Hi Stackers,
I wanted to provide a quick update on the status of the mainnet version of Daemon Technologies’ Mining Bot, as Stacks 2.0 has now been live for two weeks.
We finished development on the planned version for mainnet on January 18th, which used stacks-node V2.0.2. Given that real BTC is on the line when mining on mainnet, we wanted to spend the better part of a week testing the bot ourselves. During these tests, Gavin and the other engineers on Daemon’s core team uncovered three types of unexpected situations. These situations are outlined below, and can negatively impact the user experience of the bot in significant ways:
- The bot registers a miners key when they first come to the network. We discovered, however, that the bot was reregistering a key every time the stacks node was started or closed. This is unnecessary, and each time this happens it costs the miner between 30,000-50,000 Satoshis.
- Right now the burn fee per block cannot be changed dynamically - that is without stopping and restarting the miner. Every time the miner is stopped and then restarted, however, it incurs the fee mentioned above in order to reregister the miner’s key. This makes it difficult from an economic perspective for miners to change their burn fee to respond to market dynamics.
- If you don’t have a great network connection, the bot will consistently send outdated transactions in its attempt to mine. This will cause all affected mining commitments to be wasted.
Overall, these unexpected situations we ran into can cause an STX Miner using the Bot to spend a lot of BTC without that going towards their probability in sortition. As a result, Daemon has decided to delay the release of the mainnet version of the bot until we can solve the above, and provide a decent experience. We will continue to keep the community updated, but are hopeful that we will be able to release a mainnet version within the next month.
-Xan & the Daemon Technologies Team