We’ve just released a new alpha release that has the first pass at our Equihash PoW implementation and the Founder’s Reward mechanics. This is the first release that those interested in mining can really start to dig into, but beware that the current implementation isn’t optimized and the current algorithm parameters aren’t what we’ll use in the 1.0 launch. (The blog post links to tickets for these followup improvements.)
Just fired up new testnet and mined 10+ blocks in a round with my laptop. Come on everybody, i dont want to be the only one testing this. By the way, how do i know hashrate my laptop are generating from RPC call? There is nothing similar to gethashespersec in bitcoin.
As i understand, Equihash requires only 700MB as ‘proof of RAM’ but how does that make this PoW ‘botnet resistant’ as white paper claimed? Most of PCs nowaday has 2+ GB of RAM.
Their reasoning (in the paper’s introduction) is that botnets will be wary of running computations that use large amounts of RAM, because such usage will be more noticeable by users of the infected machines, decreasing the half-life of the infection. Even with most machines coming with 4 GB standard, a single process using 700 MB of RAM is easily identifiable.
Also note that Equihash is not restricted to requiring 700 MB of RAM; the algorithm can be adjusted to a variety of target memory requirements, depending on the intended usage (such as the low target we are currently using for the testnet).
I am trying to test, but something is not right. I was mining blocks on the previous testnet just fine.
I recompliled and connected to node alphatestnet.z.cash (46.105.126.215) but no mined blocks, nothing in the rawmempool, no received coins from testnet faucets.
Can you post an example txid so I can confirm that I am on the correct testnet blockchain?
I’m in the same boat as appadude, running and mining but I have not generated any coins nor have I received any from the faucet. This is a fresh install of zcash v0.11.2.z.2 on a new copy of Ubuntu 16.04. Installing and compiling when smoothly. I have been running for a day now.
I have two questions: 1. What is a reasonable amount of time before I should expect to see the faucet coins in in my “balance” when I do a zcash-cli getinfo? 2. I have run the daemon with -gen but I’m am unsure what to look for that indicates I’m generating coins. zcash-cli getmininginfo returns the following: {
“blocks” : 12902,
“currentblocksize” : 1000,
“currentblocktx” : 0,
“difficulty” : 0.00000048,
“errors” : “”,
“genproclimit” : -1,
“networkhashps” : 4,
“pooledtx” : 0,
“testnet” : true,
“chain” : “test”,
“generate” : true
}
I see i have an Immature_balance of 441 so it seems that I am mining? I suppose it just takes longer to get verified in our test net since there are not a whole lot of miners?
This is expected: the testnet is currently configured with low-memory parameters because the implementation is not optimised yet (this being a new PoW, the initial focus was on having a base implementation against which optimisations could be done). Parameters targeting a higher memory usage will be selected once the optimisations are in place.
