⛏️ BTX changes its proof-of-work tonight, at block 185,000
We are roughly 2 hours away, so somewhere around 01:40 to 02:10 UTC.
WHAT CHANGES
Mining stops being a lottery and becomes a computation. Today your GPU makes millions of cheap guesses per second. After block 185,000, one attempt is a single large exact calculation that takes about 30 seconds on some of the fastest hardware in the world.
That is not a typo. One attempt. Not a million.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO
Update easyBTX to v0.13.0. It is rolling out over auto-update now, and restarting the app is the fastest way to get it. That is the whole list.
v0.13.0 downloads and verifies a fork-ready mining engine, shows a live countdown, switches pools automatically if one stops accepting work, and tells you honestly if it is running but not earning.
THREE THINGS NOT TO PANIC ABOUT
1. Network difficulty will appear to collapse at the fork, by a factor of about 120,000. This is deliberate and it settles within the hour.
2. Your pool may go quiet for a few minutes just before the switch. That is the pool being careful, not breaking.
3. Your wallet, your balance and your coins are completely unaffected. Nothing about them changes.
OLDER GPUS, THE HONEST PART
The new work needs Ampere or newer, so RTX 30-series and up. GTX 10-series, GTX 16-series and the RTX 2070 can mine right up to block 185,000 and we expect them to stop there.
We are sorry to be the ones saying it. It is a decision by the mining engine authors rather than the chain itself, so if that changes we will tell you.
Mac and browser mining are still in testing. We will post when they are live.
FULL RESEARCH ARTICLE
We read the consensus source, ran the fork on a private test chain before it happened, and wrote up exactly what changes and why:
https://easybtx.com/research/matmul-v4-7-fork
It includes something we found in the test run that matters for anyone writing mining software, and one uncomfortable fact about how the upgrade is arriving that we decided not to leave out.
#BTX #ProofOfWork #GPUMining