Ok. So winning an auction basically buys you into the pool?

Bit of a novice in terms of such auctions. I am trying to understand how the whole process works. So please don’t mind if my questions are basic.

1. I signed up for a rigly account and checked, and joined the party. It shows that the current bid is 1800 sats. So for example if I bid for 1900 sats, and if by chance, that is the closing bid, then do I have to pay 1900 sats ?
2. What is the relation between the bid amount in SATS and the hashrate?
3. How I do I know if I am selected in the pool of people who will earn a percentage of the reward?

Well, we tried. I'd do it again.

{
   "workername": "3Gk1GfP3bHA6M2ZzK5mHdqbWN1iNsqAenH",
   "hashrate1m": "4.49P",
   "hashrate5m": "4.47P",
   "hashrate1hr": "4.39P",
   "hashrate1d": "2.28P",
   "hashrate7d": "482T",
   "lastshare": 1735990450,
   "shares": 134921892167,
   "bestshare": 1652742553786.171,
   "bestever": 1652742553786
  }

The best share/ever can be written as 1,652,742,553,786 and the current difficulty is 1,735,862,400,000.

If the first number was equal or higher than the second we would've found the block. Is that correct?

Lotto mining

Hello, I sent my sats but I haven't received the link yet.

Congrats to the first auction winner 🎉

I'll add +400 TH/s of bonus hashrate to the block party

I have to restart the front-end to update the env variable for bonus hashrate, so bear with me while the website is offline for a few mins

Last time, I paid several of the auctions I won (some likely twice) on https://upendo.rigly.io but their status remained "unpaid". Do you know what the issue was? After payment confirmation, it always sent me to localhost page to which I have no access. Maybe that's why the status wasn't updated?

Has this issue been resolved? Just making sure before I try some new auctions~~

EDIT: Yay, a new hot page boosted post.

Do we need to manually set up our settings to point to CK Pool under upendo account?

The block party is done, we did not find a block.

However, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, we all had some fun and I learned a few things along the way.

Block Party RecapBlock Party Recap

• 40 auctions sold (21 TH/s each, or ~2% of reward)
• Total hashrate: 4,850 TH/s
  • I added +3,200 TH/s in bonus hashrate
  • Another miner added +650 TH/s to our party (!)
• Lowest/highest winning bid = 1,000 / 20,200 sats

The lowest bid occurred about halfway through the auction and was an outlier, the average winning bid was ~5,000 sats.

The highest 3 winning bids occurred at the end of the auction.

The high cost of bidding near the end of the auction led to some frustration, so I held a few auctions aside to sell peer-to-peer - no one took me up on them.

CK Pool is a great resource for solo mining block parties. The json api allows everyone to verify the mining and the pool has a track record of successfully mined blocks. The new solostats gui is nice too.

The anonymous gift of +650 TH/s once we started mining was awesome.

We mined for 24+ hours and, while we managed to hash some high-scoring difficulty shares in the trillions, still fell short of hashing a block below the network difficulty

My takeawaysMy takeaways

Bitcoin mining is like a lottery, but real work is involved

One of the first things I heard when I started learning about mining was "it's like a lottery.. it isn't just solving complex math problems" ... and while this is somewhat true, in the sense of finding a serviceable hash, the concept of "mining as lottery" discounts all the work that goes into finding that hash.

It's a huge amount of work to mine!

Our party mined with ~5 PH/s, or roughly 40 mining rigs consuming ~3KW each. We generated trillions upon trillions of hashes, some of which were near(ish) to the target.

I'm sure Pick 4 and Powerball use their share of electricity; however, buying a lottery ticket is no comparison to the work done by bitcoin miners.

Network difficulty makes solo & block party mining daunting

You only truly feel the network's difficulty when you try to mine a block.

Even with almost 5 PH/s across our party, we faced long odds of mining a block -- 1 in 1,000+ for 24 hours. Compare the odds of winning a single number in roulette (1 in 36) gives an idea of how long the odds are -- though nowhere near as long as solo mining with 1 TH/s (1 in 5,820,208 for 24 hours)

And so, yes I get that the network difficulty's purpose and that the difficulty adjustment keeps the network the "right size" for ~10 minute block times and keeps things balanced ... yeah ok, but when you're mining to get a solo block, you want the network difficulty low!

Network difficulty of ~110 Trillion makes for a mighty high bar to go over (or under)

Picture It:

If the network difficulty was 100x lower, our 5 PH/s would have found a block and we would by splitting up $300k in bitcoin right now.

Who wins with a 110 Trillion network difficulty?

One of my favorite catchphrases is follow the money, it always leads to new insights.

Who benefits from 110 Trillion network difficulty?
Hardware vendors?
Bitcoiners?
Miners?

It's always great to sell shovels, and bitcoiners certainly benefit from a wall of energy securing their net worth ... but pity the miner.

How could things be better?

Satoshi gave us a wonderful gift 16 years ago and network difficulty has proven to be a balanced way to scale the network to trillions in value.

Unfortunately for miners - and especially solo miners! - Satoshi's gift came bundled with an arms race. It did not include a way to coordinate a cooperative reduction in difficulty.

There's no way, today, for every miner to stand down 90% of their fleet - which is certainly in every miner's interest to do - and benefit from lower difficulty.

Maybe one day.

In the meantime, the block party was a blast and I'll continue hosting them.

Stay tuned for the next one on Jan 11th.

Thanks for reading,
Evan

Block party is mining now 🚀

Telegram chat: https://t.me/+K8JjHpTgqoFjZmIx

For last minute bidders - there are several auctions still available

How was the experiment?

Tried signing up but just keep getting bad gateways when I click the sign-up link in the email

These mining bid auctions are new to me. I'd love to learn more and participate in the next one. I currently have my Bitaxe Gamma connected to the Braiins pool

https://www.coinspeaker.com/satoshi-nakamoto-launched-bitcoin-this-day-16-years-ago/

my setup appears to be working just fine 🙂 so there is no transactions logged anymore, looks like? 🤙

Here's a SimpleX group for today's party

I really like this idea, and have won an auction. Hope to see more of this in the future :)