27
votes
Accepted
What is the purpose of the tail emission?
The first question one needs to ask before even considering adaptive
blocksize limits is: Can a fee market actually work in the absence of
a base emission?
We first consider a blocksize ...
- 1,428
21
votes
Will Monero ever move to Proof of Stake (PoS)?
Though your first sentence is not actually a question, I shall refute your statement. Energy is never burned using POW or wasted, every single bit of it serves an extremely valuable purpose, no miner ...
- 6,484
17
votes
Will Monero ever move to Proof of Stake (PoS)?
No.
Let me present some arguments.
As an ecological dilemma
Let's consider the scale of mining operations energy consumption. I will take a random mining rig consisting of 6 AMD 480 GPUs, and ...
- 19.9k
14
votes
Accepted
Which reasons were discussed for potentially changing the proof-of-work algorithm?
One of the main reasons Cuckoo cycle is atractive when compared to Cryptonight is that it is very fast to verify. This is one drawback of Cryptonight: it makes all operations that need to verify ...
- 34.8k
9
votes
Accepted
What is actually happening when you pool mine? What is a share?
When you mine, you try to solve a puzzle. In a simple description, you choose a number, any number, hash it together with some info for the block you want to include in the blockchain, and then check ...
- 1,187
9
votes
Accepted
How can block size grow over time when miners are incentivised to keep size small?
TL;DR Actually, with the current minimum fee, there's an incentive for 0.6% growth as long as there's enough transactions coming in. Problem is not in the formulas themselves, but in the typical ...
- 19.9k
9
votes
Accepted
How does the dynamic blocksize and the dynamic fees work together in Monero?
In addition to the excellent summary by ArticMine already given, here below is shortened & updated version of my research on the topic.
Dynamic Blocksize Penalty
This is the penalty which will be ...
- 19.9k
8
votes
Accepted
After major coin issuance, what must the minimum XMR price be to incentivize network security?
This is kind of a subjective question. Currently the block reward is ~ 10.4 XMR per block or 5.2 XMR per minute. When the tail emission kicks in, the block reward will be 0.6 XMR per block (assuming 2 ...
- 15.1k
8
votes
Accepted
How do full nodes vs miners secure the network differently?
If I run a full node I am supposedly contributing to network security by keeping a copy of the blockchain
That's right, but by running a node, you're most importantly securing yourself. I will get ...
- 19.9k
8
votes
Why does Monero use proof of work?
PoW is more secure than PoS in that it costs nothing to try to fork a PoS chain. An attacker can try to make as many different chains as they can with a PoS chain, but with PoW if you try to fork the ...
- 741
7
votes
What is the purpose of the tail emission?
What if there was no gold to mine? The fact that it might be more efficient or beneficial to mine rather than buy from a collector adds needed complexity to market decisions. Beanie Babies were ...
- 311
7
votes
Mining Monero with Pencil and Paper
I think the overall answer is "it's ridiculously impractical to perform by hand". The Cryptonight hash operates over a 2 megabyte data space, using multiple rounds of AES along with a variety of other ...
- 4,233
7
votes
Accepted
I'm trying to create a Python miner, can I get some guidance please?
The general steps are as follows:
Call your Monero daemon's RPC method get_block_template.
Take the blockhashing_blob from the response and convert the hex to binary.
Set a 4 byte nonce in bytes 39....
- 18.7k
6
votes
Why does mining generate new coins on a fresh testnet?
the miner, who found the block, will be rewarded with some Moneros, in the expenses of the sender.
That also happens, and it is called a transaction fee. Transaction fees are small: 0.002 XMR (per ...
- 3,327
6
votes
Accepted
Why does Monero use proof of work?
The role of PoW is only to order transactions chronologically, nothing else. Thing is, PoW is the only known way to have the authority on transaction ordering be decentralized. PoS can't work for that ...
- 19.9k
6
votes
Accepted
Mining Monero with Pencil and Paper
I like the question because an answer to it will give a better understanding, from first principles, of the underlying algorithms.
So question 1 has two parts:
1a) How does the CryptoNight PoW ...
- 1,205
5
votes
How do full nodes vs miners secure the network differently?
Note that full nodes also verify transactions. Additionally, running a full node significantly contributes to the decentralization of the network. Bear in mind that running a full node in Monero ...
- 15.1k
5
votes
How can I compile a mining software for my mac computer that uses an NVIDIA GPU?
You want tsiv's ccminer-cryptonight.
I've never successfully compiled it on macOS, and don't have a mac desktop anymore to test it on, but I believe a few recent Issues on github answer this question....
- 3,717
5
votes
What stops the miner or the pool owner from cheating?
Here is the answer when it comes to Bitcoin mining pools.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/10693
TL;DR: The miner will find a valid hash based on the merkle root provided initially by the pool. ...
- 301
5
votes
What are the bandwidth and latency requirements of a miner? What is the total data usage per week?
Assuming you refer to pool mining...
This question was partially answered here: Does mining use a lot of bandwidth?
20 Mb/day download and less than 5 Mb/day upload
So over a month, that's ~750 ...
- 3,717
5
votes
Accepted
Are [solo] mining yield calculations like dice or playing card calculations?
Yes, kind of. Your model is an idealized representation of mining, and works with one exception. The network has a certain degree of latency between nodes, and as a result miners do not know ...
- 3,717
5
votes
Accepted
How is Keccak calculated in Monero?
The keccak1600 function used by Monero is based on Keccak-256 (b=1600, c=512, r=1088 and output of 256 bits, not 1600 bits), but it returns the whole internal state (1600 bits) instead of the first ...
- 3,324
5
votes
Accepted
What exactly do miners communicate with a pool?
Monero pools all (to my knowledge) use (roughly) the following payloads:
{
"method": "login",
"params": {
"login": "wallet_address",
"pass": "pool_pass",
"rigid": "",
...
- 18.7k
5
votes
What's the difference between the CryptoNightR and RandomX algorithms?
Quoting SChernykh (one of the CryptonightR authors):
CryptonightR is a modification to Cryptonight whereas RandomX is done completely from scratch. The main purpose of CryptonightR is to be the ...
- 18.7k
4
votes
Accepted
Could (merge) mining provide a vector for deanonymization?
When merge mining all you're doing is re-using your PoW calculation on different blockchains that share PoW algorithms.
Merge mining is therefore equivalent to, but more efficient than, running two ...
- 1,386
4
votes
What happens as monero network hash rate decreases
Value of a coin and hash rate goes hand in hand.
If value of coin decrease, then miners will have less reward for their mining and will rather go mine some other more profitable coin.
So if a coin ...
- 361
4
votes
Accepted
How exactly does mining software work?
In shortest / simplest, just to illustrate the principle (may not be 100% accurate).
Take the hash of the last block
Build a block made of transactions which you collect from the network, while ...
- 19.9k
4
votes
Accepted
Which country operates the most Monero nodes per capita?
The distribution of nodes varies over time and not all nodes are visible
https://monerohash.com/nodes-distribution.html
Currently the United States has more publicly visible nodes than any other ...
- 4,556
4
votes
Accepted
Does a node that is more geographically centered in the Monero network have a higher chance of mining a block?
What matters is where the last block was found, and this is due to latency. So if the last block was found on a pool server in new york, another pool server located in new york will be notified of the ...
- 5,666
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