CKB Mining Competition Round 4 Begins Sept 7!
Thanks to our community and all who participated in Round 3. Not only did it help us further stress test the network and provide valuable data and insights, but our community uncovered a critical bug that is now being fixed.
To thank everyone for participating in the development of Nervos CKB, the Nervos Foundation is sponsoring Round 4 of the Testnet Mining Competition—kicking off September 7 at 6:00 UTC and running through September 21.
Anyone can participate in the testnet mining, and potentially win a total of 9 million mainnet CKB tokens. Please join our Telegram(EN) if you have any questions.
The goal of Round 4 is to test our new hash function Eaglesong (reference the RFC and introduction). Eaglesong is the hash function for Nervos CKB proof-of-work, already deployed on testnet. We also have Eaglesong’s GPU miner (reference GitHub). Please note, that as our resources are limited, the GPU miner is only for Nvidia GPU. We are working on AMD GPU miner now. The Nervos team has no preference between Nvidia and AMD GPU.)
After the third round of our mining competition, we released an RFC (Request for Comment) to ready us for the fourth round. We gathered and reviewed comments from our community members, and have adapted the rules as follows:
Reward distribution
Total Rewards:
9,000,000 CKB mainnet tokens
Distribution
All addresses that have mined at least 1,000 CKB will share this rewards pool and receive CKBytes in proportion with the block rewards produced by each address.
Time
Start: September 7th 6:00 AM (UTC) UNIX Timestamp: 1567832400
End: September 21th 6:00 AM (UTC) UNIX Timestamp: 1569042000
Competition Process
9.7 5:00 AM UTC, release CKB testnet v0.20.0 in Github. ONLY using this testnet version can participate in mining competition.
9.7 6:00 AM UTC, competition begin. Blockchain explorer will be ready in two hours.
9.21 6:00 AM UTC, competition is over. We will release the result within one day on this website.
How to participate
To start mining on CKB testnet, simply follow the steps outlined in the official guide, or see community-created tutorials on Nervos Talk. A CKB blockchain browser is also available to look up your mining rewards.
CKB-Mine-Lord website was created by a community member to show the rank of all the addresses—you can check it to get your real-time rank—the code of this website (for reference).
At the end of the competition, we will calculate block rewards mined by each address. The accumulated block rewards of each address during the competition will form a basis for CKB mainnet token rewards (testnet tokens gained by transactions will NOT be counted as block rewards).
Rewards will be distributed directly to respective addresses on CKB mainnet. Please exercise caution when managing your private key, as it will be your only means of claiming your CKB token rewards.
FAQ:
How are the block rewards in CKB different from those in Bitcoin?
For Bitcoin, the block rewards are fixed in each block you mine. For CKB, the total block rewards are fixed in each difficulty adjustment epoch. CKB consensus adjusts difficulty to adjust block time. When difficulty increases, there will be less blocks mined during one epoch, but block rewards in each block mined will be increased. And vice versa.
What is difficulty adjustment epoch in CKB?
On the current Nervos CKB testnet, we target difficulty adjustments at every four hours (In Bitcoin, the difficulty adjustmrnt happens every 2016 blocks, while the block interval is 10 mins). For more details please refer to our consensus RFC .
Why do the rewards only apply to addresses that mined at least 3,000 CKB testnet token ?
The native token CKByte represents state storage space on the Common Knowledge Base. A cell is the basic data structure in the blockchain, and you can put any arbitrary data in a cell. It requires 60 CKBytes to create a cell.
During mining competition phase ONE, 105,000,000 CKB testnet token were mined, and we expect the same amount of testnet token will be mined in round 4. Given the rewards of 9,000,000 CKBytes, it requires you to have at lease 700 CKB testnet token mined to be able to receive the 60 CKBytes rewards. We add some buffer and require at least 1,000 CKB testnet token to receive rewards.
After mining a block, how long does it take to receive the block rewards?The block rewards from Block N will be received in Block “N + 11” (about 3 minutes) via Cell Base Transaction. This design related to our two-step transaction confirmation, if you are interested please check our consensus RFC .
What is Eaglesong? Is an Eaglesong miner available?
Eaglesong is a new hash function developed specifically for Nervos CKB proof-of-work. It is also suitable in other use cases where a secure hash function is needed. The design criteria includes novelty, simplicity and security. Here is the article written by the designer Alan and the RFC. We do have a miner, but it currently only supports Nvidia Card.
How do we know the value of token?
There are 33.6 billion CKB mainnet token in genesis block. For more detail check our token sale update.
Things to Note
- This competition is the fourth in a series. We may have future rounds and the rules may change.
- In the previous round, some rewards were distributed to null addresses, which may be caused by entering the wrong Lock Args. So please make sure everything is right when you are configuring.
- CKByte rewards will be sent to the corresponding address when mainnet launches. Please keep your private key safe to get the reward.
- Addresses for the same private key might be different on testnet and on mainnet, due to difference in algorithm. Participants only need to hold on to their private key to be able to claim rewards.
- Participation in this event means that you have read and understood the competition terms.
Terms and Conditions
- Due to US regulation, US citizens and US entities are excluded from this competition.
- Nervos Foundation reserves the right to change, amend and add new rules at any point during the competition, and dis-qualify any participants who attempt to exploit, cheat or maliciously attack the testnet or competition. All decision made by Nervos Team are final.
- Participants will be responsible for any tax associated with rewards distributed.
Disclaimer
- There may be significant risks involved in cryptocurrency related activities. You may lose all of your investment. Tokens involved might have high volatility. Nervos Foundation will not be liable for any potential loss, financial or otherwise.
- Please exercise discretion when participating.
