It seems many people trying to mine Nockchain may not fully understand the current state of the mining competition. We’re honored to see so many people eager to participate, including many beginners, we just want to make sure everyone understands what they can reasonably expect (and not expect).
First, for people asking, we can confirm the open-source reference client works correctly, out of the box. It produces valid proofs, we’ve tested it extensively.
Second, a few basic things you should understand about Proof of Work mining competitions, especially if you’ve never participated in one before. It’s very different than jumping through meaningless hoops to win an airdrop.
A.) The open-source reference client is for reference. It’s a starting point, which works, but not a promise that anyone will win any number of $NOCKS with it. We published this starting point ahead of launch so everyone interested in participating would be starting from the same place.
B.) Any Proof of Work mining competition is just that, a competition. It’s an invitation to creatively and intelligently apply software and hardware to solving the Proof of Work puzzle. One whole point of launching this PoW blockchain is to engender a big collective race to improve ZK-proving performance!
Third, for anyone confused about any of the above, we want to be super clear for you:
Given the current state of the network and competition difficulty, if you are trying to mine with the open-source reference client before improving it, your chance of winning a block is vanishingly small. If you’re not sure how to interpret that, we’ll be even more blunt: You will not earn any $NOCKS right now with the unmodified open-source client.
We love that so many people want to participate in this game, indeed we’re honored!
But we don’t want to see anyone waste their time or energy (and certainly not their money).
Fourth, there may be other opportunities to participate in mining in the future, depending on how the network evolves.
Fifth, please feel free to stick around the community, honestly the Telegram has been hilarious. Even the insane drive-by schizos (who might be in jail now) made us laugh, we’ve actually been loving it all. If you can’t mine blocks, maybe write something, draw something, build something cool adjacent to Nockchain, I don’t know! If you’re really in this tribe of ours, then stay in the tribe! Bring the information asymmetries you have, and the skills you have.
Ultimately, Nockchain is designed to be the core economic engine of something much, much larger. If you know, you know. If you don’t, then no amount of $NOCKS is going to save you, anyway!
The high end of our estimate was 2k peers. We got more than 10k.
I’m going to sleep, engineers are still working, nothing serious seems to be wrong, we think just networking issues from many more peers than we were expecting.
But hey, it’s begun! Formal writeup of launch after we get some more stability, on here and email newsletter. Probably tomorrow.