BTC.com Open Source CKB Mining Pool
Built for the Community and by the Community
BTC.com, one of the largest mining pools in the world, recently announced it has developed an open source CKB Mining Pool. We are thrilled to have such amazing support from the mining community, and wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you.
History of the mining competition
On May 18, we launched our Rylai testnet, which is under active development, being updated every two weeks since launch; check the latest release here.
In June, we started the mining competition initiative— the purpose of the competition is to stress test the network as we are preparing for our mainnet launch later this year. During the mining competitions, our community has contributed to the growth of the project in numerous ways: forming chat groups, creating mining tutorials, and building a mining competition leader board. We also saw more and more CKB mining pools forming, and the participants helped us uncover some critical bugs.
We appreciate the community’s efforts in testing the network, which has helped us in improving the code and taking the testnet to a production-ready state, as we prepare for mainnet later this year.
Mining competition recap
We have launched five rounds of our mining competition, with total rewards of 65M CKB. Here is a quick recap of each round:
June 15 — June 29 Mining competition round 1 (rewards of 1M CKB)
CPU mining, with 21,737 mining addresses created during the two weeks, and the average hash rate was 1M gps (graph per second), all-time high was 3.5M gps. (For reference, the hash rate of testnets prior to mining competition was about 50,000 gps, and a regular MacBook has a hash rate of 150 gps)
July 13 — July 27 Mining competition round 2 (rewards of 4M CKB)
CPU mining, with several hundred mining addresses, and the average hash rate was about 4.75M and the all time high hit 46M gps.
Aug 10 — Aug 24 Mining competition round 3 (rewards of 6M CKB)
GPU mining, several hundred mining addresses, while the average hash rate was 10M gps and the hash rate peaked at 60M gps.
Sep7 — Sep21 Mining competition round 4 (rewards of 9M CKB)
By the time of the fourth round of the competition, we implemented our new proof-of-work hash function called the Eaglesong. During this round of competition we had 27 mining addresses participating, and saw growing support from mining pools and mining software:
GPU Miners
Mining Pools that support testnet (as of Oct 2019, listed in alphabetic order):
Mining Pools under development (that we are aware of):
Mining Softwares:
Oct5 — Nov15 Mining competition round 5 in progress!
On-going, including three phases, 45M CKB rewards in total
Round 5 has just begun and we already see the hash rate at 22,500GH/S (doubled from last round).
What do the numbers tell us?
During the fourth round, the hashrate peaked at 10482.37 GH/s. Assuming all miners use RX570 8GB to mine, about 22.7 % of the Grin Cuckoo Cycle 29 computing power entered this mining competition.
A rough calculation: assuming all miners use AMD 578 6GB (a commonly used GPU miner) to mine, about 1.1% of Ethereum’s total hash rate went into this single round of mining competition, and the rewards ratio is 10:1 (testnet token to mainnet token).
Thank you again to our community for your continued enthusiasm and support in helping us build Nervos…Happy mining!
