this much credits in about half an hour, and this target is enough
to sync 500000 blocks (currently about a third of the monero blockchain).
There are three new settings in the wallet:
- credits-target: this is the amount of credits a wallet will try to
reach before stopping mining. The default of 0 means 50000 credits.
- auto-mine-for-rpc-payment-threshold: this controls the minimum
credit rate which the wallet considers worth mining for. If the
daemon credits less than this ratio, the wallet will consider mining
to be not worth it. In the example above, the rate is 0.25
- persistent-rpc-client-id: if set, this allows the wallet to reuse
a client id across runs. This means a public node can tell a wallet
that's connecting is the same as one that connected previously, but
allows a wallet to keep their credit balance from one run to the
other. Since the wallet only mines to keep a small credit balance,
this is not normally worth doing. However, someone may want to mine
on a fast server, and use that credit balance on a low power device
such as a phone. If left unset, a new client ID is generated at
each wallet start, for privacy reasons.
To mine and use a credit balance on two different devices, you can
use the --rpc-client-secret-key switch. A wallet's client secret key
can be found using the new rpc_payments command in the wallet.
Note: anyone knowing your RPC client secret key is able to use your
credit balance.
The wallet has a few new commands too:
- start_mining_for_rpc: start mining to acquire more credits,
regardless of the auto mining settings
- stop_mining_for_rpc: stop mining to acquire more credits
- rpc_payments: display information about current credits with
the currently selected daemon
The node has an extra command:
- rpc_payments: display information about clients and their
balances
The node will forget about any balance for clients which have
been inactive for 6 months. Balances carry over on node restart.
added for mainnet, testnet, and stagenet.
server is owner by snipa, both snipa and I have access to it. No idea where its hosted.
xmrchain.net is a block explorer thats been around a while.
Unbound uses a 64 kb large character array on the stack, which
leads to a stack overflow for some libc implementations. musl
only gives 80 kb in total. This PR changes the stack size for
these threads to 1mb, which solves the segmentation fault.
fcbf7b3 p2p: propagate out peers limit to payload handler (moneromooo-monero)
098aadf p2p: close the right number of connections on setting max in/out peers (moneromooo-monero)
new cli options (RPC ones also apply to wallet):
--p2p-bind-ipv6-address (default = "::")
--p2p-bind-port-ipv6 (default same as ipv4 port for given nettype)
--rpc-bind-ipv6-address (default = "::1")
--p2p-use-ipv6 (default false)
--rpc-use-ipv6 (default false)
--p2p-require-ipv4 (default true, if ipv4 bind fails and this is
true, will not continue even if ipv6 bind
successful)
--rpc-require-ipv4 (default true, description as above)
ipv6 addresses are to be specified as "[xx:xx:xx::xx:xx]:port" except
in the cases of the cli args for bind address. For those the square
braces can be omitted.
a96c1a46 cryptonote_protocol: drop peers we can't download from when syncing (moneromooo-monero)
ab361df2 p2p: add a few missing connection close calls (moneromooo-monero)
This can be used for fingerprinting and working out the
network topology.
Instead of sending the first N (which are sorted by last
seen time), we sent a random subset of the first N+N/5,
which ensures reasonably recent peers are used, while
preventing repeated calls from deducing new entries are
peers the target node just connected to.
The list is also randomly shuffled so the original set of
timestamps cannot be approximated.
RPC connections now have optional tranparent SSL.
An optional private key and certificate file can be passed,
using the --{rpc,daemon}-ssl-private-key and
--{rpc,daemon}-ssl-certificate options. Those have as
argument a path to a PEM format private private key and
certificate, respectively.
If not given, a temporary self signed certificate will be used.
SSL can be enabled or disabled using --{rpc}-ssl, which
accepts autodetect (default), disabled or enabled.
Access can be restricted to particular certificates using the
--rpc-ssl-allowed-certificates, which takes a list of
paths to PEM encoded certificates. This can allow a wallet to
connect to only the daemon they think they're connected to,
by forcing SSL and listing the paths to the known good
certificates.
To generate long term certificates:
openssl genrsa -out /tmp/KEY 4096
openssl req -new -key /tmp/KEY -out /tmp/REQ
openssl x509 -req -days 999999 -sha256 -in /tmp/REQ -signkey /tmp/KEY -out /tmp/CERT
/tmp/KEY is the private key, and /tmp/CERT is the certificate,
both in PEM format. /tmp/REQ can be removed. Adjust the last
command to set expiration date, etc, as needed. It doesn't
make a whole lot of sense for monero anyway, since most servers
will run with one time temporary self signed certificates anyway.
SSL support is transparent, so all communication is done on the
existing ports, with SSL autodetection. This means you can start
using an SSL daemon now, but you should not enforce SSL yet or
nothing will talk to you.
- Support for ".onion" in --add-exclusive-node and --add-peer
- Add --anonymizing-proxy for outbound Tor connections
- Add --anonymous-inbounds for inbound Tor connections
- Support for sharing ".onion" addresses over Tor connections
- Support for broadcasting transactions received over RPC exclusively
over Tor (else broadcast over public IP when Tor not enabled).
The blockchain prunes seven eighths of prunable tx data.
This saves about two thirds of the blockchain size, while
keeping the node useful as a sync source for an eighth
of the blockchain.
No other data is currently pruned.
There are three ways to prune a blockchain:
- run monerod with --prune-blockchain
- run "prune_blockchain" in the monerod console
- run the monero-blockchain-prune utility
The first two will prune in place. Due to how LMDB works, this
will not reduce the blockchain size on disk. Instead, it will
mark parts of the file as free, so that future data will use
that free space, causing the file to not grow until free space
grows scarce.
The third way will create a second database, a pruned copy of
the original one. Since this is a new file, this one will be
smaller than the original one.
Once the database is pruned, it will stay pruned as it syncs.
That is, there is no need to use --prune-blockchain again, etc.
149da42 db_lmdb: enable batch transactions by default (stoffu)
34cb6b4 add --regtest and --fixed-difficulty for regression testing (vicsn)
9e1403e update get_info RPC and bump RPC version (vicsn)
207b66e first new functional tests (vicsn)
on_generateblocks RPC call combines functionality from the on_getblocktemplate and on_submitblock RPC calls to allow rapid block creation. Difficulty is set permanently to 1 for regtest.
Makes use of FAKECHAIN network type, but takes hard fork heights from mainchain
Default reserve_size in generate_blocks RPC call is now 1. If it is 0, the following error occurs 'Failed to calculate offset for'.
Queries hard fork heights info of other network types
Those were added to the seed nodes list even when they had already
been added. Moreover, the current index was not reset after they
were added, typically causing previous seeds to be used, and some
of those fallback seeds to not be tried.
e4646379 keccak: fix mdlen bounds sanity checking (moneromooo-monero)
2e3e90ac pass large parameters by const ref, not value (moneromooo-monero)
61defd89 blockchain: sanity check number of precomputed hash of hash blocks (moneromooo-monero)
9af6b2d1 ringct: fix infinite loop in unused h2b function (moneromooo-monero)
8cea8d0c simplewallet: double check a new multisig wallet is multisig (moneromooo-monero)
9b98a6ac threadpool: catch exceptions in dtor, to avoid terminate (moneromooo-monero)
24803ed9 blockchain_export: fix buffer overflow in exporter (moneromooo-monero)
f3f7da62 perf_timer: rewrite to make it clear there is no division by zero (moneromooo-monero)
c6ea3df0 performance_tests: remove add_arg call stray extra param (moneromooo-monero)
fa6b4566 fuzz_tests: fix an uninitialized var in setup (moneromooo-monero)
03887f11 keccak: fix sanity check bounds test (moneromooo-monero)
ad11db91 blockchain_db: initialize m_open in base class ctor (moneromooo-monero)
bece67f9 miner: restore std::cout precision after modification (moneromooo-monero)
1aabd14c db_lmdb: check hard fork info drop succeeded (moneromooo-monero)
fd1dfac5 p2p: don't lookup seed IPs if using an exclusive peer (moneromooo-monero)
b50182ae p2p: don't connect to seeds if using an exclusive peer (moneromooo-monero)
This fixes a hang on exit due to race where a connection adds
itself to the server after the starting connections are closed,
but before the net server marks itself as stopped.
Deleted 3 out of 4 calls to method connection_basic::sleep_before_packet
that were erroneous / superfluous, which enabled the elimination of a
"fudge" factor of 2.1 in connection_basic::set_rate_up_limit;
also ended the multiplying of limit values and numbers of bytes
transferred by 1024 before handing them over to the global throttle
objects
The commands handler must not be destroyed before the config
object, or we'll be accessing freed memory.
An earlier attempt at using boost::shared_ptr to control object
lifetime turned out to be very invasive, though would be a
better solution in theory.
- internal nullptr checks
- prevent modifications to network_address (shallow copy issues)
- automagically works with any type containing interface functions
- removed fnv1a hashing
- ipv4_network_address now flattened with no base class
ef005f5e p2p: add a couple early outs when the stop signal is received (moneromooo-monero)
80d361c7 abstract_tcp_server2: improve tracking/cancelling of early connections (moneromooo-monero)
Fix sync wedge corner case:
It could happen if a connection went into standby mode, while
it was the one which had requested the next span, and that span
was still waiting for the data, and that peer is not on the
main chain. Other peers can then start asking for that data
again and again, but never get it as only that forked peer does.
And various other fixes
A block queue is now placed between block download and
block processing. Blocks are now requested only from one
peer (unless starved).
Includes a new sync_info coommand.
This avoids having to include p2p_protocol_defs.h in util.h,
as util.h is used a lot, and p2p_protocol_defs.h includes
a lot of other things that most users don't need.
07c4276c Don't issue a new timedsync while one is already in progress (Howard Chu)
cf3a376c Don't timeout a slow operation that's making progress (Howard Chu)
340830de Fix PR#2039 (Howard Chu)
A timedsync is issued every minute on a connection, but the input
tineout is 2 minutes. This means a new sync request could be issued
while a slow sync request was already in progress. The additional
request will further clog the network on a slow connection, and
cause a premature timeout.
All code which was using ip and port now uses a new IPv4 object,
subclass of a new network_address class. This will allow easy
addition of I2P addresses later (and also IPv6, etc).
Both old style and new style peer lists are now sent in the P2P
protocol, which is inefficient but allows peers using both
codebases to talk to each other. This will be removed in the
future. No other subclasses than IPv4 exist yet.
They're now used by core to determine the data directory to use
for the txpool directory.
This fixes an assert in the core tests, which don't use the RPC
server, which normally initializes the P2P code.
poolstate.bin and p2pstate.bin are stored in .bitmonero/ if the default
P2P port is being used.
If another port is used both files are stored in
.bitmonero/PORTNUMBER/.
Lee Clagett