So if you are all wondering what the devs are working on -- I'm working on a new BiblePay miner.
Just to explain the situation a little more, a year ago when people asked me about possibly separating the miner program from the core wallet, I didnt really like the idea because I felt we would be on track for continually modifying the mining algo to be impossible to run outside the core. However, I feel that our POBH algorithm has matured to the point where its no longer changing - so as to reduce the risk of someone trying to port it to GPU or ASIC, I feel this is a good time for us to make the move - to make a standalone miner - and give any new devs out there the chance to enhance POBH. This will also allow us to add stratum support and standardize our pool to be p2p/stratum compatible. The bbp-miner.exe must be outside of the wallet primarily to fulfill the stratum protocol request (as putting stratum inside the core wallet violates the code of conduct for exchanges).
So, I decided to go ahead and start creating a bbp-miner.exe, and at the very least we will test its performance with solo mining. Then if it offers an edge over the core wallet, we will then look into making our pool(s) stratum compatible and standardizing the miner to be a code-branch, the pool to be a branch of p2pool, etc, to be compatible with the bitcoin and dash specs in the latest evo code base (for future maintenance). This part is also important so that we can attract more blockchain devs to the project and to allow us to clean up legacy code and be more fast/lean.
So far, I have ported the KJV bible into bbp-miner.exe, a cross-platform C program, using the AES256, base64, SHA256, X11, MD5 and our getblocktemplate rules. The miner will work on all platforms, of course.
I'll let you all know as soon as a I have a working solo miner, so we can test it. If its performance is worthy, then we will move on to making the pool compatible with dash and bitcoin, etc (with p2pool) and stratum.
This sounds good. How does it work with all the ABN weight stuff? I haven't mined since PODC so I'm not exactly sure I am up to date on how it all works right now
It can probably support ABN in the end, although I have to go in baby phases.
First the solo miner, and that will honor the wallets state itself (IE require a valid ABN).
Once we do that, while we are working on the pool software, we can look into making a special stratum call that allows funded abn's (but I have to investigate that more closely, because the p2pool environment is not the same as a centralized pool - the p2pool runs in a more decentralized environment sharing the share chain among a small number of friend nodes - so Im not 100% sure yet on funded abns + p2pool).
But, to simplify things, Im looking into a 'funded pool address' and a non-funded-pool-address. Then the miner could just point to the correct pool or not and that would simplify setup. It would probably break the 'hybrid' option we have now, for the sake of simplicity for bbp.