Zcash mining pool

Yes noobs, and trolls apparently…

2 Likes

Has Zcash thought about contacting this person? http://solo.ckpool.org
Here is another link to his work [∞ YH] solo.ckpool.org 2% fee solo mining USA/DE 255 blocks solved! and I do believe he set up litecoin and doge coin solo pools

The pools part is actually pretty easy to set up. But setting up pools requires that we have standalone miners than can point to the pool.

So we first need to build a standalone miner for zcash that is capable of pointing to a pool.

I’m really hoping both a GPU miner & pool come out close to the genesis launch.

I’ll mine on your pool Austin if you get one up and running!

1 Like

He built cgminer I think he can help

1 Like

Please don’t discourage participation on this forum by newcomers to the Zcash or cryptocurrency community. If you’re looking for more technically focused discussion, I suggest the github issue tracker (which is not to say that technical discussion is discouraged here).

3 Likes

On the issue of mining centralisation, I would strongly encourage people to focus on decentralised mining approaches such as P2Pool, rather than centralised pools requiring greater trust in the pool operators – who are then in a position to launch attacks on the network and other users. (P2Pool isn’t ideally decentralised but it is a step in the right direction.)

4 Likes

Oh I see. Awesome idea! I’ll try to find time to reach out to him.

I completely agree with this. And pools created early on will benefit from a network effect. So if the first pools created are P2Pools that could have a strong positive influence on the decentralization of zcash mining in the long run.

2 Likes

@Austin-Williams @Jason-1978 I know some are busy now so I have sent Con Kolivas an email to see if he can help with building a miner, I linked to this thread so hopefully he will join the conversation or email me back.
I will let everyone know if he contacts me.

1 Like

Very good I’m happy to see my idea wasn’t thrown aside, I can’t be of any help with Zcash other than support. I am very excited to see this launch. I believe.

Awesome, thank you! Please keep me updated.

Just as an update, I didn’t get a reply from Con Kolivas about the cpuminer. I’m guessing that we are on our own for reverse engineering the Zcash miner for a pool set-up, at least until the developers can get to it.

Also as @daira mentioned, P2Pool may be a great solution for mining pool set up. I found this handy guide for P2Pool: A guide for mining efficiently on P2Pool, includes FUD repellent and FAQ

2 Likes

Thanks for the update.

Once we get a stand alone miner we can implement any kind of pool we want. P2pool is slightly harder to set up, but well worth it the long run IMHO. In a perfect world,the first public Zcash pool would be a p2pool setup. First movers have a huge network-effect advantage, and I think it’d be great if a p2pool type pool showed up early.

I’m wrapping up some Amazon EC2 mining setup/tests, and then I plan to see if I can figure out how to make a standalone miner.

I’ll keep you updated.

2 Likes

A few weeks back I was looking at some other cloud rental service which allows users to select how much of particular resources they want to pay for… I noticed that the amount of CPU scaled up to 20GHz… Does that imply they were offering a virtualised server that actually operates over a number of separate computers? If modern virtualisation allows that (and providing that the existing zcash software actually sees lots of cores), then it could be a short-cut to achieve the same effect as pool mining…

That could really only simulate “private pools”. It’s essentially the same thing as running the same miner image on several EC2 instances at once.

But that doesn’t let a huge number of untrusted/untrusting users work together by pooling their mining power and splitting the rewards.

Have we made any progress on this? This miner seems like it could adapted if we could integrate Equihash: GitHub - bitbandi/cpuminer-multi: Multi-algo CPUMiner & Reference Cryptonote Miner (JSON-RPC 2.0 implementation)

Maybe one of the devs could point us in the right direction to start? @daira @str4d

I haven’t made progress here. I also think that cpuminer is a good place to start.

We already have the .cpp implementation of Equihash (in the Zcash repo), so we don’t need to build that functionality from scratch. That’s good news.

We need to include the equihash implementation (from the zcash repo) into cpuminer.

Then we need to make sure that the data/nonce being fed to equihash by cpuminer is correct (IIR it’s not the same as with bitcoin… I don’t think we can just use getwork).

And I think that’s pretty much all we need to do. Unfortunately, both of those are things that I don’t currently know how to do in practice. I think cpuminer is written in C (which I am not familiar with), so this would/will take me a while to figure out myself.

Previously, I’ve participated in funding bounties that started on forums. Is that something people on this forum would consider? Can those of us who are interested identify the minimum functionality needed and also identify what it’s worth to us? Speaking for myself, I would happily contribute one bitcoin to a bounty for a working, Zcash compatible pool miner.

1 Like

If you put up the bounty I will take a look.