Mining

What is PegNet mining?

PegNet is a decentralized currency exchange. Prices are reported by the PegNet mining community and, with their help, users are able to buy and sell currencies peer-to-peer. PegNet runs on the Factom blockchain. As such, it relies on Factom Entry Credits in order to perform the mining action. It also requires access to APIs that will allow you to request real-time exchange rate data.

For more information, you can check out the PegNet FAQ.

If you have any questions or want to stay up to date on the latest PegNet discussions, join the Discord server.

How does Mining Work?

The miners in the PegNet network act as oracles for the pricing data of the PegNet assets. Miners are responsible for fetching the latest pricing data, and reporting the prices to the Factom Blockchain. Their prices will be submitted in a specific oracle chain on the Factom Blockchain. After each block is published, all of the entries within it will be analyzed by the miners and the reward will go to the miners that have given the most authoritative answers.

This authority comes from two sources. First, the answer must have sufficient cryptographic hashing power to be within the top fifty responses. This is done by hashing the data in order to get the highest hash. The hashing algorithm employed by PegNet is designed to be RAM access bound. CPU or GPU hardware has less of an impact on the overall performance of the hashing challenge.

Once the top fifty answers have been determined, a second selection process takes place. A sorting algorithm is employed that tries to locate the set of prices that is closest to the overall median price. Outliers are removed from the set in succession until only ten answers remain. These ten will become the recipients of the block reward.

The OPR

Each entry that is published as part of the mining process must contain the Oracle Price Record. This allows the miners to give the PegNet network real-time price information. The OPR includes the full list of the PegNet assets as well as their current price in PEG. The full list of these currencies will be placed into an asset entry that is added to the oracle chain.

Mining Awards

The PegNet provides a static 5000 PEG reward with every block. This award is distributed evenly amongst the top 25 graded OPRs.

Hardware Requirments

PegNet Miner

Mining on the PegNet has minimal requirements in order to support a large and diversified community of miners. It can easily run on a Raspberry Pi so long as it is equipped with enough RAM.

Minimum Requirements

• Any 32bit CPU
• 4GB RAM

Factom Federation

PegNet mining requires access to a fully synced factomd node. To satisfy this requirement, you can either connect to a remote node or run your own factomd node in conjunction with your miner.

If the machine you’re using for PegNet mining has enough power, you can use a single machine to run both. If you are running on relatively weak hardware such as a Raspberry Pi, you may be required to run the Factom Federation software on a separate device.

Minimum Requirements

• Any 32bit CPU
• 4GB RAM
• 100GB HDD

Ideal Requirements

• 64bit 4 core CPU
• 8GB RAM
• 100GB SSD

Quick Start Guide

There are two options for mining PegNet: with Docker and without.

With Docker

Check out the quick and easy docker-compose installation guide: https://github.com/pegnet/pegnet-compose.

Without Docker

To quickly setup factomd, you will need to:

1. Installation - Install factomd, factom-walletd, factom-cli, and pegnet command line applications. You will also need to sync factomd
2. Acquire Entry Credits - Acquire entry credits to fund your miner.
3. Running Pegnet Miner - Configure and launch the miner

Each step has a more thorough explanation in a separate wiki page. Please walk through them in order!