Creating a separate thread to continue the conversation from here.
Below are the most up to date details for the upcoming Testnet Mining Challenge, hosted by Daemon Technologies. These will be finalized by EOD Friday, Eastern Standard Time. Please comment with any feedback before then as a reply to this post.
Mine to Mainnet (working title, open to suggestions)
When: December 15th, 2020 - January 4th
Hosted by Daemon Technologies (landing page/registration to come early next week, Nov. 30th)
Judging & Prizing: Participants must compete for at least 1/3 (33%) of the total blocks that occur over the course of the competition. Participants will be judged based on (Total number of block rewards received) / (Total amount of testnet BTC Burned)
The prize pool will be provided by the Stacks Foundation. Total prize pool will be 200,000 STX ($40k USD equivalent @ $0.20 STX price). Every participant who successfully mines a block will receive a reward. The reward calculation will be: Total Prize Pool * Judging Ratio
The remaining tokens will be used for Mining Incentives on mainnet when it launches.
We will follow up with a discussion on what those incentives will be after we have finalized everything for this competition first.
I may be missing something simple, but I’m not 100% following what you mean - can you write out what the full calculation would be for an individual participant in the competition?
miner A should get 200,000 STX * 10/16 = 125,000 STX
miner B should get 200,000 STX * 5/16 = 62,500 STX
miner C should get 200,000 STX * 1/16 = 12,500 STX
the total payout is 125,000 STX + 62,500 STX + 12,500 STX = 200,000 STX
Transaction fees should not be counted as block rewards, correct? If I understand correctly, miner of microblocks do not receive a reward for microblocks. They only receive parts of the fees of the transaction contained in the microblocks. Therefore, mining microblocks is not part of this competition. Is that correct?
I like this but am worried it could potentially skew/concentrate the rewards paid out among just a few participants.
Do you see an issue with ranking based on the same judging ratio, but then using a smooth curve to reward? (something like 20% goes to first place, 20% of remaining pool goes to 2nd, and so on…)
BTC would be nice, but not my decision and my understanding is that’s not doable for the contest. The Stacks Foundation is providing the prize pool, and those funds are in STX. @blocks8 or @stacksadmin to comment further.
Fair point on prize amounts. @friedger with the use of this new “Judging Ratio”, do you think it’s still necessary to require participants compete for at least 33% of the blocks during the contest period?
I did some maths for the prize money using the two methods with the data from last challenge:
Blue is using the judging ratio/sum of all eligible judging ratio
Red is using 20% of the remaining prize pool
(The red dots at the 0 line are participants that have not mined for at least 1000 blocks, they do not receive any prize).
The second last miner is the one that had the most expenses (6.1 BTC committed), unfortunately a not very profitable strategy. Hence, prize for that miner would be ~ 3000 STX (blue) or ~ 900 STX (red).
Thanks Friedger, that spreadsheet is very helpful. I agree with you and think we should go with the relative reward, and make things more like mainnet.
The challenge will run from December 15th - January 4th. If there are 144 blocks per day, my estimate would be the contest will last for ~3,000 blocks.
The Stacks Foundation announced they are putting up 1M STX as extra incentives. The idea is 200,000 of these STX will to be used as the prize pool for the upcoming contest on testnet. The remainder will be used as extra rewards for the first month or so of mainnet, in addition to the regular block/transaction fee rewards that are earned by miners.
Echoing Xan’s message. The additional incentives are there to reward miners for being setup before mainnet launch to support the network at launch. Rewards for mining are built into the protocol but will not be live until after mainnet.
The extra incentive that carry over after mainnet launch are a sweetener for those early miners.
We will be moving forward on the contest as described above, but with two changes. The first is this will be a two part contest, and the above describes part 1. The second change is part 1 of the contest contest will not use Xenon, but will use a Krypton set up, with a private Bitcoin regtest.
The reasons for this are as follows:
(1) Mining on Xenon is significantly more complex. More time is needed to improve the mining experience, documentation, and to make sure the new infrastructure is stable before it makes sense to hold on a contest on this new infrastructure.
(2) Daemon’s main goal is to make mining more accessible (easier). This has been done for Krypton, but we need more time to get the experience on Xenon to a similar level. The work to do this will include upgrading the Mining Bot so it works on Xenon, hosting a public Bitcoind node for testnet miners to use, and creating new tutorials/documentation that provide an easy walk through to get set up as a Miner.
Updated Contest Details:
When: December 15 - January 2nd
Hosted by Daemon Technologies (landing page/registration will be live by end of week, will share link in this thread)
Judging & Prizing: Participants must compete for at least 1/3 (33%) of the total blocks that occur over the course of the competition. Participants will be ranked based on a Judging Ratio, that is calculated as (Total number of block rewards received) / (Total amount of testnet BTC Burned)
The prize pool will be provided by the Stacks Foundation. Total prize pool will be 200,000 STX ($40k USD equivalent @ $0.20 STX price). Every participant who successfully mines a block will receive a reward. The reward calculation will be: Total Prize Pool * (Judging Ratio/Sum of all Judging Ratios)
Once Part 1 of the contest concludes, part 2 will start. Part 2 will be similar, but will use Xenon. More details to come on Part 2 shortly.
We’ll be making a more formal announcement shortly as well. For any feedback on contest details, registration, or the page, please continue to use this thread.
