StakeMiner

Job of the StakeMiner is to search for valid kernel and create new blocks. It received considerable development attention lately, lot was changed to a point you may notice a difference in behavior. Let me describe how it works.

Stake weight

In dev staging master branch, the stake weight is reported in two places on the overview screen.

The "DPOR Weight:" is calculated somewhere in gui code as balance+magnitude and may not reflect real staking weight.

Second is in "Client message:" is calculated in stake miner as sum of weights of all mature UTXOs and reflects the real weight. It is not in coin units.

• For version 7 blocks, 1 GRC and 0 Mag equals to 800 of weight.
• For version 8 blocks 1 GRC equals to 80 of weight.

Command getmininginfo

RPC command (also in debug console) can be used to obtain additional information from StakeMiner.

• stakeweight.combined; no unit natural; Sum of stake weights of all your mature UTXOs. This is your total, real stake weight. The minimum and maximum if then min/max of them.

• stakeweight.valuesum; GRC real; Total balance that is mature and considered for staking.

• stakeweight.legacy; GRC real; Calculation of the above, done in different code.

• staking; bool; Indication that the stake miner is doing it's job.

• mining-error; test; Reason why stake miner is not doing it's job.

• mining-message; text; various message by miner, previously contained in MiningInfo 5.

• time-to-stake_days; days real; Estimated time to stake.

• expectedtime; seconds natural; Estimated time to stake.

• mining-version; integer; Version of block the miner will create.

• mining-kernels-found; count natural; Count of CoinStake kernels found. You can figure out how many blocks were aborted or rejected by subtracting.

• mining-created; count natural; Count of blocks fully created.

• mining-accepted; count natural; Count of blocks locally accepted. They might still get rejected by network. Too many locally rejected blocks usually mean a problem. But v7 blocks usually are rejected for reward too low.

• InterestPending GRC real; Sum of interest currently owed on all UTXOs. When you stake, you usually get only part of this. When you send coins, the interest is destroyed.

• BoincRewardPending; GRC real; The amount one would receive for research if he were to stake at that moment.

• difficulty.proof-of-stake; no unit real; Current staking difficulty. Higher number means more secure and healthier network, but it is less probable to stake. This number is perfect for network health monitoring.

• netstakeweight; GRC natural; Estimated weight of the network. I wouldn't make any conclusions based on this value.

• netstakeweight2; GRC natural; Different function calculating network weight.

• difficulty.search-interval; millisecond natural; How long miners sleeps between attempts. Configured using minersleep config option.

• pooledtx count natural; Number of unconfirmed transactions in mempool.

• stakeinterest; micro percent APR natural; Current interest rate.

• CPID; hex; Your mining CPID or investor.

• Magnitude Unit; real; Current magnitude unit.

Code flow description

It runs in a loop in it's own thread. The loop is composed of several commands as illustrated below. If any of the commands fails, the loop starts over.

while not shutdown do begin {
  Sleep( minersleep );
  IsMiningAllowed
  CreateCoinStake;
  CreateRestOfTheBlock
  AddGridcoinReward
  SignStakeBlock
  ProcessBlocks
end

CreateCoinStake

This function loops over all own unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) and for each it checks validity of the stake kernel. When a tx meeting all stake conditions and the stake meets the difficulty target, the search is stopped and miner proceeds to actually create the CoinStake block, otherwise the miner loop starts over.

A stake time-stamp mask is applied to current time-stamp before it is used in the kernel. This mask is 16 seconds. During this 16 second period, the outcome of stake kernel evaluation for given UTXO does not change. It is either failure the whole time, or success. So it makes no sense to evaluate more often. To account for processing drift and stake modifier change caused by incoming block, Miner waits only 8 seconds before trying again.

If you enable debug2 flag, stake hash and target will be written to log file.

This function adds a valid CoinStake transaction to second transaction in block (first is CoinBase tx) and returns true on success.

CreateRestOfTheBlock

If a valid stake is found, rest of the block must be created. Most notably unconfirmed transactions (from mempool) are included into the block and their fees added to reward.

This function was not modified. Previously it was called before searching for coinstake which resulted in lot of unused blocks being created and work wasted.

AddGridcoinReward

Here Fees, Interest reward and Boinc rewards are calculated and added to the block. Also boincHash is constructed from the results of reward calculation and added to, interestingly, the CoinBase transaction. CoinBase is otherwise not used, has zero input and output.

Description of the boincHash and reward calculation can be found in other article.

ProcessBlocks

When the block is ready, it is passed to the same function which processes blocks received from other peers. It takes care of verification, adding to local block-chain and propagating to other peers.