Ravencoin Spring 2020 fork FAQ

Ravencoin will be changing its mining algorithm at 1800 UTC on May 6th, 2020. We will be forking to a progpow variant called kawpow. The intention of the algorithm change is to continue our attempts to prevent ASIC domination of the Ravencoin network and to level the playing field for GPUs mining this coin. This is the 3rd algo that Ravencoin has implemented, and replaces X16Rv2 which replaced X16R. It is hoped that this fork will achieve asic resistance for a very long time.

Assuming the ASICs are successfully repelled from the network, yes. The higher the hash on a network, the more spread out the rewards are. If ASICs are mining with 98% of the network hashrate, then they are taking 98% of the rewards, leaving the meager remainder for those who are mining with GPUs and FPGAs. If all ASICs are removed from the network, then all the rewards go to the miners who remain. Having said that, the loss of the ASICs will drive difficulty down rapidly, which will cause Ravencoin profitability to increase, which will bring in additional GPU miners back onto the network. That will in turn drive difficulty higher again, which will reduce the profits to all miners. This is standard behavior of all Proof of Work blockchains. It would be a very successful outcome if more GPU miners return to Ravencoin.

You will need to install a new miner.

• NVIDIA: kawpowminer - open source.
• NVIDIA: t-rex 0.15.3 - proprietary with 1% dev fee.
• NVIDIA: gminer > 2.04 - proprietary with 2% dev fee.
• NVIDIA: TT-Miner 4.0.0 or better - proprietary with 1% dev fee: Windows or Linux.
• AMD or NVIDIA: NBMiner - proprietary with 2% dev fee.

Tests done in early May by the MinerMore sysop showed that t-rex performed the best, followed somewhat closely by kawpowminer.

After you have added your new miner software, you can update your cmd/bat/script file to instruct it to use the new connection. The connection line looks something like (note that the following lines contain testnet ports):

kawpowminer -U -P stratum+tcp://[email protected]:4505

or...

t-rex -a kawpow -o stratum+tcp://rvnt.minermore.com:4505 -u username.worker -p x

or...

gminer --algo kawpow --server rvnt.minermore.com:4505 --user username.worker

or...

nbminer -a kawpow -o stratum+tcp://rvnt.minermore.com:4505 -u username.worker

or...

TT-Miner -coin rvn -P stratum+tcp://[email protected]:4505

IMPORTANT NOTE: The connect lines shown above only work currently for testnet. Once we fork on May 6th you will need to be using port 4501 and a real valid Ravencoin address (or MinerMore username) for mining. For more information on setting up for May 6th, see this page.

They are all pretty close to each other in performance so you should use the one that works the best for you. Traysi did a 24 hour test on April 23rd and found that the open source kawpowminer outperformed the proprietary miners. View the test details here.

You will need to manually stop mining at 1800 UTC on May 6th and switch your script to change to the new miner and parameters, and then reconnect. If you are running a desktop wallet, you will also need to update that in order to stay on the right chain. Just make sure you are using the latest release of Ravencoin, which must be 4.1.0 or higher. Assuming all goes well, around the fork time the new algo will come into effect and we will start mining with the new algo. For a brief window of time, it is possible that both algos may be mining the network blocks, but that will quickly give way to 100% kawpow hashing.

If you are using t-rex, you can use their fork-at feature to automate the transition to the new algorithm. Update your cmd/bat/script file to instruct it to automatically switch at the right time.

For example, if your launch line looks like:
t-rex -a x16rv2 -o stratum+tcp://us.rvn.minermore.com:4501 -u username.worker -p x

Then you will change it to:
t-rex -a x16rv2 --fork-at kawpow=2020-05-06T18:00:00 -o stratum+tcp://us.rvn.minermore.com:4501 -u username.worker -p x
Then restart your miner and it should take care of everything for you at that point.

Yes!! kawpow will bring AMD miners back into the Ravencoin flock because unlike x16r, kawpow should work pretty close to equally well between nvidia and AMD. kawpowminer uses opencl and should work fine with AMD, and nbminer (linked above) supports AMD.

Yes, our testnet is activated with kawpow. You can mine it by visiting this page.

Traysi has written and released an open source implementation of the node-stratum-pool nodejs module for kawpow. This should be all you need to add this coin to your pool.

Traysi and others are happy to answer any other questions you have. Please join the Ravencoin and MinerMore groups and ask away.