Aion-Kilimanjaro launched with basic mining pool. While not full featured, this pool enabled miners to deploy their GPUs to Aion Network without needing to set up their own blockchain infrastructure (Aion Kernel and Solo Mining Pool). It was clear that this initial version would not maintain relevance in the long term, and that either the project should be deprecated or rebuilt.
In efforts as a community-driven project and to give the community a strong foundation to build upon, the Aion Foundation is launching a new pool software to support the decentralization of mining power. We are excited to release the New Aion Pool Software, the software includes features that exist in modern mining pools.
Features
Variable Difficulty
One of the major differences with this pool is the variable difficulty. Without this a miner is mining at network difficulty and generates a pool share at the same time it mines a block on the network. As the network increases in size, the time it takes to probabilistic mine a block also increases in duration. What variable difficulty does is adjust the difficulty, so the individual miner can generate one or multiply solutions (and pool shares) at a different target time than network. Given the probabilistic nature of mining a block, variable difficulty is more effective only when it is large enough to be statically significant. A mining pool of a single miner is still going to generate shares; however, it is unlikely that the pool will find blocks on the network, and therefore will have no rewards to distribute. Calculation of the probability of finding a single share is left as an exercise to the reader.
So the big three take aways are:
- The pool adjusts difficulty based on a miner’s current hashpower, as compared to the total hashpower of the pool
- The pool smooths earnings of shares over time, rather than single infrequent block reward
- Shares are earned and rewarded proportionally based on the miner’s hash power contribution over time
Pay Per Last N Shares
Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) is a round based reward system. A round is defined as the time between the last block and the next block. With PPLNS shares are earned during a round, and shares are earned proportionally based on a miner hash power.
Under the Hood Enhancements
Improved Payment Resiliency and recovery
Under the hood, this pool software uses a persistent database that can be traced if there is ever an outage. More specifically there is also a table of payments that will be used to retry if a payment ever fails.
Improved Pool Performance
The underlying application model is designed to handle connections for efficiently.
More Flexible Interfaces
Last payouts, full history per mining address, overall view of all payments, additional areas for customization and better statistics
Improved Fee Processing
When deducing pool fees the mining pool will no longer send transactions to itself during the payout phase. This will reduce the number of transactions required for each payout and will save pool operators from unnecessarily paying for transactions transferring funds to themselves.
Installation
The installation guide is posted on the github repo, see below, along with the code. Happy Pooling.
