Today I want to talk a bit about the upcoming RandomX / ProgPoW implementations and gauge a bit of interest from people.
So first a little bit of background here:
DigiByte originally started off as Scrypt-only mining. In 2014, this was able to be mined on a GPU, and although there were a few FPGA bitstreams, they were mostly kept to themselves. This means that for most people they would mine DigiByte on their home graphics card.
DigiByte then upgraded the network and became MultiAlgo. This is different from the likes of Ravencoins older X16R etc in that all 5x…
So I’ve got some *fantastic* news to share today about the future of DigiByte:
I’ve been contacted by somebody with an offer for them to complete the RandomX implementation on DigiByte 🥰
They’ve already begun work and are part-way through, however in order to speed up the process they’ve basically offered to take some time away from their day-job and to work full-time on RandomX for DigiByte to get it “over the line”.
This will be a perfect compliment to ProgPoW which I’ve spoken with Kristy-Leigh about (And she’s been working on just this weekend past), and will really help…
I find it fascinating looking at these kinds of stats about DigiByte. Given it’s now been a year (Well, next week) since Odocrypt went live, I thought now was a good time to look back at the year in hashrates.
The down-side to being MultiAlgo and having MultiShield is the per-block difficulty adjustments. Sure, the default DigiStats graphs show you the daily amounts along with 60-min averages, but that doesn’t show the “bigger picture”:
Even taking the graph and looking back over the last 12 months, I would suggest the 60-minute average still doesn’t give us enough of an idea:
I was asked about the previous mining stats published around the distritbution / decentralization of DigiByte mining, so figured now was worth doing an update on the last one again given it’s been 4 months and almost a year now since Odocrypt went live on the DigiByte blockchain (1yr as of next week).
What follows is a comparison of the last 16 hours of mining on Bitcoin (100 blocks) vs 16 hours on DigiByte (4000 blocks).
This was checked at 10:30AM on Thursday the 16th July (NZST).
We’ll start with BTC:
24 unique miners over the course of 16 hours…
It’s certainly been an interesting day or two…
Here’s a short re-cap for those who have better things than to follow crypto-Twitter “fun” every single day.
Jared Tate, the founder of DigiByte, is going to be taking a bit of a sabbatical. To be fair, he’s long overdue a vacation. He and I were talking about this 18 months ago, with the intention for him to come to New Zealand at some point at the start of 2019.
This is a man who has poured his heart, soul, and body into DigiByte and pushing the blockchain space forward as a…
There’s been a bunch of drama doing the rounds (Happens more regularly whenever there’s a price appreciation in DigiByte) so I’m here to clear the air a little:
Yes, I helped Amon work on over half a dozen videos
Yes, I provided him with the scripts for many of them
Yes, I even did the voice-over for one of the videos
Yes, I even contributed a few hundred dollars of my own money towards them
Yes, permission has been granted to use the videos
Yes, he’s even given me the originals to upload to YouTube
What happened?
With a recent influx of people joining Telegram / Reddit etc, it’s worth explaining the “halvening” (halving?) schedule for DigiByte.
You see, unlike Bitcoin / Litecoin with their 4-year halving event, DigiByte has improved upon this, along with many other aspects, to make a much smoother emissions curve.
Rather than halving the reward every 210,000 blocks (or 840,000 in Litecoins case), DigiByte instead opts for reducing the newly minted supply by approx 1% every 175,200 blocks.
Technically speaking the code that you can find in validation.cpp is:
int64_t blocks = nHeight-consensusParams.workComputationChangeTarget; int64_t months = blocks*15/(3600*24*365/12); for(int64_t i = 0; i…
With the recent accusations floating around of DigiByte’s mining centralization, and the fearmongering around the possibility of a 51% attack from some unknown miners, it’s time to put it in to perspective!
So I took Bitcoins base of 100 blocks (16.5-ish hours), and instead did 4,000 blocks for DigiByte (Faster block timings) at the same timeframe. To be honest I was lazy when it came to Litecoin, so their 100 blocks is a little over 4 hours worth. …
A number of people have asked for a more concise summary of what’s happening, so here goes:
We’re implementing ProgPoW for GPU mining, and RandomX for CPU mining on DigiByte!
A little history…
DigiByte when it started was originally Scrypt-only, and GPU mineable in 2014 due to there being no Scrypt ASICs at the time.
We then upgraded to MultiAlgo, and had 5x algorithms:
- SHA256 : ASIC
- Scrypt : ASIC
- Skein : GPU
- Myriad-Groestl : GPU
- Qubit : CPU (Then GPU)
However, by the middle of 2018, it was clear that all the algorithms are being ASIC mined, and by late 2018 it…
It’s my (admittedly anecdotal) experience over the last 6–9 months that the DigiByte community at large is vastly in favor of implementing ProgPoW to replace one of the existing 5x algorithms.
I have also witnessed quite a strong push for RandomX as well, though ProgPoW is very clearly prioritized.
So where am I going with all this? Well recently I was talking with Kristy-Leigh Minehan about everything, we’ve stayed in touch since our DigiByte and Friends interview in November ’19. She has since hinted that she would be up for assisting DigiByte with a pull-request implementing the latest ProgPoW.
Now…
Josiah Spackman
I write interesting things about cryptocurrency, especially DigiByte
