Mining Contest Update: Early STX reward & new start date

[Gavin]

TL;DR:

• The Krypton testnet was overwhelmed by the number of active miners. To solve the issues this caused we are adding more capacity and doing a chain reset of Krypton. As a result, we will lose access to some data from the first 24 hours needed to rank contest participants.
• Given the overwhelming demand, we’ve decided to restart the competition with a new start date: 10pm HKT on Monday, December 21st. See here in your timezone.
• Everyone who successfully participated in the contest prior to the chain reset will receive a 300 STX token reward. List of eligible participants by testnet addresses.
• The remaining STX tokens will still be used for the final prize pool for Part 1 of the contest.

Hi Everyone,

To start Daemon Technologies wants to say thank you to the overwhelming number of folks who registered and participated in Part 1 of the Mine to 1 Million STX Challenge so far.

When we held the very first testnet mining contest back in October, the network saw up to 40 miners competing online at any given time. Those numbers have now been completely blown away by Part 1 of the Mine to 1 Million STX Challenge: we’ve seen over 700 registrations, and more than 200 miners active on the testnet competing for blocks in the first 24 hours!

We’re thrilled to see this type of turnout, but it has also caused some unforeseen technical issues. Specifically, we were forced to do an unplanned chain reset roughly 16 hours into the contest due to the number of participants using the same infrastructure. Please note: these capacity limitations apply specifically to the setup for this particular mining competition only, and do not apply to Stacks mining on mainnet.

As a result, Daemon will restart the contest so we can upgrade the Krypton infrastructure to handle a larger number of network participants. We will reward everyone who successfully tried to mine prior to the chain reset with 300 STX tokens. Those individuals will also be emailed separately, but you can check if you are part of that group by looking up your testnet STX or BTC address in this sheet.

We will restart the contest with a blank slate for all participants at 10pm Hong Kong Time on Monday, December 21st. This will give Daemon enough time to plan for increased capacity, and for participants to make sure they are set up properly before the contest starts again.

Daemon is excited to see the level of participation mentioned above, but we apologize for the unforeseen technical issues this caused. We very much appreciate your understanding, and, after all, this is exactly the purpose of testnet and these competitions: to identify issues and bugs before we get to the mainnet launch of Stacks 2.0. We are also planning to add technical support for the contest during nighttime Hong Kong Time (US day time) going forward.

For any further questions or concerns, please reply to this email or reach out to [email protected].

All the best,
Daemon Technologies

[muneeb]

Awesome to see 200 active miners! Hiro PBC is happy to help with any infrastructure capacity building; we have experience with running the Krypton testnet. Good luck and looking forward to the restart of the competition

[cuevasm]

Well A) congratulations on the turnout, I suppose of all the problems to have, a capacity/resources related one has a silver lining and B) appreciate the way you and the team have handled!

[stacksadmin]

Thanks for sharing this Gavin! The date change will be going out in the Stacks Foundation newsletter today

[fluidvoice]

@Gavin why is there only 160 participants in this spreadsheet/list?
I think there were many more than this.
I was mining for a while - after I figured out the problem with the Daemon Bot - and my address is also not on this list. See my many posts in the discord mining channel. I helped a lot of people get the Bot working while you were sleeping
https://discord.com/channels/621759717756370964/728030782693834862/788474290273255484

[xiri]

I’m on the same boat as @fluidvoice. I was mining on a different fork for most of the period so probably that wasn’t counted (but should be)

[xan]

@xiri and @fluidvoice, the addresses in that spreadsheet are those where we are able to confirm participation prior to the reset. As mentioned, a few miners were participating, but are not on that list due to the fact they were likely mining a different fork.

We want to include those folks if possible, and have been doing the following: Send any proof that you were in fact mining before the reset occurred to my email at [email protected]. This proof can take the form of screenshots of conversations in the #mining Discord channel with a claim that BTC amount is going down, or STX chain tip is increasing. If you still have a working directory from when the competition started, you can also run a stacks-dump or zip it, and provide that info.

Once you send me proof I’ll see if I can add you to the list. Thanks for the understanding.

[xan]

Update

As a reminder, Part 1 of the Mine to 1 Million STX Challenge will restart on Monday, December 21st at 10pm UTC+8. Below is everything you need to make sure you’re ready:

• Follow the updated documentation to download and install the new release of The Mining Bot. The Mining Bot is the only officially supported software for the contest.

• Documentation now includes an FAQ for the running the bot and the competition.

• Watch our MacOs or Windows demo videos for further help getting set up.

• For technical questions and trouble shooting, join the Stack’s Discord and post to the #mining channel. Please keep questions to that channel only.

For any further questions or concerns, you can also reply to this thread or reach out to [email protected].

Happy mining!

[Mushroom]

Thanks for sharing