[Bounty] Community bounty for open source GPU miner.
Community bounty
Why?
As it stands right now, there are two primary miners dominating the miner queue.
- rabbit
- gxt-1080-sc
They have made normal CPU mining absolutely impractical for many miners, and in the process, centralized mining. This is not a huge issue for the stability of the steem blockchain itself, but it has made many miners in the community feel uneasy. It is for this reason that today I am hosting a community bounty for an open source GPU. This bounty will serve an incentive for any existing gpu miners to open source there mining software. It will also serve to as incentive for new gpu miners to come out.
How?
I am asking anyone reading this to donate some SBD to the bounty. To increase the bounty, please send any amount SBD to @picokernel with either a memo mentioning the bounty, or a comment in the thread. I will then act as the escrow. If you have created an open source miner I ask that you submit a link to it to me in private message on slack or rocketchat, or post down below in the comments a link to the source code.
50% of all the bounty will be given to an openCL/AMD miner, and 50% will be given to a Cuda miner. In addition to that, all SBDs generated from this post will increase the bounty.
Win condition
Any GPU miner submission is eligible for the bounty prize if it meets the following conditions: 1) it supports ECDSA operations in the GPU kernel; 2) it is licensed with a copy-free license (e.g. MIT, BSD); 3) it is not simply a derivation of an earlier submitted GPU miner perhaps with some performance optimizations; 4) it is submitted no later than 2 weeks after the first eligible GPU miner submission. All eligible GPU miners submitted within the two week window are ranked according to the following rules: if one GPU miner has better performance (within some prior specified margin of error) according to mining benchmarks compared to another GPU miner, the faster one is ranked higher; and, if the performance of two GPU miners are close enough to each other within the margin of error, the earlier submission will be ranked higher. If there is only one eligible GPU miner submission on the ranked list, the submitter of that GPU miner will win the full bounty prize. Otherwise, the submitters of the top two ranked GPU miners will share the bounty prize: 75% goes to the submitter of the rank 1 GPU miner submission, and 25% goes to the submitter of the rank 2 GPU miner submission.
Thank you folks. This is a good cause to help decrease centralization and increase the health of the steem platform. If you have any questions or concerns you can get in contact with me on steemit.chat. #bounties will be where I post updates about how we are managing the funds and who the winners are.
Current Bounty: $3200 SBD
@smooth is donating $1000 SBD
@riverhead is donating $1000 SBD
@complexring is donating $250 SBD
@pharesim is donating $250 SBD
@arhag is donating $200 SBD
@carlidos is donating $200 SBD
@picokernel is donating $150 SBD
@liondani is donating $100 SBD
@knozaki2015 is donating $50 SBD
- picokernel
I will donate minimum $100 SBD to the bounty.
Thanks man I will put you down!
Donating 250 SBD at a later point.
I will also vouch for the legitimacy of this bounty. Feel free to donate.
Awesome! This is a appreciate and I think a thoughtful pledge.
Ohh yea I have a handful of r9 295 x laying around I would also like to donate! I didn't see a ending time is this on going till some one finds a way?!! That would be something good for steem. I would also be donating $200 SBD, I would donate more once my psych posts keep increasing I'm in for mining hits home for me.
Thanks man! I will put you down.
I would be open to donating, but my concerns are the real necessity of steem being GPU mineable and last I checked there was still no easy way to run a witness unless you run linux. My rigs are all linux for obvious reasons, but I prefer Windows user experience and compatibility. I think it was Sia or LBRC that was only mac mineable for a long time. Regardless as someone that does a ton of mining on a daily basis, do you really want to further devalue steem through profit mining GPU dumps? I would be more inclined to donate to changing the algo to HODL or Scrypt^2 than to promote mining more steem faster. We need less steem hitting the market so the price can recover. Either way good luck, if I feel it's worthwhile I'll consider chipping in some coin.
The amount of Steem mined per day is not affected by the algorithm or hardware used.
Interesting, so basically people are just mining for higher percentage?
Correct
Thanks for the clarification, I was assuming. We all know what good that does. It was one thing I found strange about steem, but noone mines for free, it's too expensive. Knowing that it isn't just hyper inflation makes me happy.
I think you misunderstand how it works. The amount of Steem produced per day is fixed. I would suggest reading the white paper.
I completely agree and have thought the same thing in regards to changing the algo to HODL which I've experienced since March, it's a good platform.
thanks, for setting this up we really need it.
You're welcome
I am in with 50sbd too!
Thanks! I will put you down.
already sent you the sbd !
Very nice, I will make sure that gets to the right person.
quite frankly I don't believe these are gpu miners... but hey I can be wrong
You may be right, but does it matter? Some believe that GPU mining is practical. If so, most of the goals of mining, especially on this platform (where raw hash rate and an arms race contributes to security only to a small degree), are best achieved by having low barriers to entry and wide availability i.e open source miners.
from https://steemit.chat/channel/mining
@djm34
I think people are actually a bit spoiled on this coin because the difficulty was relatively low and price relatively high for a long time, making mining easy. Now it is harder, but CPU mining really is still viable. You just need decent hardware (i.e. not a 5 year old laptop) a bit of patience and not expect to be getting lots of blocks every day.
Nevertheless I still support the goals of an open source GPU miner if GPU mining is viable at all.
Even with an i3 is that even possible?
supercomputer (sc) has revealed himself on #mining channel at steemitchat.com (the guy that hacked pow1 and was dominating the mining list a couple of days until the hardfork) He is @nobody on steemitchat and is known now as the gxt-1080-sc-XXXX miner. He confessed he is using a GPU miner and he has one competitor( @djm34 )?. He said that at some point (due competitions) it will be more profitable for one of them to reveal the code for a bounty....
PS https://steemit.com/steem/@arcange/the-end-of-steem-cpu-mining
I'll pledge 1000 SBD toward the bounty. If there is a specific credible proposal from a developer I'd consider pledging additional funds toward that proposal.
Awesome! This is a appreciate and I think a thoughtful pledge.
I'm not really sure why mining should really even be a "thing". It's always occured to me as an idiotic use of compute resources and electricity.
so how do you think coin are made ?
and how do you think a p2p network exists if no one mine ? (and actually you make money out of mining... yeah see not entirely idiotic)
That this is how people try and make money IS idiotic. Bitcoin was set up to require mining. But blockchains don't require mining intrinsically. The witnesses handle most of operations. It's not a true p2p network like bitcoin.
you know that some people do a little more than just "trying" to make money...
This depends strongly on how you define p2p network.
waiting for that, keep it up! 8]