Prosper is a mining pool implementation for PegNet and works with prosper-miner. The pool handles polling datasources and syncing the pegnet chain to come up with the oprhash for miners to mine. When a miner submits their work to the pool in the form of a share, the pool software determines whether or not to submit that share, and will credit the miner for the work they have done.
There are a few moving parts in the pool. This diagram depicts things from a high-level:
More details about the initial design can be found [here](Prosper Pegnet Mining Pool.pdf). The document may not track the development changes.
The pool is currently not able to bootstrap the network. If running local development, it is advised to also run a local pegnet miner to ensure enough records are submitted. The pool requires a fully valid (25 winners) block to start mining ontop of.
The pegnet reference miner requires a node that syncs with minutes. If the minute syncing is lost, the miner is dead in the water. Prosper pool does not require syncing by minutes, and uses a rolling submission strategy. If your hashpower begins to dominate the network, tweaking might be necessary. A 36 block (6 hr) exponential moving average is kept of the network difficulty to determine whether or not to submit a share.
The issue with rolling submissions, is that is possible to submit over 50 records, which is a complete waste of ECs. If you dominate the network hashpower, or following a hashrate decrease (like a network pause), this is problematic. The pool implements what we are calling a "SoftMaxLimit". Instead of saying the pool can only submit 50 records, the pool says it has a soft limt of 25.
How it works is the pool saves the best 25 shares for any given job. If a new share is under the 25th share, it blocks it from being submitted. If it is above the 25th, it submits is and resorts the list. This helps when you start submitting over 200+ records. In a brief simulation, if you would submit 139 entries, this feature still lets through 105. If you submit 450, it let through 160. And at 1941, it let through 247. This feature helps fight any exponential hashpower difference. A tighter method is much more complicated to implement, so this should be superseded or supplemented by something else in the future.
What we owe miners is recorded, but no payouts actually occur. This is to be implemented at a future date.
All miner work is stored in memory and saved to postgres at the start of the next block. If the pool is shut down, the miner work for that block is lost and the pool will receive the full payout.
The RPC documentation, including the PegNet-oriented modifications and additions, can be found here. To run the Stratum server only (for experimentation and/or debugging purposes) you can run things with the stratum command included: prosper-pool stratum and then run a client/miner to connect with it normally (the server will disable strict authentication requirements in this state). This also enables a simControl-esque environment, where server-side commands like listclients, getversion <client-id>, or showmessage <client-id> <message> or client-side commands like getopr <job-id> can be entered directly by the user.
GoLang v1.13+ must be used when compiling the pool. A docker compose is provided to run postgres.
If you are running the pool against a private network and not mainnet, you must ensure:
- The pegnet chains are initialized
- There are valid pegnet blocks being made (like by the reference miner)
When running the pool, the additional flag --testing must be provided. The mainnet activation heights are embedded in the codebase, and the --testing flag will set these activation heights to 0 and allow your node to start syncing pegnet from block height 0.
echo "launch the postgres db"
docker-compose up -d db
https://github.com/qor/auth is used for user management and authentication. All user registration must be done through a miner and the stratum server.
To interact with a running pool as an admin, you can consult this document
First, make sure that factomd is running locally (or get the address of a remotely running instance). Also, double-check the values in the docker-compose.yml file are appropriate for your setup:
- Update the
"http://172.17.0.1:8088/v2"flag passed to--fhostto match the location of thefactomdinstance you are connecting to. - If you would like to change the
LXRBITSIZEvalue to something lower (for quicker deployments during testing), you can do so indocker-compose.yml.
Then you can start a postgres database and the prosper server binary with:
docker-compose up
Note: you can pass the -d flag to docker-compose if you'd like to run this detached)
The configuration for the pool server is by default stored and managed at ~/.prosper/prosper-pool.toml though this can be changed with the --config command-line option. Please look and modify your config before running the pool. The prosper-pool datasources command will help you setup your data sources.
Once the server is running, you can run and connect a prosper-miner to it.
You can use prosper-pool --help to list the command-line arguments and options. There are hidden commands used for development purposes.
Launch the private pool
Usage:
prosper-pool [flags]
prosper-pool [command]
Available Commands:
config Write a example config with defaults
datasources Reads a config and outputs the data sources and their priorities
db Any direct db interactions can be done through this cli.
help Help about any command
Flags:
--act int Enable a custom activation height for testing mode
--config string Location to config (default "$HOME/.prosper/prosper-pool.toml")
--fhost string Factomd host url (default "http://localhost:8088/v2")
-h, --help help for prosper-pool
--log string Change the logging level. Can choose from 'trace', 'debug', 'info', 'warn', 'error', or 'fatal' (default "info")
--phost string Postgres host url (default "192.168.32.2")
--pport int Postgres host port (default 5432)
--rauth Enable miners to use actual registered usernames (default true)
--sport int Stratum server host port (default 1234)
--testing Enable testing mode
Use "prosper-pool [command] --help" for more information about a command.