Did Qubic Just Crush My Mining Power?
If you woke up this morning and casually looked at your Qubic miner, you would have seen 1 of 2 things.
Option 1: Way More Hash Power
Option 1 is a great way to start the day! Way more Hash Power.
My Qubic miner hash rate shot up by over 150% from this update alone. My RTX 3060 GPU went from sitting around 20 it/s to 53-56 it/s second overnight! That's absolutely insane - and I'm not even using great hardware.
You can check out my complete guide to Qubic mining here if you want to see my setup:
James Hinton
My Guide on Setting Up Qubic on Windows
Option 2: Idling...
Option 2 kind of sucks. A mysterious 'IDLING' prints out on the screen and 0 it/s.
So what's going on?
Qubic Epoch 125 TL;DR
What Happened with Epoch 125
At midnight, UTC, a whole bunch of updates went live on Qubic network. The TL;DR for miners was as follows:
- New mining algorithm š - HELLO EXTRA HASH POWER!
- Dual use mining algorithm with 50% idle time on mining power š¢ - the mysterious Idling
You can view the two announcements here:
How does this impact my Qubic miner?
The simplest impact to your Qubic miner is that it will now sit idle for 50% of the time.
In my testing and measurements today, I found the following:
- The idle time is difficult to predict. I.e. there was no easy way I could say "When you idle, mine something else, and then when the network is mining again go for gold"
- It appears that multiple miners are running/idling at the same time. Whether this is an entire network thing or groups of miners, I don't yet know.
- A massive increase in hashrate. Given my historic experience with mining Ethereum, I'm really amazed that a single mining algorithm update can increase the hashrate by over 150% in one go. It shows that the team is really focusing on this aspect of the Qubic network.
For point number 1, don't get me wrong. I'm sure there IS a way to do this, I just haven't had time to figure it out yet š
What's The Big Picture Here for Qubic?
On the surface of it, the Qubic mining update seems a bit random. I mean, why would a crypto proof of work network deliberately waste 50% of their mining power?
Imagine if Ethereum had decided to do that back in 2018!
However, if you take a step back and consider the goals of the Qubic project, it starts to make sense.
Qubic Useful Proof-of-Work
If you've read my analysis on the Qubic project, you'll remember that one of my big takeaways was useful Proof-of-Work (PoW).
Qubic's useful PoW aims to take all that computing hash power currently devoted to solving arbitrary problems and direct it to solve AI problems
However, getting right at a network scale is actually pretty hard. Somehow Qubic needs to (autonomously) assign network hash power to running the network, while also managing the compute requirements for AI.
Given the dreams and plan of Qubic, this is not the sort of thing you can get wrong!
Qubic Computors
Ultimately, the Qubic network needs to use it's excess hash power autonomously. This means that the Computors need to be dynamically assigning work to their mining clusters, starting and stopping them as needed.
What We Need is a Test...
All of this leads us to a pretty clear conclusion. The network needs to start testing it's ability to start and stop miners, dynamically assign tasks, and so on.
To me, that's the best and easiest way to understand the random thing I woke up to this morning.
How Can I Learn More About the Qubic Crypto Project?
Want to learn more about the Qubic project? Check out my in-depth analysis on this amazing blockchain project below
James Hinton
An in-depth analysis of the Qubic Blockchain
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