Today I'm releasing a preview of Raycoin, this release is a mining sandbox and visualization of the Ray Tracing Proof-of-Work algorithm. The viewer will be used to browse successful hashes in your mining log and on the blockchain.

Raycoin will be a vanilla Bitcoin derivative with PoRT (Proof of Ray Tracing) for ASIC resistance. Integration into Bitcoin (bitcoind) is underway as of today, I'll provide more details of the Raycoin cryptocurrency later on release day. For now I'd appreciate if prospective miners download the viewer and report any bugs:

Raycoin-v0.5.zip (VirusTotal Clean)

Official Website (just a forum for now): http://ray-coin.com

Requirements:

- Latest Windows 10 October update
- Nvidia RTX 2080/70 GPU (Turing)


Screenshot of the viewer:



Description of the Ray Tracing Proof-of-Work:

- rays are cast out into a randomized field (seeded from the block) of faceted spheres which reflect the rays chaotically (like a disco ball)
- each sphere has a random label (4 bytes), when a ray hits a sphere its label is concatenated to the ray's string
- 32 such labels in each ray's string are hashed together using blake2s on the GPU
- if the hash is less than the target then a block is found, and the XY screen coordinate of the successful ray is stored in the high 20 bits of the nonce for verification
- there is one additional constraint: the ray must travel a certain depth into the field, after which the motion is deemed chaotic enough (over 99% of rays pass this test)
- rays that exit the field wrap around to the origin with a small perturbation to their orientation

Ray Tracing consumes 96% of the frame time with hashing just 2%, so this Proof-of-Work is dominated by Ray Tracing and thus ASIC-resistant. You can verify this yourself in the viewer by disabling hashing and enabling the profiler in the Engine Tuning menu.

Here you can see the labels and the hit count, the ray stops at hit #32:



The Engine Tuning menu can be used to customize the viewer appearance, here the specular and ray intensities have been cranked up so that the scene sparkles: