Duplicate Nonce Patch

Miner Release: Miners need to be updated

v0.5.0 introduced a bug in which multiple threads could submit the same nonce, effectively wasting hashpower.

This patch corrects this.

If you run prosper-miner properties, and see you are on version v0.4.2 or v0.5.0, update immediately to increase your hashrate.

V4 OPR Release

Pool Only Release: No miners need to be updated

This release of Prosper pool is for the V4 OPR update at height 231620 estimated to be Feb 12, 2020, 18:00 UTC.

Information about the hardfork can be found here: https://github.com/pegnet/pegnet/releases/tag/v0.5.0

All pool operators need to update before the fork.

Miner Improvement V2

Miner Release: This update is mainly targeted to miners. Pool operators do not need to update.

This update provides a boost for mining found by Whosoup. The boost amount is machine-dependent. I'd appreciate feedback from the users.

The new miner has a few options that can be used to tune/tweak the miner. Changing these should vary your hashrate, and you can search for the optimal parameters of your machine.

prosper-miner <flags>

• --seq=true will put the miner back into it's old mode of hashing. This removes the hash boost code, as it might not benefit cpu's with small caches.
• --bs=128 changes the batch size to 128. The batch refers to how many parallel hashes to do at a time. This variable likely depends on your cpu cache size, and should be tuned. The default is 512, but that may change.

Miner Improvement

Miner Release: This update is mainly targeted to miners. Pool operators do not need to update.

This update adds a performance boost for mining that has seen to add as much as 15% to a machine's hashrate. The boost was discovered by another party, and the optimization is theorized to make more efficient use of the cpu cache. The optimization performs a batch of hashes in parallel vs the old method of sequentially. It still performs the hashing on 1 core, but will step through the hash function across a batch, meaning if you stop the hash function halfway, the entire batch is halfway complete for each individual hash. If you stop the old code halfway through a batch, half the hashes are complete, and half are incomplete.

The new miner has a few options that can be used to tune/tweak the miner. Changing these should vary your hashrate, and you can search for the optimal parameters of your machine.

prosper-miner <flags>

• --seq=true will put the miner back into it's old mode of hashing. This removes the hash boost code, as it might not benefit cpu's with small caches.
• --bs=128 changes the batch size to 128. The batch refers to how many parallel hashes to do at a time. This variable likely depends on your cpu cache size, and should be tuned. The default is 512, but that may change.
• --abort=false turns off a small optimization I made. You can kill the hash a little early when mining. It's likely less than a 2% gain, but the last phase of the hash runs through the 32 byte hash in reverse and does a last little "randomization" of the resulting bytes. When I get to the leading bytes, if they are not big enough (like the 3rd byte not being 0xFF for mainnet mining), I skip the last 2 remaining bytes and abort early. You can turn this off if you want. It's on by default

ChangeLog

• New cli command for pool operators prosper-pool pullsources
• datasources command now includes PEG
• Mining boost in the prosper-miner

LXRHash Update

LXRHash has had another update by WhoSoup. This is a pre-release to test it.

Free Floating PEG

Pool Only Release: No miners need to be updated

This update is mandatory for all pool operators. It matches the update on pegnet here. PEG price is going floating, meaning it will come from the external markets.

You must update by block height 222270, estimated to be Dec 9, 2019, 17:00 UTC.
Upon updating, you must also add these lines to your config file: https://github.com/FactomWyomingEntity/prosper-pool/blob/master/prosper-pool.toml.example#L33-L35. You must set their priorities to something >= 0.

Once the activation height is hit, those config fields will be required or your pool will not earn any PEG.

Soft Max Limit

Pool Only Release: No miners need to be updated

With the growing success of the prosper-pool and the additional pools coming in, this feature was added. When the pool begins to have a large share of the network's hashpower, some more features are necessary, and are being added. This is the first.

This feature, called Soft Max Limit will save on pool operator's entry credit costs. The rolling submission vs the reference miner strategy was chosen so that mining operators can run on a less steady factom node. It also increases the mining time as the rolling submissions will mine as late as possible into the block. The downside was the over submissions in some cases. Until a more complete solution is in place, this will save miners a good percentage of ECs.

Timestamp Fix

Pool Only Release: No miners need to be updated

ATTENTION The factomd url has changed to require /v2 added to the end. This means in your config file, you need to change your url from http://ip:port to http://ip:port/v2

A dependency of the Prosper Pool had a timestamp issue where the timestamps being generated had a chance to be outside the valid limits of the Factom Protocol. This meant that some of the pool's submissions were rejected. This fix does not address every location this dependency has affected the pool but puts out an immediate patch to address the most common scenario.

A future update is planned to cover all scenarios but will take more time as pegnet needs to update first. Luckily the maintainer of this pool is also a Pegnet core dev :).

An immediate update is recommended as this directly impacts your rewards.

The payout-cli binary is in a broken state at this time because of a pegnet dependency. Once pegnet updates, we can resolve this. Until then, please use the older payout-cli binaries.

An update can be applied with docker-compose:

docker-compose up -d --build prosper-pool

Stability improvment

This release is primarily targeted towards miners. The mining software had a bug where high thread count machines could stall in mining. This was corrected, and miners should update immediately.

32 Bit system support

32 bit system support was added by replacing int with int32

Changelog:

• Support 32 bit systems

Downloads:
Located here: https://github.com/FactomWyomingEntity/prosper-miner/releases/tag/v0.2.0