QuarkChain Bi- Weekly AMA Summary — 12/01/2018
QuarkChain has been holding its bi-weekly AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Telegram/Wechat groups on Saturday, from 7–8 PM PST. We are always happy to take questions/comments/suggestions.
Last week, we officially announced the launch of QuarkChain testnet 2.0 with mining and have received many questions regarding the mining event. For your reference, we summarized all the questions the community have raised related to the Testnet 2.0 mining function. If you have any other tech-related questions, welcome to join us on Discord: https://discord.me/quarkchain.
A prize pool with total 5 million QKC has been reserved to motivate all miners to participate in the testnet 2.0 mining event. According to the different mining algorithms, the prize pool is allocated as follows:
Total Prize Pool: 5,000,000 QKC
Prize Pool for Ethash Algorithm: 2,000,000 QKC
Prize Pool for Double SHA256 Algorithm: 1,000,000 QKC
Prize Pool for Qkchash Algorithm: 2,000,000 QKC
The number of QKC which each miner is eligible to receive for mainnet will be calculated on based on the ratio of sharded block mined by each miner to the total number of sharded block mined by all miners employing such mining algorithm in Testnet 2.0. (For further details, please refer to : https://quarkchain.io/quarkchain-testnet-2-0-mining/)
1. Q:Can I mine with GPU?
A: Currently, we support CPU mining as our first step. With the upgrade of our Testnet, we expect to provide the corresponding GPU / ASIC interface at a later date.
2. Q: What are the minimum requirements for my laptop or personal computer to mine? I notice that a Linux or MacOs machine is required. So does that mean I cannot participate in mining by using my windows operating system laptop? Is the mining process harmful to my computer?
A: Actually, Windows is also available to mine as long as you install docker. As a quick start, we provide the docker image to setup your cluster to mine. Thus, it means the mining is unrelated with the operation systems. If you installed Docker in your Windows laptop, you can also join the Testnet 2.0 mining. In fact, we have volunteers in our community that wrote a guidance for how to mine with Windows system. The link is here: https://www.jianshu.com/p/dac18a97b629?from=groupmessage&isappinstalled=0 (The guidance is written by Chinese, we will have the English version soon).
For the next question, since the mining process would occupy a lot of CPU, you may feel the computer becoming slower (but no damage at all) if you are also doing other works on the same computer. Thus, we would recommend to use an idle computer for mining.
3. Q: What are QuarkChain’s designs to prevent dominated miners?
A: Good question. We have proposed a new algorithm (Qkchash), which was designed to adjust the efficiency of hardware mining. This algorithm has been implemented and tested in Testnet 2.0. At the same time, our research team submitted an academic paper regarding this new algorithm. The paper is under review by IEEE (The world’s largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology) now.
4. Q: I have a question about QuarkChain’s sharding and scalability. When a shard is unable to carry higher TPS, will QuarkChain network automatically scale a new shard to increase TPS?
A: QuarkChain’s sharding balance is implemented by token economics. If the shards cannot reach the desired TPS, we mainly adopt two ways to add a new shard in the current testnet: community voting and consensus algorithm.
5. Q: Is sharding able to be infinitely scalable by adding new nodes? With the increase of nodes, will the difficulty of mining increase significantly as well just like Bitcoin?
A: The system is scalable with the increase of shards. In the same shard, mining difficulty rises correspondingly with the increase of mining computing power. In addition, for Bitcoin, the mining difficulty has nothing to do with the number of nodes, only related to the computing power. We hope that in QuarkChain as the computing power climbs, TPS will also see an increase.
6. Q: How to measure the investment ratio of mining？
A: The main purpose for testnet 2.0 mining is for everyone to have a better understanding of QuarkChain’s infrastructure and report bugs. The tQKC earned from Testnet 2.0 is not for real transactions. We provide a prize pool with 5 million QKC as rewards. The number of QKC that each miner is eligible to receive is based on the ratio of sharded blocks mined by each miner to the total number of sharded blocks mined by all miners. Currently, since it is difficult to estimate how many people will participate in mining, it is also difficult for us to evaluate if the mining process is profitable or not. However, to encourage more people to participate in mining, we provide early bird rewards. Miners who participate in the first month (December 2018, PST) will enjoy double points. We believe that after the launch of mainnet, more miners will be participating in mining.
7. Q: In addition to high TPS, what are the main features of QuarkChain, for example, identity management, logistics tracking, anti-counterfeiting queries?
A: There are at least two main features of QuarkChain that makes us stand out from the crowds:
- QuarkChain aims to improve on-chain TPS by applying sharding technology;
- QuarkChain aims to become the most flexible, scalable and user-oriented blockchain. QuarkChain is able to support multiple virtual machines (VMs), various consensus algorithms, different ledger formats, multi-native tokens in one network, and even customized by the clients’ requirements. This is unique in today’s public chain’s market.
Regarding the features you mentioned, those are not usually implemented by a public blockchain, they’re more related features considered by protocol layer and application layer.
8. Q: Is QuarkChain using data sharding?
A: Actually, in the traditional database and centralized systems, sharding refers to state sharding rather than transactional sharding. (For further details of sharding, please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard_(database_architecture) ) State sharding means that data on each shard will be partitioned to parts and each of them will be put onto different node to operate. As a result, with the increase of nodes and shards, the system performance, including data storage and TPS, will improve as well. While transactional sharding is a simplified version of state sharding. Data of the whole network is stored on each node while it only processes transactions happening on sub-datasets that is related to it. The data migration problem can be well addressed by using transactional sharding. However, since all the data are stored in each node, once the system data upsurges, storage burden on each node will be heavy as well.
9. Q: What does HTTPConnectionPool Read Timeout mean?
A：We are investigating, and most likely the full node is busy syncing.
10. Q: As rewards are based on the blocks, how we will know that？
A: You need to put your coinbase address into the config so that the block will contain your address if you mined. Coinbase is an address that put in block to indicate who mines the block. Coinbase address is a much older term than coinbase.com (and I guess the name comes from :) )
Now we provide a UI for you to check the mining status. You can check your coinbase rewards on our testnet wallet: http://testnet2.quarkchain.io. Also, note that the mining rewards are proportional to the numbers of mined blocks. Transferring the tQKC does not affect the final mining rewards.
11. Q: How will the token swap from tQKC to mainnet be executed?
A: This is no token swap from tQKC to QKC. The mining reward will be decided by the number of blocks you mined, not tQKC in your balance. That is to say the reward is only for miners.
The number of QKC that each miner is eligible to receive when mainnet launches will be calculated based on the ratio of sharded blocks mined by each miner to the total number of sharded blocks mined by all miners employing such mining algorithm in Testnet 2.0.
If you have any questions, please feel free to connect us. You can join in Discord, QuarkChain engineers will answer your questions as soon as possible. Thank you for supporting QuarkChain.
Website
https://www.quarkchain.io
Discord
https://discord.gg/gVYRazf
Telegram
https://t.me/quarkchainio
Twitter
https://twitter.com/Quark_Chain
Medium
https://medium.com/quarkchain-official
Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/quarkchainio/
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