Cardano (ADA) CEO Charles explains how to mine ADA

On March 24, 2018, Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Cardano (ADA), explained to BCNews how to mine ADA. The following translation comes from Li Gang of the ChainPool team.

The way Ouroboros Proof of Stake works is that anyone who holds ADA is technically eligible to participate in mining, with no minimum. So we have the idea of ​​an epoch, which happens every 5 days, and each epoch contains a number of blocks (slots). Before an epoch begins, an election takes place, with a certain amount of randomness and distribution of ADA. Let's say Bob mines with 50% of the ADA, Alice with 25%, and Jim with 25%. They get a block with a certain probability corresponding to the amount of ADA they invested, and the blocks are produced in a certain order. Bob has 50%, so he has a 50% chance of winning. The election takes place, and one of Bob, Alice, or Jim wins, and the process repeats. So technically, anyone who holds ADA can win and be one of the 20,600 blocks in each epoch. Although the reality is that most people probably don't want to mine, because you need to have a computer turned on and have a certain understanding of the basic logic of mining.

So we also created a proxy system. If you win the right to produce a block for a corresponding slot, you have three choices: (1) you can show up and do the work; (2) you can not show up or act maliciously, in which case we call it Byzantine behavior; (3) you can delegate the right to someone else - this is called a stake pool.

What we want to do is make this process as simple and easy as possible for people who want to delegate or run a stake pool. When we are about to release Shelley, we will enable the functionality of Daedalus (Cardano wallet). So there will be an authorized proxy center in our wallet. If you want to run a stake pool, you can register it on the blockchain so that others can find your pool. They just need to click a button of "authorize" to start mining, no extra steps are required.

Not only that, we have also come up with innovative technologies like "cold mining". You don't have to put your private keys in a Daedalus wallet to do this. You can create a Daedalus proxy key and put your private keys on, for example, a Ledger, Hyperwallet hard wallet, or paper wallet, which is safer.

In terms of stake mining pools, we will create a mirror and corresponding system to incentivize 25 to 100 stake mining pools to join, so that we have a starting set. Then help them configure so that they can establish a corresponding business model. In the end, we hope to see a network architecture running hundreds of stake mining pools. This architecture not only has the decentralized technical characteristics of proof of stake (POS), but also has the speed and efficiency of joint arbitration similar to Paxos or competitive algorithms, and then it can be optimized on this basis and achieve really fast speeds.

The above will be implemented in stages. In terms of the equity mining pool, we will adopt a registration mechanism. Anyone interested fills out the form and sends it to us. We will conduct a series of communications, invite and screen the list of people who have obtained the right to operate the equity mining pool. Then put them on the test network to verify what we think is correct and to carry out normal operations.

For regular users, it will be activated one day, and your Daedalus will be updated. You can see the center and decide if you want to run a stake pool? If so, you register accordingly, download the image file and install it accordingly (if you are pro enough). If you don't want to, just click "mine", simple as that. This is what we want, the simpler the better.

This is an experiment, no one has done this before. Of course, we are still a very new protocol, which means you have to be patient with us and understand that we may not get everything right at the beginning. That's it based on the data now, there will be some updates and changes later.