For most people familiar with cryptocurrencies, mining is still too complicated and expensive. And even the opportunity to passively earn after the initial investment in a simple farm stops most of the potential miners. Doubts about whether to engage in mining, have a very real basis: here and the risks of burning equipment before reaching self-sufficiency, and the general instability of the market. But the biggest problem is the following two factors: a high threshold for entry into the field (in terms of technical literacy) and high competition in the field.
Together apart
It would seem that mining pools are a solution that removes the aforementioned problems, reduces the entry threshold and increases earnings on mining. But this happens only at first glance, because if you dig a little deeper than on the "floor of a spade", it is revealed that the pools are just scattered groups of miners, in which everyone pulls a blanket over himself. Yes, the profitability from such mining is higher than when trying to mine cryptocurrencies completely autonomously and this model is suitable for small players, but it is far from ideal.
Actually, this is why Whalesburg appeared.In fact, today the entire segment is engaged in endless self-deception when it positions the pool as a collective mining tool. Communities and interactions are only slightly larger than when mining directly. The only thing that helps the pool is that it increases profitability by combining capacities with the subsequent "sharing" of the mined. At the same time, the miner himself decides where to direct the power of his farm and what to dig. Such individualism fits very well into the paradigm of modern market culture, but at the same time, over a long distance, reduces the overall profitability of mining. Only the pool owners themselves and genuine industrial miners win, when as an ordinary “digger” it remains only to rush between the blockchains and monitor the rates of cryptocurrency until red eyes.
We do not call for "dispossess and divide" - this is at least silly. But the existing system of mining pools can truly be improved, and all its participants will benefit from it: both large and small players. This is what we actually do, but let's start a little from afar.
A little bit about game theory
On Habré about the theory of games did not write just lazy. And in fact, not just. Some people believe that the theory of games for economics and everything related to the relationship of people for the purpose of obtaining any benefits is like string theory for physicists, explaining everything in the universe. The difference, however, is that game theory is fully formed, but string theory still has to work and work, and it is not completely clear whether it is true at all.
So where does the game theory for mining pools? We said above that any form of interaction in society with the receipt of the final remuneration can be explained by this very theory of games. Mining pools, in fact, are only hub storage sites, which allow you to combine the efforts of several miners into one "fist" and this is where their functions end. But there is still plenty of space to maneuver. For example, deciding where and with what force this fist “beat” in order to extract the maximum profit for all participants in our “game”.
Now mining cryptocurrency is an endless race for profitable blockchains. High market volatility leads to constant rate jumps that make mining some altcoins for some time extremely profitable. Now imagine the situation: you are standing in line at the cashier in a small supermarket. In total, two out of three ticket offices work and people are quietly waiting for their turn. But as soon as the third cashier, located in the middle, opens, everyone decides for himself what to do:
- Stay in your lineup.
- Try to run to the next box office in the hope of reducing waiting time.
As practice shows, there are obviously winners and obviously losers in such a move: the one who is in the first wave penetrates his goods very quickly, but those who are late are at the tail of the line, probably even larger than the one in which they stood initially The task can be complicated by the lack of change, zazhevannoy tape check or problems with the terminal: it is impossible to predict. If you lose this situation over and over again, then you can identify a clear pattern when someone stays in the win, and someone loses.
Now imagine: in the queue at all three ticket offices are fans of two different football clubs. In club "A" everyone pays for himself and also takes a queue, but in club "B" fans help each other, optimize the queue, take the goods from their comrades in their basket, if there are any problems in their turn, creating a delay.
The effectiveness of the fans of the team "B" will be much higher and with the same time of standing in line, they all leave the store with their purchases before the fans, individualists of team "A".
Many have already understood where we are going. In game theory, this is called a “non-zero-sum game”, in our case, for fans of team “B”. Conventionally, each of them remains the winner when all the fans of team “A” are unconditionally the losers. However, creating a non-zero-sum game requires a consensus between players in terms of cooperation and interaction in order to achieve the best result. While each miner is responsible only for himself, and the pool pursues its own interests, as is usually the case, mining within a specific pool is conducted according to the model of the game with a “zero amount”, that is, there is a loser for each winner.
If we scale the game model of interaction between miners to the level of interaction between pools, we get the same situation when competition between pools occurs according to the rules of a zero-sum game, but in the pool itself you can already organize a game with a non-zero amount. In this system, the loser is placed outside the "non-zero" pool, all participants of which receive the maximum benefit from cooperation among themselves. For this, in fact, it is necessary that the pool become not just a platform for connecting capacities, but an integral “player” who distributes his own resources with the maximum benefit without knowing who exactly owns the capacities. Yes, we are now talking about centralized management of computing power, when the entire benefit of the “manager” is an operating percentage.
What is needed to organize a pool on the principle of a non-zero-sum game?
First of all - this is trust between the participants. What is the game of trust is very well told in this project called "The
Evolution of Trust ", which has already been mentioned at least once on the resource. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with this page, this part of the theory of games there is very intelligible and understandable.
If to be brief: when playing on trust, there are several patterns of behavior, such as “deceiver”, “imitator”, “vindictive”, “gullible” and so on. In an ideal world, it is the “gullible” who receive the greatest collective benefit when playing among themselves - they always play fair and believe in the cleanliness of their partner. The reality, as it usually happens, is much more unsightly and, in the uncontrolled system, the “gullible” simply do not survive, suffering constant financial losses. However, by creating conditions in which all participants automatically trust their partners in the “game”, we get the most profitable possible interaction model.
Such conditions can only be created by the external guarantor of the honesty of all the participants in the “game”, who at the same time determines the rules of interaction. In our case, this is the mining pool itself, which decides for everyone else how to distribute the power. As in the example with queues at the box office and football fans, the pool, which itself will decide where and with what intensity to get cryptocurrencies, remains at the greatest possible gain in terms of specific participants.
So it's obvious. So, what is next?
But if you aim to find such a pool, it turns out that they simply do not exist. Actually, that's why we started developing. None of the existing platforms has implemented the principle of non-zero-sum games, leaving the principle of internal competition between miners, along with the ability to manually determine the blockchain mining cryptocurrency. We do not take into account mono-pools that “dig” only conditional ether or bitcoin.
Constant “manual” transfer of computational power between high-yield blockchains leads to an abrupt increase in complexity, reduced profitability from mining (and for “latecomers” this is also loss), searching for a new blockchain and reproducing the situation again and again. All modern multi-mining is an endless bustle from queue to queue, in an attempt to run to the checkout earlier than other miners.
Our task is to create a platform that, with the maximum degree of automation, allows mining to take maximum advantage. This is becoming increasingly relevant against the background of community interest in Altcoins due to the stagnation of the “main cryptocurrency” course. Now we are developing in several directions at once: this is the OS based on the Debian kernel, the mobile application, the direct Fiat output system, and so on. Everything is in our Roadmap site platform.
Our development team also has its own, everyone works full time. Actually, this is probably the main reason why we already have a working product, and not bare WP and far-reaching plans.
Why did I read all this?
Well, you should always start with something, and the articles “hello, Habr, look how cool we are!” It's literally a shot in the leg, and we love our feet. Specifically, now we briefly talked about the very idea of the platform, why do we need our project at all. Next - we will share our experience in developing, managing a team and tell you about other pitfalls that you may encounter when creating your own commercial project that is targeted at a specific audience. By the way, the pool is already working and the guys are successfully "digging." If you have your own GPU farm and you are mining at Ethash, then
welcome , and in the future we will add other algorithms.
