Mining Contest Update: New Judging & Prizing

Community News
#1

TL;DR:

  • Bug in sortition makes chance of winning a block equal for all miners, regardless of the amount of BTC burned
  • New prizing will reward every miner that successfully has their miner online and mining for at least 30% of the blocks during the contest
  • The size of the STX reward will be the same for everyone who successfully meets this threshold

Hi Everyone,

Earlier today we discovered a new bug in the miner sortition for Krypton. Instead of weighting sortition by how much BTC each miner burns, the protocol equally weights all miners each block. This means it doesn’t matter how much BTC is burned per block. Miner A could burn 10,000 BTC and Miner B burn 10 BTC, and they would both have the same chance of winning that block.

As a result, miner “efficiency” no longer makes sense to use. This is because the bug makes winning blocks random, and the best strategy to always burn the minimum BTC per block.

What we are going to change for the contest:

  • No longer use efficiency to rank participants
  • Reward all participants who successfully have their miners online, and mining, for 30% of the blocks during the contest
  • Everyone who successfully meets this threshold will be rewarded the same number of STX from the remaining 145,000 STX prize pool (55,000 STX went to the early reward before the contest reset)

Please note this bug only exists in Krypton. Sortition works as intended on Xenon and in the code for Mainnet

#2

Thanks, Xan.

To clarify, this was a regression that exists in the release being used for Krypton. It has since been fixed and sortition is taking into account BTC commitments as expected on Xenon.

Unfortunately given the timing of the mining competition and when the regression was discovered, it didn’t make sense to try and incorporate this on Krypton.

Appreciate everyone’s patience and support: it’s been exhilarating to see the level of participation in the mining competition!

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#3

Thank you for the clarification Diwaker! Will echo your comments on the amazing level of participation.

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