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
15
votes
Accepted
CryptoNight-Lite PoW modifications in Aeon
There are two modifications: the scratchpad is only half the size of regular Cryptonight (1 MB rather than 2 MB) and the number of AES iterations is halved (half a million rather than a million). This ...
- 34.7k
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 ...
- 34.7k
11
votes
What is Monero's mechanism for defending against a double-spend attack?
Double spends are prevented by the use of key images, which are sent along with each output being spent in a transaction, and which are checked for uniqueness before allowing the transaction.
In the ...
- 34.7k
10
votes
Accepted
How does Boolberry's Wild Keccak work?
There is a high-level description of this algorithm at http://cpucoinlist.com/cryptocurrency-algorithms/wild-keccack/ which reports as follows:
Wild Keccak is a Keccak hybrid which uses blockchain ...
- 333
10
votes
Accepted
What is Monero's mechanism for defending against a double-spend attack?
Each transaction generates a key image. In the CryptoNote protocol, key images used more than once are rejected by the blockchain as double-spends. When a new transaction is received, the miner need ...
- 2,491
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 ...
- 731
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
What exactly has been changed in PoW algorithms in the v7 fork?
In versions 1 to 6 of the protocol, the CryptoNight algorithm was very roughly:
state = keccak(block_data)
scratchpad = fill_scratchpad(state)
loop 524,288 times
address = compute_address(...
- 3,324
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
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
How would a transition from cryptonight PoW to cuckoo cycle work?
Yes, that's basically what would happen if Monero switched to any other PoW. A good example is Vertcoin's switch from Scrypt-N to Lyra2RE (and then to Lyra2REv2).
Essentially, the changeover works ...
- 3,697
6
votes
How does CryptoNight "depend on all the previous blocks"?
I think the CryptoNote website's page about the egalitarian proof of work is about the inner working of the hash function, not about how the hash of a block is computed (which is basically ...
- 3,324
6
votes
Accepted
How to calculate job target in hex
How to get a decimal value of difficulty (480045) by a hexadecimal value of a given target in hex (f3220000) ?
Swap endian f3220000 and remove padding gets 22f3, then 0x100000001 / 0x22f3 yields: ...
- 18k
5
votes
Accepted
Energy consumed to protect the Monero network
Generally you can simply look at the value of the current block reward as an indication of how much electricity it takes to secure the network. At 8.7 XMR per block it costs about 78k USD in ...
- 6,484
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 ...
- 18k
5
votes
What PoW hashing algorithms did Monero historically use?
Monero's genesis block dates back from April 2014. The first PoW change was in 2018.
The full history is:
| block | date | PoW algorithm
|---------|------------|--------------
| 0 | ...
- 34.7k
4
votes
Accepted
How to Generate a Blob for PoW Hashing
The process to compute the mining blob can be described by the following pseudo-code:
miner_transaction = build_miner_transaction(...)
miner_transaction_id = compute_transaction_id(miner_transaction)
...
- 3,324
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 * ...
- 366
4
votes
Can monero network exist without miners?
If no one is mining, and this is very rare for any cryptocurrency, no transactions would be able to be verified, yet your balance would still show up assuming people are still running nodes.
- 857
4
votes
Where can I find some test inputs and outputs for the CryptoNight (Monero PoW) hash algorithm?
There's a test code for hash functions (https://github.com/monero-project/monero/tree/master/tests/hash) where the expected values are in the txt files.
- 704
4
votes
Accepted
What are the differences between the slow hash, fast hash, and tree hash on the monero github?
cn_slow_hash is CryptoNight. cn_fast_hash is Keccak. As the names imply, the former is much slower than the latter. Both hash a contiguous buffer. Cryptonight is used for PoW and KDF, while Keccak is ...
- 34.7k
3
votes
Why does Monero use proof of work?
The simplest reason why Monero uses Proof of Work (PoW) is because it is guaranteed to work and was the only option at the time (2014).
It is entirely possible that Proof of Stake consensus ...
- 242
3
votes
Accepted
What other benefits does Cuckoo Cycle have over cryptonight, is it quantum computer proof?
The arrival of quantum computers (QC) isn't necessarily a reason to change the PoW. It would only be necessary if the first generation of quantum computers are so fast that only a small investment is ...
- 1,386
3
votes
Is "Two-phase Proof of Work" suitable for Monero?
The question to ask isn't 'Can this be done?' but rather 'Is this something we can benefit from?'.
Since you did ask explicitly if it was possible, I'll address that first:
Yes, it's absolutely ...
- 1,386
3
votes
Energy consumed to protect the Monero network
Based on this answer, an efficient device to mine Moneroj at the moment can produce ca. 6 H/s/W. That's around 20 MH/kWh.
The current difficulty of the network is around 6.5 billion (average number ...
- 2,188
3
votes
Accepted
How is CryptoNight variant 4 increasing the CPU to ASIC performance ratio?
At block 1788000, Monero will switch PoW from CryptoNight variant 2 to variant 4
The current naming is a little misleading as we are really on variant 3 right now, with the next being variant 4. This ...
- 18k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible