Hi, I am very interested in the AE. And I have some questions about mining. When can I know the mining regulation？How many AE coins can be mined each year? Do I need to buy a special mining mechaine to mine the coins or just satisfy the GPU requirements showed in the “Cuckoo Cycle” is OK?
It will be a gpu algorithm, memory hard so you’ll want to get cards with lots of ram
Hey @junrong and @TwenteMining,
Thank you for participating in the discussion.
Your question has been forwarded to our dev team and they’ll get back to you.
Best regards,
The AE Team
I would like to ask why a gpu algorithm? What’s the idea behind it?
As soon as this algo gets added to Nicehash Aeternity will be exposed to all kinds of possible cheap attacks:
Reference: https://www.crypto51.app/
Hi @junrong! To start mining you will just need to deploy an epoch node. A machine described in the requirements will suffice (at least at the beginning).
Best regards,
The AE Team
I’m not sure what you mean by »GPU algorithm« but we chose cuckoo cycle for our PoW scheme since it is memory hard, i.e. performance is mostly bound by memory bandwidth, because it does not lend itself as much—caveats apply here!–to huge speedups by ASICS.
The alternative would’ve been that we end up with the same dynamics around ASICS, where a small handful of players have exclusive access to powerful mining hardware before the general public does.
I get the idea and it makes sense, but the project is exposed to every possible attack. Every bad actor can rent some hashpower from mining rental services or nicehash (in case the algo gets added) and for some 100’s of bucks per hours every bad actor can take over the network.
Just take a look into these daily updated calculations: Reference: https://www.crypto51.app/
I personally absolutly agree that it’s a bad thing having asic producers secret/private mining ahead, but so are all the possible attacks beginning with 51% attack up to selfish mining attacks.
I am aware of that site and agree with you.
But there is really not all that much we can do with pure Nakamoto style consensus, other than making sure that our difficulty adjustment algorithm—in our case the difficulty gets re-evaluated every block—can take care of sudden influx of mining power and that we can adjust the PoW puzzle as needed, which is the plan anyway.
How would this prevent selfish mining and mostly million dollar attacks?
Just a fictive scenario:
Let’s say:
- the AE network will have 20 MH/s hashrate
- 11 MH/s at Nicehash/other service would cost 1.000 USD/hour
how do you plan to prevent the following possible scenarios:
- bad actor mines secretly and than with rented hashpower >30% injects his secretly mined chain?
- bad actor (big mining farm or again rented hashpower of 11 MH/s+ attacks the network and takes it over?
AE is currently on market cap position #33, and we all know that top 50, if not top 100 coins are primary targets for all kind of hack attacks, see XVG, BTG, ZEN, ETN, … and the list goes on. These are millions of hacked Coins worth multi million dollars. There must be a action plan how to prevent this happening if everybody is aware it is an easy thing to start a malcious attack on AE.
From my personal observation i noticed that about 33%-50% of the mineable top 100 coins/token decide to change from POW to POS in hear future (<12 months). My guess is that one of the main reasons is the concern of exactly such attacks and not being able to precent them at all.
Just some thoughts to think about at time, bevor it’s too late or happened.
Nice thoughts.
There is a balance between hacker’s invest and earn.
Practically, the 51% attack will be observed very soon such as BTG, if AE prevent suddenly hash power growing, it will cost hacker much cost with an unpredictable earn.
But what if the hacker’s target not the money:grinning:?
I’am not the absolute expert when it comes to such things, just sharing common thoughts with common logic, or at least trying to do 
I’am not sure if for example AE can observe/notice if a longer chain is prepared on a hidden miningpool. It would just happen when the attacker/bad actor tries to overcome the network and to “inject” his prepared mined chain. Just as an example. Of course there are other attacks as well, just using this one as a good example.
And as you allready said. If money doesn’t matter it gets even worse. That’s why i ask for prepareness and an “action plan” bevor it can happen and bevor damage is done.
Even more that AE will be a new POW coin with nearly no hashrate in beginning making it extremely vulnerable in my opinion.
Another thought about the cost and upredictable earn.
Taking an example coin: monacoin, Lyra2REv2, network: 3 TH/s,
It would cost less than USD 2,000 per hour to overtake it (as it happend with monacoin in the past if i remember right). Now a USD 2,000 “investment” into an attack is just peanuts in my opinon. Everything below USD 50,000 per hour is easy to go for every attacker/hacker/bad actor. Just my opinion of course.
Dear AE Team,
Thank you so much!
Junrong
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