The Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge | Hacker News Reader

The Zcash Open Source Miner Challenge

zcashminers.org

9 pointstromp8 comments

Some more links:

Zcash discussion forum: https://forum.z.cash/

Zcash Slack online chat: https://zcashcommunity.slack.com/

I'm one of the participants in this contest. The Zcash proof of work is Equihash. It uses Blake2b to create a bunch of hashes, then Wagner's generalized birthday algorithm to find a set of distinct hashes that xor to zero.

The deadline is a little short at this point, but if you're decent at GPU programming it is achievable. Most of the other contestants are on the Zcash Slack.

I sure hope someone releases a good public GPU miner in time for launch, otherwise the distribution is going to be quite unfair.

Currently, several private GPU miners are used to sell cloud hashing.

http://toom.im/ has the fastest known GPU miner, while

https://cloud.zeropond.com/ was the first to offer cloud hashing (unavailable to US customers).

The release of a good public GPU miner is one of the contest goals. Another is to close the huge gap between the reference CPU solver, which achieves 0.06 solutions per second, and private CPU solvers, which achieve 2 solutions per second (all single-threaded an a high end Intel Core i7).

A public CPU miner is essential for launch to be considered valid in my opinion. Any coin instamined at a huge advantage by a small audience is doomed to fail.

I'm pretty sure that both CPU and GPU have been developed and I would be very surprised if the competition didn't include an optimised CPU miner - guess we'll find out tomorrow when entrants are released

I wouldn't be surprised if we see some early submissions with a whole host of updates leading into the final contest hours. My fear is that there will be a number of last–minute submissions on the eve of the contest closing.

Either way, if you know OpenCL or CUDA, you can probably land some easy money here.

lol its not smart to release a public miner. private investors pay 100K-200K for an exclusive miner .....,

so calculate yourself, 5 investor = 1 MIO Dollar!

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