Zcoin is about to update its MTP algorithm. Will personal mining usher in a new era?

Zcoin (token name XZC) is one of the few technical anonymous coin projects currently, and is also one of the representative projects in the MN currency.

In 5 days, the Zcoin mainnet will officially usher in a hard fork, which is a large-scale update. Currently, the Zcoin official website has updated the countdown interface:

The biggest highlight of this update is the MTP algorithm. I have previously introduced this algorithm. The biggest feature of this algorithm is that it can achieve the goal of equal computing for different hardware devices (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC), so that everyone can participate in mining and better achieve decentralization. For more highlights of the MTP algorithm, please refer to my previous article:

" The fairest mining algorithm - Introduction to MTP algorithm" .

The basic principle of the MTP algorithm's anti-ASIC is still to design the algorithm as a Memory-Hard algorithm. After reading the development logs updated recently on the Zcoin Blog, Da Mao found that although the MTP algorithm is very powerful, the related supporting facilities are still in a semi-finished state: the only mining software that has been released to support MTP is the CPUminer and the N-card miner (the A-card miner will not be released until 2 weeks later). The most surprising thing is that the miners that have been released so far have extremely strict requirements for the hardware of the mining machine. The original text of the official blog is as follows,

These miners:

*Require 4 GB of RAM per thread (possible to share the memory allocation in future)

*Do not support multi-GPU setups (requires initialization to be done on GPU to be coded)

*PCI-e risers slow down performance greatly

A simple translation is as follows:

When mining with CPU, 4GB of memory is required per thread

Currently no support for multiple GPUs

PCI-e accelerator (probably FPGA) will significantly reduce computing performance.

In other words, after the hard fork, most of the existing mining machines cannot be used to mine Zcoin directly: ASICs are directly killed, GPU mining machines are temporarily impossible (multiple cards are not supported), and CPU mining machines need to be equipped with huge amounts of memory. After much thought, only some personal PCs can meet this hardware requirement. In this way, it is very exciting to see how much computing power will be left on the Zcoin network after the hard fork is completed on December 10. Perhaps it is possible for personal PCs to participate in mining and have good returns by then.

In addition, here is a little knowledge. Since Zcoin is a POW+MN network structure, thanks to the huge number of MNs, the reduction in the number of miners and the reduction in the computing power of the entire network will not affect the security of its main network. According to the data from the website Nodeasy.com, the number of Zcoin's main nodes has reached 3922, and the decentralization is very thorough. At the same time, MN builders still have a good annualized return (20%).

Screenshot from nodeasy.com

In any case, as the hard fork update time approaches, related development is also in full swing. Friends who are interested in MTP algorithm mining are recommended to pay more attention to Zcoin Blog; or follow our currency circle encyclopedia. Damao will also promptly introduce the progress of the project in public account tweets and communities. Mining friends should not miss it.