The STX Freehold is currently focused as group of community stakeholders who work together to make an impact and are rewarded for it. They must hodl to remain in the STX Freehold, or any Freehold for that matter. Join us to have an impact at joinfreehold.com.
One of our goals will be related to securing the blockchain:
I’m looking to have folks join us and earn for working to grow the Stacks ecosystem.
I really liked what Xan did with the Daemon Technologies mining competition, I think I saw something like 60 miners online across the globe simultaneously and that was really awesome to see. I think Mining is an objectively measurable thing to work towards making more secure so we become the most trusted ecosystem for builders. As for us at Freehold, I could imagine STX Freeholders spreading the word and earning for hitting growth milestones related to this, especially as we are approaching a launch where we could encourage a broad heterogenous group of miners online at the same time.
Again, if folks are pro-growth Stackers, please join us at joinfreehold.com and I’ll onboard you personally into the STX Freehold.
The Daemon team very much agrees with your statement “The Stacks blockchain becomes more secure as more Bitcoin runs through it”. This is Daemon’s North Star.
To further drive this, we are going to be doubling down on the contests between now and mainnet launch. Making them bigger, better, and with technology that will be progressively easier to use. Below are our plans between now and mainnet launch:
Releasing an Alpha version of the mining bot for Mac and Linux, in both English and Mandarin. Aiming for the end of this week 11/13.
Second mining contest end of this month, tentatively kicking off November 30th and running for ~5 days. Targeting both English and Mandarin speaking participants. I’m currently putting together the details for the contest including prizing and distribution/promotion.
Hold a major mining contest that starts at the launch of mainnet. Take 1 week prior to the contest to onboard participants to be ready to mine at contest. This could run a lot longer, up to 1 month, and provide a greater diversity in prizing, in addition to the ultimate winners.
I’m looking for folks to help Daemon: (1) Promote and get the word out about the upcoming contest at the end of Novermber, and (2) Fully develop the details for the larger contest, and promote and get the word out prior.
In addition to working with the larger Stacks community to do the above, we would love to work with Freeholders on developing incentives, and promoting the contests. We would also like to work with the Stacks Foundation and @blocks8 to add further incentives to the contests, and even to STX Mining generally when it is live on mainnet.
Great to see this discussion! Hiro PBC remains heads down on the public infrastructure. Hiro engineers are happy to fix any bugs in software discovered during these competitions but won’t be directly running any mining competitions. We’re happy to be a technical resource between now and mainnet launch and can leave any feedback/comments on ideas on the forum. Excited about the mainnet launch!
@xan happy to start by helping with “(1) Promote and get the word out about the upcoming contest at the end of November” by rewarding high impact people doing this in the STX Freehold. Feel free to share details whenever you get them and we’ll structure challenges to help promote!
Once we’ve ironed that small contest out, maybe those activities for STX Freeholders will transfer easily to the larger mainnet contest.
Thanks Patrick. Below is my first pass at the high level plan for the contest. Everyone please feel free to provide input/comments. Will share more as we flesh out details.
Second Mining Contest
When: The start of Phase 4 (Zenon) of testnet (tentatively Nov. 30th)
Structure: Generally follow the same structure of the first Mining contest
4-5 days long
Prizing: Reward based on most amount of testnet STX blocks mined over the course of the contest
Top 5 are rewarded - how big do the rewards need to be to make noncommunity members interested?
Other incentive ideas?
Hosted/run by Daemon Technologies
Daemon’s Alpha version mining bot will be available for the competition
Mining bot + documentation will be available in both Mandarin and English
The contest website, details, and rules will also be provided in both English and Mandarin
Distribution: We want to promote this contest both in the English speaking world and in China. The goal is simply to spread the news about the contest, how easy it is to participate, and the prizes that can be earned.
In English: possibly distributed by Freeholders
In Mandarin: Daemon is working on a plan to distribute the contest in China via channels such as WeChat. We welcome anyone who wants to help here and can share more of our plan soon.
Technical Support: provided by Hiro PBC primarily via Discord
I’m from Brazil and I can help spread the project in communities, groups, social networks, Brazilian channels. In relation to arousing the interest of the communities and the public, the suggestion would be that the top 5 winners win the blocks won during the competition as a reward. Thus, we could attract the attention.
Inviting comments on how the judging/scoring for the contest will work:
The goal of the judging criteria is to (1) have participants try to mine as many blocks as possible during the competition, but without trying to game the system.
Winners will be judged based on:
(Total number of testnet STX blocks mined) / (Total amount of testnet BTC burned)*
*Caveat that to be eligible to win, a miner must participate in at least 50% of all STX blocks that occur during the course of the competition.
The idea behind this is it stops folks from trying to game the system by spamming the testnet BTC faucet, since mining is free on testnet. The caveat is needed because without it, the best strategy would be to try to mine a single block at the lowest possible price, and then stop mining for the rest of the competition. We want miners to continue mining throughout.
Please poke holes in the above method, or if you have a different method to propose, please do.
What if Daemon does an overview of how to use their mining bot, and Daemon has a reward for most efficient mining for the top 25% of participants, and separately the STX Freehold holds a competition that rewards most unique qualified/activated/unique referrals.
We’ll have documentation/tutorials for the mining bot. Anyone can follow the progress of the mining bot and documentation here. We planned to release yesterday, but still dealing with some last minute bug fixes. Expectation is now mid next week.
I like that idea for prize structure. To clarify, instead of rewarding top 5, reward top 25% of participants based on efficiency. I think for that, I would want to up the threshold for % of blocks a participant must try to mine in order to be eligible. Maybe 75% of total blocks during the competition? My only worry is making the threshold too high, if 75% means you need your miner to be properly running 18 out of 24 hours every day to qualify.
Like the idea of Freehold rewarding different types of referrals.
I think 75% is way too much. Too much resources used such as internet bandwidth for people in countries with limited budgets and/or who might be using metered access. 8 hours per day seems like enough to me, so ~33% of blocks?
I’m with @fluidvoice that perhaps a lower threshold will encourage participation. If we can get 100% of testnet miners working 33% of the time, that’s great, instead of people dropping off if they can’t meet the 75% threshold. Maybe the % is in the middle, 50%? This is a draft guess.
We’re spreading the word and happy to do more to get out the contest within our communities and hand off materials to our active members to share further.
We also have an opportunity to fund more incentives for miners. The security of the network is critical to the success of Stacks 2.0, especially in the early days, so the more miners the better. We can fund incentives for these contests and early mining rewards after the launch of Stacks 2.0. We can review proposals here or run it for review through our grants infrastructure.
Excited to see the mining bot in the wild funded by a Stacks Grant!
Thanks everyone for the input. Updated details for the next testnet mining contest below:
Mine to Mainnet (working title, open to suggestions)
When: December 15th, 2020 - January 4th
Hosted by Daemon Technologies (landing page/registration to come this week)
Prizing: 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 curve will be 1st place receives 20% of the total prize pool, 2nd place will receive 20% of remaining pool, 3rd place will receive 20% of remaining pool, and so on. This results in the top 10 all receiving at least $1k USD equivalent at a $0.20 STX price.
Judging: 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 testnet STX Blocks Mined) / (Total amount of testnet BTC Burned)
What we learned from the first session is that randomness is a big player in this competition. That is not well reflected in the exponential prize money, IMHO.
Two miners transferring the same amount and mining all blocks can have quite a different result.
Is Total number of testnet STX Blocks Mined the blocks that were produced and where the block reward was awarded? Do blocks count that are not the canonical one? How do microblocks count?
Total number of testnet STX blocks mined is the number of Blocks a miner actually won. These are the blocks that, if on mainnet, the miner would have received the 1000 stx reward for.
In terms of canonical blocks and microblocks - will either of those be relevant on testnet when this contest is going on?
My initial reaction is only the canonical ones should count, but I think we may already be capturing that by only counting “actual wins”. cc @Gavin to comment.
If microblocks will exist for this contest, then yes, I think they should count in some lesser way. Do you have any recommendations on how you would handle this?
Also fair point on randomness and the prize structure - what would you propose that more correctly reflects the reality @friedger?
