9 votes
Accepted

What will the Monero Research Lab be working on in the future, after RingCT has released?

Monero Research Lab Publications MRL-0001 to MRL-0005 have been published. MRL-0006 - Difficulty Adjustment Algorithms in Cryptocurrency Protocols have been started. According to fluffypony The ...
Clement J.'s user avatar
  • 3,339
7 votes

What will the Monero Research Lab be working on in the future, after RingCT has released?

Additionally to what Clement J. said, there are a lot of potential future reserach tasks on the Monero Design & Development goals, including Research goals on the bottom half of that page.
stke's user avatar
  • 702
5 votes
Accepted

Overview of what happens when I run monerod diff

I may be wrong but I assume this is the code initialized when you run "diff" in monerod. uint64_t now = time(NULL); uint64_t diff = ts > now ? ts - now : now - ts; if (diff > 24*3600) ...
Lurker's user avatar
  • 473
5 votes
Accepted

Monero Pool job contents, blob length

Mining Blob The mining blob is the block header + merkle root + number of TX-es. It's similar to block identifier as defined in CNS003: Calculation of Block Identifier The identifier of a block is ...
JollyMort's user avatar
  • 19.9k
5 votes
Accepted

What happened at Monero difficulty from Nov 2017 to Jan 2018?

It means that the network is used by more powerful miners. Difficulty adjusts to the network hashrate (after every block, unlike Bitcoin which adjusts difficulty only every 2016 blocks, around two ...
Florian Schneider's user avatar
5 votes

Which is the unit of the global difficulty?

The Monero network targets blocks to be mined at 120 seconds, using the difficulty so that hash_rate = difficulty / block_time, ie difficulty = hash_rate * block_time. Unit analysis gives the ...
user36303's user avatar
  • 34.9k
4 votes
Accepted

How does the difficulty adjustment for monero work?

The difficulty adjusts with each block. The adjustment algorithm examines 720 prior blocks, starting from 15 blocks ago. Of those 720 blocks, the 60 highest and lowest block times are excluded from ...
knaccc's user avatar
  • 8,468
4 votes

How many hashes are needed to solve a Monero block of difficulty 1?

One Monero block is (1 << 21) / 16 [Source (Lines 40, 43 and 90): https://github.com/monero-project/monero/blob/master/src/crypto/slow-hash.c#L40 ]. The Monero block reward = (M - A) * 2-20 * ...
Rob's user avatar
  • 366
3 votes

Which is the unit of the global difficulty?

The difficulty is simply a number specifying the maximum size for a block's PoW hash. With a difficulty of 80926050199, a block's PoW hash (represented as a big endian integer) must be below a certain ...
Florian Schneider's user avatar
3 votes

What is "aes_round" in the Monero hashing algorithm?

An AES round uses the three functions (SubBytes, ShiftRows and MixColumns). The Wikipedia article on AES has a high-level description of the algorithm and links to the AES standard, reference source ...
glv's user avatar
  • 3,334
2 votes
Accepted

How can I tell what difficulty my solution is?

You can find the difficulty of a submitted hash (which is just a big endian hex encoded string) by dividing the base difficulty (2^256-1) by your hash. As such, nodejs-pool (the most common pool ...
jtgrassie's user avatar
  • 19.1k
2 votes

What's the scratchpad for?

The scratchpad is filled with pseudo-random data based on the state (using rounds of the AES block cipher). Check https://cryptonote.org/cns/cns008.txt for a detailed description of the algorithm (...
glv's user avatar
  • 3,334
2 votes
Accepted

Which is the unit of the global difficulty?

With a difficulty of 80G, the network will need to try 80 billion hashes on average to find a new block. The difficulty is adjusted to target a block every 2 minutes or 120 seconds. So a difficulty ...
assylias's user avatar
  • 2,208
2 votes
Accepted

Would a long-time block target be annoying?

To target a block time of a day, difficulty would be adjusted to make the likelihood of finding a block require a days worth of hashing (work). The big drawback to such a large block time would be ...
jtgrassie's user avatar
  • 19.1k
1 vote
Accepted

How to calculate the achieved difficulty of a mined block

Why is there a difference there? The difficulty displayed on block explorers is the difficulty the hash has to be greater than, not what difficulty the hash is.
jtgrassie's user avatar
  • 19.1k
1 vote

Does anyone have test data that illustrates the CryptoNight 7 algorithm?

One simple way is to call the daemon RPC's method getblock. From this you can get the result.blob (the data to be hashed) and from the result.block_header.hash, the expected hash result.
jtgrassie's user avatar
  • 19.1k
1 vote

How many hashes are needed to solve a Monero block of difficulty 1?

Answering your actual questions: How many hashes are needed to solve a Monero block of difficulty 1? ... Or, more simply, the average number of hashes (total, across the whole network) required to ...
jtgrassie's user avatar
  • 19.1k
1 vote

How many hashes are needed to solve a Monero block of difficulty 1?

According to Minergate: Reward = ((hashrate * block_reward) / current_difficulty) * (1 - pool_fee) * 3600 ...where does the 3600 come from? Does anyone know what this formula means or how to use it?...
Matt_B's user avatar
  • 19
1 vote

Keep mining to replace an already published block

Assuming that the network is healthy which means there are many competing miners for a block. It would not make sense for a miner to keep mining an already published block because by the time it will ...
Gundamlancer's user avatar
  • 1,026

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