Hi Aeternity team,
Please help me understand the strategy in getting a full decentralized network for Aeternity.
May be I am wrong, please correct me if true, that the idea was that everyone should be able to set up mining nodes (even with smart phones), so that you get a very decentralized environment.
In order to reach this target, there should be “Mining tutorials”, even for beginners, so that we can all help to create this decentralized environment.
May be it takes time, but so far the tutorials are written for persons that already know the technical part of the mining world, and it is also spread across several technical docs. I am more looking for a guide that should introduce Mining. Potential subjects:
(A) Introduction of Mining concept in Aeternity
(B) The different Mining hardware environment strategies (CPU, GPU, etc…). What is the recommended spec per hardware environment? What is the expected outcome for each environment?
© Software installation guide per Hardware environment
(D) Maintenance required / update Software, etc…
Will there be such a quide on short-term? It will help to get more people to create nodes for Aeternity
In a short and fast answer:
There are currently 2 main mining platforms (GPU and CPU)
GPU comes in Single gpu and multi gpu
CPU comes in Mean and Lean modes. mean takes more memory and is faster. Lean uses 1/10th of the ram but is also 1/10th of the speed (approximate values).
Yeah, I too remember it was the idea that a mobile would be able to mine this coin at the very start.
Now there was also something else, Oracles (Virtual machines) that process contracts should be paid for performing such processes, which means that is also another form of mining. But this is not yet working since there are not many contracts on the networkm, if at all.
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Although I generally agree with what @Kryztoval said, there is a small clarifying to be done there.
Oracles are a means of providing real life external data inside the blockchain for Contracts to use. This does not have much to do with mining itself except that miners have to include the various Oracle’s transaction types in micro blocks.
What is more interesting there - Oracles are services, so providers of those services are to be paid for their work. Every Oracle provider specifies the (minimal) price they are to get for answering a query asked to their own Oracle. So you are getting paid for answering questions, if other users expect you to provide a correct answer. This is providing decentralization of information flow as well. You also don’t have to trust an Oracle - you can specify in your smart contract that expects an Oracle response, a list of Oracle providers to be used and later on you can build a consesus of their responses.
Imagine you have a smart contract in which you’re getting paid of the temperature outside falls bellow 10C. You need a source of information and Oracles provide exactly this. Supposedly you don’t want to trust one single Oracle, but rather specify three different ones - OracleA, OracleB, OracleC that provide temperature outside. You ask them, they respond:
- OracleA - 9C
- OracleB - 11C
- OracleC - 8C
So now you can use those results in your smart contract and having 2 out 3 bellow 10 - means you can safely execute your contract in a decentralized and trustless manner.
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Hey @singularity,
We totally agree with you and we are currently working on and investing in improving our documentation and providing educational materials and tutorials.
Stay tuned!
Best,
Albena