CPU Mining, Staking & Participation - State of the market

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Decred and the State of the market is brought to you by Exitus, Tivra and PhoenixGreen.

In this episode, we’ll be talking about the change to CPU mining and the initial mining difficulty which had to be overcome to find the first block, after the consensus change. We’ll also look at the current active proposals on Politeia and other participation opportunities.

Live stream agenda:

The first piece of news is the anticipated consensus change from being an ASIC mineable chain to becoming ASIC resistant and the community effort that it took getting from block 794,368 to block 794,369.

• The initial hash difficulty was set to accommodate the possibility of GPU mining
• How long before the difficulty adjustment stabilises?
• Special thanks need to go out to Dave Colins for all his hard work and effort.
• Karambles for putting the CPU mining tutorial together which got a lot of us new to mining, including myself, up and running
• Kozel, JHoldstock, JZ, Warrior, Zippycorners, Alanbarber and a whole host of others for their community support.
• Plus all the other people in the community that turned out to help mine.

As a comparison, the last ASIC mineable block (794,367) had an estimated hash rate of 40Ph/s (40,000,000 Gh/s). And the first CPU block had approximately 15Gh/s, currently still adjusting to approx 7Gh/s.

How were the general feelings during the sustained delay between block 68 and 69? Personal emotions, community emotions, expectations, and theories.

• No code patches were needed
• No adjustments in code
• The expected production time for block 69 was between 2.5 days and 12 days. It was found just before 3 days. How was this sped up?

What does the new difficulty adjustment mean for block production going forward?

• Difficulty adjusts every block to compensate for mining games
• New algorithm has bricked all ASIC miners
• Drop in mining reward to 1% per block has reduced profitability for aggressive mining and reduced the possibility for bringing out new specialist hardware

What will the low hash rate mean for the security of the Decred’s blockchain?

• Most of the security is generated by the POS tickets
• The hash rate is likely to increase with GPU mining, but CPU mining is where it’s likely to be most profitable.
• The estimated cost of producing a block is estimated between $0.5 – $1 for 0.08 dcr (current value $0.80). For GPU mining to start being profitable, the price of dcr will need to go up. Based on these calculations, GPU profitability starts at around $20 to $30 per dcr.

Mobile wallets currently voting

• What are the benefits and perceived drawbacks of these two Wallet proposals?
• Are there any benefits / drawbacks between the codebases (CryptoPower = Go, CakeWallet = Flutter & C++)
• How is the vote looking and what can we expect if successful?

Building the Decred Ecosystem

As we’ve said on many occasions, the codebases of most established cryptos are now extremely solid. It’s now time to move the conversation on, can we make crypto useful?

• Earn it.
• Save and interest.
• Accept it.
• Spend it and receive it.