67 KiB
Mission lane 5: what can be reinvented. The miner's experience
Date: 7 October 2026, UK time. Lane 5 of the last mission. Written in the mission worktree; this file is the only output. Nothing was built, measured, posted or started; the live devnet was not touched.
the project lead's words that this lane holds: "revolutionise the mining itself"; "dopamine for GPU miners everywhere, a structure that makes the mining commodity fall in love with the project"; "the perfect gpu network that will be noticed as the revolution that everyone is waiting for". Bounds that this lane obeys: no premine, no dev fund, no treasury, no token sale, no airdrop, no referral paid in coins; every coin is mined under the rules that exist (the 80/20 split, the signing bonus of 8 of the 80 producer points, the proving pool); no stake; no device bounty; the three signalling thresholds (60, 90, 95); miners are the security always; gates, not dates; hours are agent hours.
0. Progress
| Time (UK) | State |
|---|---|
| 08:46 | Rules read: CLAUDE.md, polish.md sections 1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 3.6, 3.7, 3.10, 4.5; litepaper miner sections; vote-or-burn section 5; tail-emission one page; horizon one page; ledger decisions 3, standing, 6 and 7 October; pool.md; miner-ui-3 and its audit; testnet-go; the dev fee; the Discord kit; the Reddit kit (branch reddit-kit); journey.json |
| 09:05 | Three research sub-lanes launched: Reddit post sample, chain histories, pool and install facts. The third refused by the concurrency limit; its topics done by hand with WebFetch. The session's WebSearch budget was already spent by other lanes, so every outside fact below comes from a fetched page or is labelled approximate |
| 08:52 | Igneum maths computed (scratch mission-reinvent/igneum-maths.txt, tiers.txt): solo block expectations per tier at 100 GH/s and 1 TH/s, the vote dust line, the signing bonus per day |
| 09:04 | Sections 3 to 8 drafted; 1.1 and 2 waiting on the sub-lanes |
| 09:10 | Section 1.1 and headline 3 written from reddit-sample.md (105 posts, 69 with a room median) |
| 09:13 | Section 2 and the sources written from chains.md (seven chains, hashrates derived from explorer APIs at dated heights) |
| 09:15 | Done: 0 em dashes by grep, no placeholders, 446 lines; the three findings sent to the coordinator |
1. The dopamine loop of a GPU miner, from data
1.1 What the archives say
Method (the sub-lane's file, scratch mission-reinvent/reddit-sample.md): 105 posts picked by hand from the top-of-all-time listings of r/EtherMining, r/gpumining, r/chia, r/ravencoin, r/MoneroMining, r/Monero, r/HeliumNetwork (2021 to 2022), r/kaspa and r/erg_miners (r/ErgoMining is an empty shell whose top post points to r/erg_miners), plus six bitcointalk "first block" posts from 2011 to 2017 through the ninjastic archive. Each post's score is the value Reddit served on 7 October 2026. The subreddit median for the post's year is estimated from three half-month samples of the Arctic Shift archive (approximate; the typical post in these rooms scores 1 to 4 points, so the ratios are large and describe how far the best joy posts rise above an ordinary post). 69 of the 105 rows have a ratio; r/MoneroMining and r/erg_miners have no archive sample.
| Post type | Rows with a ratio | Median score | Median ratio to the room's typical post | Range | Best example (score, date, URL) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| f. "My card paid for itself" (ROI, break-even) | 6 | 777 | 777x | 493x to 1,367x | solar panels paid for by mining, 1,367 points, 16 May 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/ndduuu/ |
| g. The community meme | 11 | 710 | 739x | 81x to 2,054x | "New miners be like...", 2,054 points, 19 Apr 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/mu3jgh/ |
| c. The rig photo | 13 | 361 | 417x | 48x to 2,923x | "Rate my new build", 2,923 points, 3 Mar 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/lwpudz/ |
| d. The hashrate milestone | 7 | 324 | 409x | 95x to 672x | "What 1GH looks like", 672 points, 8 Apr 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/mmybn2/ |
| e. The profit screenshot, "X per day" | 7 | 234 | 234x | 48x to 593x | "I finally mined a full Ethereum today", 593 points, 21 Jul 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/ootl28/ |
| a. First block found solo | 8 (plus 6 bitcointalk rows with no score) | 233 | 119x | 46x to 762x | "Tried Solo Mining ETH as an Experiment, Ended up Hitting a Block", 762 points, 3 Jun 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/nr13be/ |
| h. "We did it", the network milestone (ATH, listing, hotspot count, halving) | 12 | 214 | 66x | 12x to 305x | Helium's first telecom deal, 305 points, 26 Oct 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/HeliumNetwork/comments/qg9o6g/ |
| b. First payout | 5 | 173 | 56x | 43x to 478x | "I made my first bitcoin penny", 478 points, 8 Mar 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/m0emml/ |
| all | 69 | 256 | 297x | 12x to 2,923x |
What the ranking says. The posts that rise highest are about the miner, not the network: the card that paid for itself (777x), the rig in a photo (417x), the personal hashrate milestone (409x). The network's own milestone, the thing a project would post, sits near the bottom (66x). The first solo block is the strongest single feeling in the quotes and a middling score (119x), because it is rare; the first payout is the lowest (56x), because on a pool it is routine. Chia's first-block posts are the exception that proves it: on a chain where the first win took weeks of plotting, "It finally happened! I never thought this day would come" scored 615 (19 May 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/ngevxy/), 308x its room's median. The Monero room shows the same feeling at every size of CPU: "After 271 days and 101 Billion Hashes, I Finally Mined my First Monero" (128 points, 20 Nov 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/jxxwzo/).
Quotes (verbatim, with the sub-lane's dates and URLs; all accessed 7 October 2026):
| Quote | Where | Date |
|---|---|---|
| "GUYZ! I DID IT! I FINALLY WON!!" | r/chia title, https://www.reddit.com/r/chia/comments/myaizh/ | 25 Apr 2021 |
| "cries in 17TiB with 0 xch" | top comment on the same post | 25 Apr 2021 |
| "380 MH/s, about 24 hours total time mining. Very, very lucky." | r/ravencoin, https://www.reddit.com/r/ravencoin/comments/pnfl4y/ | 13 Sep 2021 |
| "That's crazy. Now all of us pool miners are going to think hmm." | r/EtherMining, https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/nr13be/ | 3 Jun 2021 |
| "1 GH/s and disappointed parents achieved!" | r/gpumining title, https://www.reddit.com/r/gpumining/comments/okexp4/ | 14 Jul 2021 |
| "Love solo mining its the best." | r/MoneroMining, https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/1uexakh/ | 25 Jun 2026 |
| "I just solo mined my first block ever! :3 Feels good." | bitcointalk, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=619210.msg6866375#msg6866375 | 22 May 2014 |
| "Mind blown." | bitcointalk, first reply to "just found my first block", https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=338903.0 | 19 Nov 2013 |
Consequence for Igneum, by surface: the shareable thing must be the miner's own object (the block card with the card's name on it, the rig's row on the census, the weight rank), never the project's milestone; the ROI post cannot exist without a price, so its stand-in at the testnet is the line "N IGN per kWh" and the days-mined ring; and the solo first block must stay reachable for the common tier, which is the reason the Poisson line and the pool switch sit on the same screen (section 3.2).
1.2 Time to the first hit on each chain
| Chain, year | First hit | Measured or estimated time from install | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum 2017, pool (Ethermine, Nanopool) | first share accepted, worker on the dashboard | share within seconds of the first job; worker visible in 1 to 10 minutes; first payout at 0.05 ETH took one GTX 1070 about 2 to 3 weeks in mid 2017 (approximate) | approximate, from memory of the pool pages |
| Ethereum 2017, solo | first block | a 30 MH/s card against 60 TH/s: one block in about 2 million blocks, 1 year or more; nobody did it (approximate) | approximate |
| Kaspa, launch day 8 Nov 2021, solo | first block | the network was 3.4 MH/s on 8 Nov 2021 (derived from the header bits, chains.md), so one 2021 card found blocks within minutes; at 2.86 TH/s six months later the same card needed a pool |
https://api.kaspa.org/blocks-from-bluescore?blueScore=100000 (7 Oct 2026) |
| Kaspa 2022, pool (2miners) | first share; payout at 50 KAS every 2 hours | share in seconds; payout the same day for a 1 GH/s card in 2022 (approximate); 2miners: "Payouts are processed automatically every 2 hours", minimum 50 KAS | https://2miners.com/faq and https://kas.2miners.com/ (7 Oct 2026) |
| Monero 2019, p2pool (from 2021) | a share in the PPLNS window, paid at the next pool block | p2pool: "It can take several days to a week to find a share if your hashrate is low"; min payout 0.00027 XMR | https://p2pool.io/ (7 Oct 2026) |
| Chia 2021 | the first plot finished (the hit was the plot, not the coin) | 6 to 12 hours a plot on a consumer SSD; the expected solo win on 10 TB at 5 EiB netspace was months (approximate) | r/chia posts of May 2021 (section 1.1); approximate |
| Helium 2021 | the hotspot on the map, the first beacon, "HNT per day" in the app | hours after power-on, days to weeks of waiting for the device itself (the r/HeliumNetwork top post of 2021 is a photo of a miner six months after ordering, section 1.1) | section 1.1 |
| Ravencoin 2018, solo | first block, 5,000 RVN | on launch day any card found blocks in minutes (approximate) | approximate |
| Igneum devnet, 2026 | first accepted block, shown in the app's event feed | an Apple silicon laptop through the DMG: first block "within the first minutes", 33 accepted blocks in 7 minutes; an RTX 5090 through the Windows installer: 34 accepted blocks in the first minute once the clock was right | docs/bench-log.md 4 October 2026 (the first outside machine; the three-card rig) |
1.3 The loop
| Stage | What it is for a miner | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | a number moved: a block, a payout, a hashrate tick, a chart on the explorer, a post in the feed | the post types that score highest are all "a number moved and here is the screenshot" (section 1.1) |
| Action | open the app, the pool page, the explorer, the Discord; refresh | the daily ritual on every chain in section 2 |
| Variable reward | blocks are a Poisson draw; the payout varies; the post's upvotes vary; luck is the word every pool shows | 2miners shows "luck 441%" and "last block 2 minutes ago" on the pool's front page (https://kas.2miners.com/, 7 Oct 2026) |
| Investment | a rig built, plots made, a key aged, a reputation in the room, a name on a board | Chia's plots, Helium's named hotspot on the map, the EtherMining rig-photo post (section 1.1) |
Igneum has one investment no other chain has: the vote key's 30-day window. A key that mined for 30 days weighs more than the same hashrate that appeared yesterday, and that weight signs finality. That is a level system written into consensus, and section 3.7 builds the ladder on it.
1.4 The five moments on Igneum, and the time to each today
Computed at 1 block a second, the producer share of 80 points, 100 IGN a block at full rate. The network size is the variable: the first 1,000 miners at the measured median card (about 25 MH/s, section 3.8) are about 25 GH/s; 100 GH/s is the litepaper's example; 1 TH/s is where the loop breaks for solo cards. Full tables per tier: section 3.8 and scratch tiers.txt.
| Moment | Solo, 100 MH/s on 100 GH/s | Solo, 17 MH/s (8 GB) on 100 GH/s | Pool member, any card | Where it is shown today | Where it should be shown |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. First share or first block | first block: expected gap 16.7 min, 97 percent within the first hour | 1.6 h expected, 46 percent within the first hour | first share: vardiff starts at one share per 10 s and the first correction is sized from the measured rate (pool.md section 2), so under a minute after the first job; before that the node sync and the dataset build (measured: the devnet laptop's first block "within the first minutes") |
the event feed and the blocks strip (app.js:1052-1127) |
the block card of section 3.3 |
| 2. First payout | the coinbase of the first block, credited by the execution layer when the block is blue; so the payout is the block, seconds later | the same | PPLNS credit on blue confirmation; a payout round every 60 s (pool/src/config.rs:61), minimum 1 IGN; an 8 GB member at 100 GH/s earns 1 IGN in about 73 s, so the first payout lands inside two minutes of the first share |
Earnings reads "£0.00 earned" and never shows mined IGN (Q18) | Earnings as section 3.4 |
| 3. First proof shard paid | shards are assigned by lot to eight provers for ten seconds; 388 shards and 446.13 IGN paid on 5 October (the Discord kit's start-here text); on a 24 GB NVIDIA card today, 12 GB cards with the patched prover measured not shipped | not available on 8 GB today (core-only proving measured, prover-tiers-real-cards.md rows 4060) |
proving income never passes through the pool (C6) | Prove tab state line "0 proven · 0 paid" | "your card proved shard N of block M" as a card, section 3.7 |
| 4. First vote (the key above dust, 100 blocks in the 30-day window) | 1.2 days | 6.8 days | the member's own blocks carry its key (pool.md section 2, Votes), so the same days as solo for the same card; a member without a node has no vote (spec 09 9.7) |
nothing: the app never says whether the key votes | "your key has a vote" card, the ladder rung 1 |
| 5. First signature in a certified checkpoint, then the full window | the first checkpoint after the key enters the table (one checkpoint is 30 s; a young key counts as present); the full window at day 30 | the same; full window at day 30 | the same | nothing | "your signature is in checkpoint K" and "30 of 30 days" |
The consequence of the dust line, per tier (the standing rule of 5 October): at 100 GH/s every tier reaches a vote inside a week; at 1 TH/s a single 8 GB card finds 44 blocks in 30 days and never reaches 100, so it never votes, and the pool does not help because weight follows the member's own found blocks. The 12 GB RTX 4070 reaches 65, also under. The RTX 5090 reaches 255. So past about 500 GH/s the "your key has a vote" rung is out of reach for the cards most of the first 1,000 miners own, and the X5 gate (1,000 independent keys above dust) gets harder as the network grows. This lane does not touch the constant; it hands the finality lane the question in section 8 and keeps the ladder's first rungs (first block, first payout, first shard, 30 days mined) reachable for every tier at any network size.
2. The product structures that made miners fall in love
Method (the sub-lane's file, scratch mission-reinvent/chains.md): hashrates derived from block difficulty at dated heights through each chain's public explorer API (Ergo, Monero, Ravencoin, Kaspa) or Etherscan's daily CSV (Ethereum); Helium and Chia from their own HIPs, blog posts and release notes; prices from CoinGecko. Every URL opened on 7 October 2026. "Approximate" marks a figure from memory. Hash units differ across forks and are not compared across them.
2.1 The hook, the ritual, the proof, the ladder, the story
| Chain | Hook | Daily ritual | Social-proof surface | Status ladder | The story a miner told |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Helium 2019 to 2021 | a USD 500 box on the windowsill mines by giving radio coverage | the app or explorer.helium.com: the hotspot's 24-hour HNT, witnesses, "relayed" | the explorer hex map; every hotspot a dot with a three-word name; "the map was the product" | none formal: "first in my city" on the map, maker badges in Discord, validators from 2021 (approximate) | HIP 10's own example: a hotspot "which has earned approximately $21,000 worth of HNT by purchasing $145 worth of DC" (https://github.com/helium/HIP/blob/main/0010-usage-based-data-transfer-rewards.md) |
| Chia 2021 | farm on drives you already own; "green Bitcoin" from the BitTorrent inventor | the GUI's netspace and "estimated time to win"; plots finishing; then the pool page | the netspace chart (chiaexplorer, xchscan); the pool leaderboard | plot count and TiB; "OG plots" against portable plots (approximate beyond that) | "It finally happened! I never thought this day would come" (section 1.1); the other side: "cries in 17TiB with 0 xch" |
| Ethereum 2017 | the gaming PC prints money while you sleep | WhatToMine with your card list, the pool's unpaid balance and graph, the overclock | the pool's worker list and "estimated earnings"; YouTube rig builds; the GPU price chart | rig size (6, 8, 12 cards), hashrate, the "paid off" post (approximate) | "In Feb this subreddit told me it was too late and I'd never ROI" (893 points, 1 Aug 2021, https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/ovvaah/) |
| Kaspa 2022 | "No premine. No hidden allocation. Fair launch." (https://kaspa.org/) | miningpoolstats.stream, the pool dashboard, Discord #mining | the miningpoolstats hashrate chart and pool count | Discord roles for early miners and pool operators (not verified, approximate) | "I mined six figures of KAS on two GPUs at a tenth of a cent" (approximate, the room's tone) |
| Monero RandomX 2019 | any CPU, even a laptop, mines again; RandomX "optimized for CPUs" (https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/randomx.html) | the xmrig console, the pool page, the electricity maths | the RandomX README benchmark table (i9-9900K 5,770 H/s, Ryzen 7 1700 4,100, i3-3220 510, Raspberry Pi 3 20; https://github.com/tevador/RandomX) and the pool's miner count | none formal; hashes per watt bragging | "After 271 days and 101 Billion Hashes, I Finally Mined my First Monero" (section 1.1) |
| Ravencoin 2018 | Bitcoin's fair launch replayed for GPUs; "no private, public, founder, or developer allocation" (https://ravencoin.org/assets/documents/Ravencoin.pdf) | the pool dashboard, the WhatToMine line, Discord #mining, "is that hashrate jump an FPGA?" | the pool ranking and the explorer difficulty chart | none formal | "380 MH/s, about 24 hours total time mining. Very, very lucky." (section 1.1) |
| Ergo 2019 | the ETH miners' second home: GPU-only Autolykos, a 2 GB table, "hardcoded no-premine proof" (https://github.com/ergoplatform/ergo/releases/tag/v3.0.0) | the pool dashboard, the explorer, WhatToMine, Discord #mining | the hashrate chart and the pool list | none formal | "My first payout. All mined with my humble GTX 1060 at 50MH/s." (section 1.1) |
What the seven have in common: the daily ritual is a number read off a page the project does not control (a pool, miningpoolstats, WhatToMine); the social proof is a chart or a map; the ladder is informal everywhere. Helium is the one chain whose product was the proof surface itself (the map), and it is the one whose miners posted photos of the device six months after ordering (section 1.1). No chain had a ladder the chain itself computed.
2.2 The numbers at 3, 6 and 12 months
| Chain, launch | 3 months | 6 months | 12 months | Peak | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Helium, 1 Aug 2019 | about 1,500 hotspots (approximate) | about 3,000 (approximate) | about 7,500 (approximate) | "500,000+ Hotspots" (HIP 54, 2 Feb 2022); "close to 1 million" (HIP 70, 30 Aug 2022) | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helium/HIP/main/0054-h3dex-targeting.md ; https://github.com/helium/HIP/blob/main/0070-scaling-helium.md |
| Chia, 19 Mar 2021 (transactions 3 May) | "over 30 exabytes" (7 Jul 2021) from "about 100 pebibytes" at launch | 32 EiB (3 Aug 2021) | 28 EiB (19 Mar 2022); "over 400,000 nodes" | about 35 to 40 EiB late 2021 (approximate); 17.3 EiB on 7 Oct 2026 | https://www.chia.net/2021/07/07/official-pooling-protocol-launched/ ; https://www.chia.net/2022/03/19/chia-mainnet-year-one/ ; https://alltheblocks.net/chia |
| Ethereum GPU, from 1 Jan 2017 (6.0 TH/s) | 17.3 TH/s (1 Apr 2017) | 37.2 TH/s (1 Jun 2017) | 159.4 TH/s (1 Jan 2018) | 1,126.7 TH/s (13 May 2022); 871.0 TH/s on 14 Sep 2022, zero from 16 Sep | https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate?output=csv |
| Kaspa, 7 Nov 2021 (3.4 MH/s on 8 Nov) | about 1 TH/s (approximate; 0.3 TH/s on 19 Dec 2021) | 2.86 TH/s (28 May 2022) | 431.8 TH/s (26 Nov 2022) | 210.7 PH/s (12 Apr 2024, derived); about 344 PH/s on 7 Oct 2026 | https://api.kaspa.org/blocks-from-bluescore?blueScore=15800001&includeTransactions=false ; https://api.kaspa.org/info/hashrate?stringOnly=false |
| Monero RandomX, 30 Nov 2019 (307 MH/s CryptoNightR before, 686 MH/s RandomX on 1 Dec) | 1,338 MH/s (29 Feb 2020) | 1,372 MH/s (30 May 2020) | 1,695 MH/s (29 Nov 2020) | 7.54 GH/s (16 Jan 2026) | https://xmr-node.cakewallet.com:18081/json_rpc (get_block_header_by_height) ; https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/monero/hashrate-chart |
| Ravencoin, 3 Jan 2018 | 0.89 TH/s (19 Mar 2018) | 1.31 TH/s (17 Jun 2018) | 3.51 TH/s (7 Jan 2019) | X16R 22.5 TH/s (29 Sep 2019); KAWPOW 18.76 TH/s (20 Sep 2022); 0.61 TH/s on 7 Oct 2026 | https://blockbook.ravencoin.org/api/v2/block/130000 (and later heights) ; https://rvn.2miners.com/api/stats |
| Ergo, 1 Jul 2019 | 1.06 TH/s (1 Oct 2019) | 1.29 TH/s (31 Dec 2019) | 7.89 TH/s (30 Jun 2020) | 180.6 TH/s (17 Sep 2022); 0.47 TH/s on 7 Oct 2026 | https://api.ergoplatform.com/api/v1/blocks?limit=1&offset=66000&sortBy=height&sortDirection=asc (and other offsets) ; https://erg.2miners.com/api/stats |
Discord member counts were not found in any source opened for any of the seven; the one community-size number in the sample is r/erg_miners passing 5,000 subscribers on 6 Jan 2022 (section 1.1, row 104).
What the first year looked like from a card: Kaspa went from 3.4 MH/s on its first day to 2.86 TH/s at six months, a million-fold, and then 150x more in the next six (the post-Merge fleet); Chia's netspace rose about 300x in under four months, so a fixed farm's share fell 300x; Ethereum rose 26x across 2017. A miner who joined on day one of any of them watched their share fall by two or three orders of magnitude inside a year. Igneum's 30-day window gives that miner something the hashrate curve took away: weight that the newcomers cannot buy for 30 days.
2.3 The failure modes
| Chain | What broke | The number | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Helium, 2022 | dilution then gaming then a pivot: emission halved to 2,500,000 HNT a month (1 Aug 2021, HIP 20) while hotspots went past "close to 1 million", so under 0.1 HNT a day per hotspot against about 5 to 10 in 2020 (approximate); a denylist run by the company from about 14 Jan 2022 whose method is not published; subDAO tokens with a "50B pre-mine" of MOBILE (HIP 53); the move to Solana (April 2023); the SEC complaint of 17 Jan 2025 over claims about Lime, Nestlé and Salesforce, settled for USD 200,000 | HNT ATH USD 54.88 to ATL 0.1132; "almost 38% of all HNT is staked in Validators" (HIP 70) | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helium/HIP/main/0020-hnt-max-supply.md ; https://github.com/helium/denylist ; https://raw.githubusercontent.com/helium/HIP/main/0053-mobile-dao.md ; https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/litigation-releases/lr-26229 ; https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/helium |
| Chia, 2021 | the SSD burn (about 1.3 TiB of writes per plot, Chia's own figure; consumer drives killed in weeks, the press figure approximate), the pool protocol eight months after the pools promise (11 Nov 2020 to 8 Jul 2021) with "OG plots" shut out of it, a closed pool at a third of netspace, 300x dilution in four months, then consolidation and a price fall of 99.9 percent | hpool "hovering at around 33% of netspace" (15 Jun 2021); XCH ATH USD 1,645.12 to ATL 1.14 | https://www.chia.net/2021/05/24/chia-and-ssd-endurance/ ; https://www.chia.net/2021/06/15/common-misconceptions-vol-1/ ; https://github.com/Chia-Network/chia-blockchain/releases/tag/1.2.0 ; https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/chia |
| Ethereum, 15 Sep 2022 | the Merge switched 871 TH/s off in a day; ETC absorbed at most 236.6 TH/s; Ergo rose 11x in 48 hours (16.1 to 180.6 TH/s) and Ravencoin 7x (2.70 to 18.76 TH/s), so every existing Ergo rig lost about 91 percent of its share inside a week; both fell back by Christmas (32.6 and 9.19 TH/s) | the bagpipes post: "Powering down last ETH mining rig the only proper way", 2,277 points, 15 Sep 2022, https://reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/xek7wq | https://etherscan.io/chart/hashrate?output=csv ; https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-eth-etc.html ; https://decrypt.co/109713/ethereum-classic-hashrate-soars-merge-nears-miners |
| Kaspa, 2023 | the ASIC turn: IceRiver KS0 to KS3 listed for "Sep 2023", Bitmain KS3 "Oct 2023"; network hashrate 2.67 PH/s (28 Jul 2023) to 115.7 PH/s (19 Dec 2023), 43x in under five months; one KS1 at 1 TH/s equals about 2,000 RTX 3070-class cards (approximate), so the GPU share went to a rounding error | 43x | https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/iceriver ; https://api.kaspa.org/blocks-from-bluescore (derived) |
| Monero, 2019 onward | nothing broke on chain; two slow failures: botnet mining ("Monero's popularity among malware-based non-consensual miners", Wikipedia), and a 4x hashrate rise to the 2026 peak against the 0.6 XMR tail | 686 MH/s (1 Dec 2019) to 7.54 GH/s (16 Jan 2026) | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monero ; https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/monero/hashrate-chart |
| Ravencoin, 2019 to 2020, then 2022 | the FPGA and ASIC surge: 10.0 to 22.5 TH/s between 22 Aug and 29 Sep 2019 with no price move; two algorithm forks (X16Rv2, 1 Oct 2019, "ASIC shmasic"; KAWPOW, May 2020, hashrate 29.4 to 3.39 TH/s overnight); then the economic break after the Merge, 18.76 TH/s to 0.61 TH/s today, and a "consensus flaw in KAWPOW header validation" rescued by a pool in Aug 2026 | hashrate down 97 percent from the 2022 peak; RVN down 99.2 percent | https://github.com/RavenProject/Ravencoin/releases?page=2 ; https://github.com/RavenProject/Ravencoin/releases/tag/v4.1.0 ; https://2miners.com/blog/august-2026-work-progress-ravencoin-chain-rescue-pearl-hard-fork-and-kaspa-reward-cut/ |
| Ergo, 2022 | the overflow pipe: 16.1 TH/s (3 Sep 2022) to 180.6 (17 Sep), back to 36.8 by 3 Oct; 0.47 TH/s today, under 3 percent of the peak | 11x up and 80 percent down in a month | https://api.ergoplatform.com/api/v1/blocks (derived) ; https://erg.2miners.com/api/stats |
What Igneum takes from each: from Helium, a proof surface the miner owns (the map) and a warning that a company-run denylist with an unpublished method ends the love (section 6, "a number a company server has to be trusted for"); from Chia, that the ritual (plotting) must not destroy the hardware, and that a pool that arrives eight months late with the early miners shut out is remembered (pool-0 is at the go, section 3.5); from Ethereum, that the shareable post is the rig and the ROI, and that a chain can end mining by decree (Igneum's miners are the security always, so there is no Merge to decree); from Kaspa, that a fair launch holds a community for two years and an ASIC takes it in five months (the hourly program and the census, 4.4); from Monero, that "anyone's CPU" is a narrative that survives seven years when the hash keeps its promise; from Ravencoin, that two algorithm forks by human release are what Igneum's automatic schedule replaces; from Ergo, that a hashrate wave arriving from a dead chain dilutes the faithful 11x in two days, which is exactly what the 30-day weight window was built to keep from the vote.
3. The miner's experience on Igneum, reinvented
3.1 Install: the two warnings before the first screen
What happens today (polish.md 3.10): Windows, SmartScreen "Windows protected your PC" (More info, Run anyway), per-user install, then a UAC prompt for the firewall rule 20 to 50 s in, on top of whatever screen is up. Mac, an ad hoc signature, Gatekeeper refuses, the user must find Privacy and Security, Open Anyway; the app strips its own quarantine on start. The Windows installer cannot be rebuilt tonight (Q80, GitHub billing).
What the comparators do: SmartScreen warns on any file that is not "well known and downloaded frequently" and on any certificate without reputation; "If a URL, a file, an app, or a certificate has an established reputation, users don't see any warnings" (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/operating-system-security/virus-and-threat-protection/microsoft-defender-smartscreen/, page dated 23 April 2026, read 7 Oct 2026). SSL.com's code-signing page says Microsoft "moved away from automatic instant reputation", so OV and EV build reputation through use (https://www.ssl.com/code-signing/, 7 Oct 2026). Apple: USD 99 a year, notarisation included (https://developer.apple.com/programs/, 7 Oct 2026); on macOS the unidentified-developer path is System Settings, Privacy and Security, Open Anyway (https://support.apple.com/en-us/102445, 7 Oct 2026). Certum sells an open-source code-signing certificate "from €49.00" (https://shop.certum.eu/open-source-code-signing-on-simplysign.html, 7 Oct 2026; out of stock on the day). Azure Trusted Signing: Basic tier 5,000 signatures a month, one certificate profile of each type; price not shown on the page (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/trusted-signing/, 7 Oct 2026; from memory about USD 10 a month, approximate). GPU miners trip antivirus even when signed: T-Rex's README says some engines detect signatures "similar to those that real viruses protected by the same packer have" (https://github.com/trexminer/T-Rex, 7 Oct 2026).
| Step | Today | Proposal | Hours | Gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac signature | ad hoc, quarantine strip | Developer ID plus notarisation and stapling in build-dmg.sh; the quarantine strip removed |
3 plus the project lead's USD 99 | a fresh macOS 26 machine opens the DMG's app with no Privacy and Security visit |
| Windows signature | none | Authenticode through Trusted Signing or an OV certificate, signed on the box as a job step; the sha256 and the signer's name on the download page (Q50, Q82) | 3 plus the project lead's purchase | a fresh Windows 11 machine runs the installer with no SmartScreen interstitial by the 1,000-download mark (reputation is use; before that the page shows the exact interstitial text and the two clicks) |
| Firewall prompt | UAC 20 to 50 s in, unexplained | the Cards screen names it and the step runs after setup_done (Q14) |
1 | the prompt never appears before a screen that says it will |
| Antivirus | nothing | a "What your antivirus may say" line on /miner#get with the engine names and the exact action, and the submission to Microsoft's SmartScreen review on every release (the Learn page's submission route) |
1 | the line is on the page; every release's binaries are submitted the day they ship |
| Time to the first share | not measured end to end on a fresh machine | measured on a fresh Windows 11 VM and a fresh Mac for every release by the Devnet 2 gate: download to first accepted share or block, with the clock, the sync and the dataset build as three timed steps | 2 | "first share within 10 minutes of download in 9 of 10 fresh Windows installs", published on /evidence |
3.2 First run: what the first hour should feel like
Today's three screens (Welcome, Cards, Address, the key sheet) are rated 7 to 8 of 10 by the UI 3 audit; the audit's own finding is that the one question a home miner has, "is this worth running", is not answered until the third screen, and the Cards row does not say what the card is expected to make although site/miner-priors.json knows the model (miner-ui-3-audit.md 2.1, 2.2).
| Screen | Add | Hours | Gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cards | under each known model: "about 25 MH/s at 91 W; on today's network that is about N blocks a day" from the prior and the live network rate | 1 | the row shows a number for every model in the priors file |
| Cards | the tier sentence in plain words: "8 GB: mines; proves small shards", "24 GB: mines and proves" (from prover-tiers-real-cards.md) |
0.5 | every memory size has a sentence |
| Address | "Start mining" starts mining; the key sheet comes before the button (the audit: "the button lies once") | 1 | view test |
| Mine, first ten minutes | a "waiting for your first block" line with the live expectation: "a card like yours finds a block about every 1.6 hours on today's network; chance so far: 31 percent" (a Poisson line from the card's own rate and /api/stats network rate; the pool mode shows "first share in N s" instead) |
2 | the line is on screen from the first job until the first block, then is replaced by the block card |
The Poisson line is the piece no miner app has. 2miners shows luck for the pool; nothing shows a solo miner's own running chance. It turns the dead first hour into a count-up, and it is honest: it says 46 percent for an 8 GB card at 100 GH/s, which is why the pool switch sits one line below it.
3.3 The first block: the card, the sound, the link
Today: an event line in the feed and the blocks strip. Nothing is shareable, nothing is kept.
Proposal, the block card (Ember, Mine page, in place, no dialog):
Block 1,284,117 is yours. 12:27:53 UK
RTX 4070 · 25.0 MH/s · 0.025% of the network
80.00 IGN to 0xdd44…86E8 (72 producer points, 8 for signing)
Hash 9f3a…c21e [Open in the explorer] [Save the card] [Copy the link]
| Element | Rule | Hours | Gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| The card | shown on the first block of every key, then on every 100th, 1,000th and 10,000th, and on the first block of every new card; stays until dismissed; the rest are feed lines | 2 | view test on the four thresholds |
| Sound | off by default; one short tone on a block when on; honours reduced motion and the OS mute (app.css already honours reduced motion everywhere) |
0.5 | the tone never plays when the switch is off |
| Save the card | a 1200x630 PNG drawn locally from the same data (the rig-photo post without the rig; the dark scheme, the brand mark, the card name, the hash, the explorer link as a QR) | 2 | the PNG opens; no network call is made to make it |
| The link | /block/<hash> (exists: parents, children, mergeset, shards, checkpoint fractions, block.html:285-325) |
0 | |
| What is not on it | no fiat, no price, no "worth": there is no market and the copy law forbids the aphorism |
The pool user gets the same card for the first share ("Share accepted by pool-0 · 0.0012 of a block") and the first credited block ("pool-0 found block N; your share 0.41 IGN"), from the share_result and the PPLNS credit lines the pool already sends.
3.4 The app: Earnings
Today (miner-ui-3.md section 5, polish Q18): the first number on the tab is "£0.00 earned: nothing is bought or sold on devnet"; mined IGN is never shown, only proving paid_wei; the electricity line is real and shown as a cost.
| Line | Today | Should read | Source of the number | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | £0.00 earned | 6,912 IGN a day at your last hour's rate (86 blocks) | the node's own block count for the key times the subsidy at the block's DAA; the projection from the 1-h rate and /api/stats network rate |
2 |
| 2 | 0.0000 IGN from 0 proofs | 2,592 blocks in 30 days, 207,360 IGN; 14 shards, 16.1 IGN | the node and the execution layer (the balance is in the wallet; the app reads the coinbase credits per key) | 1 |
| 3 | none | about £N a day at a price you type (no exchange lists IGN; a typed price, remembered, never fetched) | the user's field; the engine's price_gbp_per_ign when a market exists, as the UI 3 plan already owes |
1 |
| 4 | none | your card is 0.100 percent of the network; weight rank 41 of 1,204 keys; 30 of 30 days | /api/live miners and the finality weights RPC (getFinalityWeights, spec 3.10) |
2 |
| 5 | £1.95 a day electricity | unchanged, and the line under it: "N IGN per kWh" | the existing watt reading | 0.5 |
| 6 | dev fee line | unchanged (1 in 100, the switch) | 0 |
A rule for every number on the tab: it comes from the node this machine runs, or from the public API with the field named on hover (polish 4.3, one formatter table). The typed price is the only number the user supplies and the tab says so.
3.5 The pool
Decision for the launch pool, with reasons:
| Question | Decision | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Who runs it | the project runs pool-0 at the testnet go and at mainnet genesis, on the written systemd unit (pool/README.md), with the member's vote key in every header as built |
nobody else can on day 1; the member-key design means the project's pool never holds vote weight, which is the thing a project pool is normally criticised for |
| Fee | 1 percent, the same as the solo dev fee, published in welcome, on the page and on /miner |
a 0 percent project pool makes every outside pool unviable, and the first outside pool is a launch gate (section 4.1); 1 percent is what miners accept everywhere (2miners 1.0 percent, https://kas.2miners.com/, 7 Oct 2026; Ethermine 1 percent, approximate); fee-neutral between solo (dev fee 1 in 100) and pool, so the choice is about variance only |
| Where the fee goes | the same software address as the dev fee; it is a software fee, documented as such (miner-dev-fee.md), never a protocol fee |
no dev fund, no treasury; the protocol carries no fee to anyone |
| Mode | PPLNS, window 2 blocks of weight, payout rounds every 60 s, minimum 1 IGN (as built) | the first payout inside two minutes of the first share for an 8 GB card at 100 GH/s (section 1.4) |
| Default in the app | solo under 500 GH/s network, the app suggests the pool above it, per card: "a card like yours finds a block about every 16 hours on today's network; pool-0 pays every minute" | the Poisson line of 3.2 decides; the user chooses |
| What the pool page shows | the connect card, the lookup, the blocks and the payments table (Q71 owed), luck in MiningPoolStats' convention (Q69, Q72), "payouts follow blue confirmation, not finality" (Q73), and the finality state | the comparator rows in polish 3.6 |
| TLS | before the public testnet (Q67, 8 hours, consensus-engineer) | spec 9.3 |
The variance arithmetic that makes the pool required, computed: a single 8 GB card at 17 MH/s finds a solo block every 1.6 hours at 100 GH/s, every 16 hours at 1 TH/s (23 percent of days with no block), every 6.8 days at 10 TH/s (36 percent of weeks with no block), every 68 days at 100 TH/s. The pool is optional at launch size and required from about 1 TH/s. The pool's own payout latency: credit on blue confirmation (seconds), a round every 60 s, so under two minutes end to end once the member's balance passes 1 IGN.
3.6 Community: the Discord, the live page, the leaderboard, the miners page, the explorer
What exists: the Discord kit (roles Founder, Core, Prover, Miner, Bot; channels INFO, CHAIN, LEDGER, TALK; the bot posts a pulse four times a day, a daily digest, weekly numbers, releases, incidents; nothing live yet, Q7); /live with a Miners lane list of vote keys with a block in the last 10 minutes; /miners the bench table (six rows, Q51); the explorer with Miner as the payout address per block; /address (noindex) with balance and blocks mined.
| Surface | Add | Rule that keeps it honest | Hours | Gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discord #first-blocks | the bot posts every first block of a new key (short key id, the block link, the card model if the miner opted in through the app's "show my card" switch) | from the public API only; the forbidden-string guard; no name, no machine id | 2 | ten first blocks posted on Devnet 2 with the right links |
| Discord roles | Voter (the key is above dust, verified by a message signed with the vote key against getFinalityWeights), Window (30 of 30 days), Prover (as built) |
chain-side facts, anyone can check the same RPC | 3 | a role granted and revoked by the chain's numbers in a test |
/live Miners |
a leaderboard by 30-day weight: rank, short key id, blocks in window, days mined, signing presence, last block; a toggle to the 10-minute view that exists | weight, never hashrate; a renter who arrived today is at the bottom whatever they rent | 3 | the page shows the top 100 by weight with days-mined; a key that stops mining falls one place a day |
/address/<key or address> |
the public profile: blocks in 30 days, weight rank, vote state, checkpoints signed, shards proven, first block date, the block cards | noindex stays until the owner opts in from the app ("make my page public") | 3 | the page renders for every key in the window |
/miners |
the hardware census (section 4.4): one row per card model from the hourly program's per-card timings, MH/s, W, MH/W, count of keys on that model, median first-block time | measured, scrubbed, no machine names (the bench-table rule) | 4 | eleven rows today, every model with three or more keys after the testnet go |
| Explorer block page | "found by key id N, rank 41, day 23 of 30" under Miner | from the same weights | 1 | the line on every block |
3.7 Why I stay: the ladder written into consensus
The thing no other chain has: vote weight is 30 days of blocks per key (rule v2). A level system with no points server, no badge contract and no company database: the chain computes it, the node reports it (getFinalityWeights), the wallet verifies the certificates it signs.
| Rung | Name on screen | Rule | Time for a 100 MH/s card at 100 GH/s | Time for an 8 GB card at 100 GH/s | Where shown |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | First block | one blue block with your key | 16.7 min expected | 1.6 h | the block card; #first-blocks |
| 1 | Your key has a vote | 100 blocks in the window (the dust line) | 1.2 days | 6.8 days | Mine hero, address page, Discord Voter |
| 2 | Your signature is in checkpoint K | the first certified checkpoint carrying the key's vote | the next 30-s checkpoint after rung 1 | the same | the finality line in Mine, the block page of the lock |
| 3 | Full window | 30 of 30 days with blocks | day 30 | day 30 | the days ring in the hero; Discord Window |
| 4 | Rank | position by weight among all keys | continuous | continuous | /live leaderboard, Earnings line 4 |
| 5 | Signing streak | days since the key last missed the presence window (the 8 points never lost) | continuous | continuous | Earnings: "signing 8 of 80 points, 41 days unbroken" |
| P | Your card proved shard N of block M | a paid shard record | hours on a 24 GB card; not yet on 8 GB | not yet | the Prove tab card, Discord Prover |
The exact lines, in copy law: "Your key has a vote." "Your signature is in checkpoint 184,220." "Your card proved shard 3 of block 1,284,117." "30 of 30 days. Full weight." "Rank 41 of 1,204 keys." Each line names the chain fact behind it on hover (the RPC field), the same rule as every number on the site.
What the rungs pay, so the ladder is not decoration: rung 1 is the vote itself; rung 2 starts the 8-point signing line (the public sentence: miss two hours of signing and the next blocks pay 72 until you sign again); rung 3 is maximum weight; rung P is the proving income (20 points of every block, split by shard). Nothing is paid from a fund; the ladder only names what the rules already pay.
3.8 Per tier: the first hour and the first month
Cards at the measured untuned rates of docs/analysis/prover-tiers-real-cards.md (rented, 6 October 2026) and the bench table; expectations at 1 block a second; the first month at full rate (100 IGN a block) and at the 90-day ramp approved for the testnet genesis on 7 October (10 percent on day 1, so divide the IGN column by 10 on launch day; CLAUDE.md's 30-day ramp is the earlier text).
Network 100 GH/s:
| Tier | Gap to a solo block | Block in the first hour | Blocks a day | IGN a day (80 points) | Days to a vote | First month: blocks, and what the key is |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 GB, RTX 4060 (17.07 MH/s) | 1.6 h | 46 percent | 14.7 | 1,180 | 6.8 | 442 blocks; a voter from day 7; full window day 30; proves core-only shards (prover-tiers row 4060) |
| 8 GB, RX 9070 XT (17.9) | 1.6 h | 48 percent | 15.5 | 1,237 | 6.5 | 464; a voter from day 7; no proving (CUDA only today) |
| 12 GB, RTX 4070 (24.99) | 1.1 h | 59 percent | 21.6 | 1,727 | 4.6 | 648; a voter from day 5; mines and proves on the patched prover when shipped |
| 12 GB, RTX 5070 (41.89) | 40 min | 78 percent | 36.2 | 2,895 | 2.8 | 1,086; a voter from day 3 |
| 16 GB, RTX 4060 Ti (17.58) | 1.6 h | 47 percent | 15.2 | 1,215 | 6.6 | 456; a voter from day 7; mines and proves |
| 24 GB, RTX 4090 (52.25) | 32 min | 85 percent | 45.1 | 3,612 | 2.2 | 1,354; a voter from day 3; mines and proves today |
| 32 GB, RTX 5090 (98.48 rented; 122 on PC 1) | 17 min | 97 percent | 85.1 | 6,807 | 1.2 | 2,553; a voter from day 2; proves beside the miner |
| Apple M5 Max, Metal (26.7) | 1.0 h | 62 percent | 23.1 | 1,846 | 4.3 | 692; a voter from day 5; proves on the CPU, slowly |
| Rig, 6 x RTX 4090 (313.5) | 5.3 min | 100 percent | 271 | 21,669 | 0.4 | 8,126 (one key per machine, the 6 October default) |
| Pool member, any of the above | first share under a minute; first credit under two minutes | 100 percent | the same blocks on average, paid every minute | the same minus 1 percent | the same days (weight follows the member's own blocks) | the same |
Network 1 TH/s (the same cards):
| Tier | Gap to a solo block | Block in the first hour | Blocks a day | IGN a day | Days to a vote | 30-day blocks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 GB, 17.07 MH/s | 16.3 h | 6 percent | 1.5 | 118 | 68 (never inside the window) | 44 |
| 12 GB, 24.99 | 11.1 h | 9 percent | 2.2 | 173 | 46 (never) | 65 |
| 12 GB, 41.89 | 6.6 h | 14 percent | 3.6 | 290 | 28 | 109 |
| 24 GB, 52.25 | 5.3 h | 17 percent | 4.5 | 361 | 22 | 135 |
| 32 GB, 98.48 | 2.8 h | 30 percent | 8.5 | 681 | 12 | 255 |
| Apple M5 Max | 10.4 h | 9 percent | 2.3 | 185 | 43 (never) | 69 |
| Rig, 6 x 4090 | 53 min | 68 percent | 27.1 | 2,167 | 3.7 | 813 |
Per OS and vendor, what differs in the first hour: Windows, two prompts (section 3.1) and NVIDIA through the driver, AMD and Intel through OpenCL; macOS, one prompt, Apple silicon through Metal, no watt reading so no pounds line; Linux and HiveOS, no prompt, the Flight Sheet fields, Hive itself untested on a real rig (/miner). AMD cannot prove today (CUDA only). The 12 GB tier cannot mine and prove at once on the shipped build (peak 15.6 GB measured, bench log 5 October); the patched prover's 10.1 GB peak beside the miner on the 4070 is measured and not shipped.
3.9 The first withdrawal, and the first "I own something"
No exchange at the testnet, none arranged or sought at mainnet (journey phase 6). So the first ownership moment is not a withdrawal. It is:
| Moment | Today | Proposal | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| The balance | in the wallet ("the balance is in the wallet", Earnings); the address page shows balance and blocks | the Earnings tab shows the balance read from this machine's node, with "verified by this node" on hover | 1 |
| The proof | the wallet verifies finality certificates with the node's own code (finality.rs:101-121) |
the first block card carries "final under checkpoint K, certificate verified by this machine" once the lock lands, and the address page shows the latest locked checkpoint (Q37) | 1 |
| The QR | the wallet draws the ethereum: URI locally (server.rs:140) |
the saved block card carries the explorer link as a QR; the address page's QR under "make my page public" | 0.5 |
| The send | EIP-1559 value transfers in the wallet | a first-transfer card in the wallet: "sent 10 IGN to 0x…, in block N, final under checkpoint K" with the state words pending, included, executed, proven, finalised (UI 3) | 0 beyond Q9 |
"I own something" on Igneum is "a block with my key is final under a certificate my own machine verified". No other chain's miner app says that sentence.
4. The exact structure for Igneum
4.1 The launch sequence as gates
The go checklist (docs/plans/testnet-go.md) has eleven steps, from the seeds at height 0 to the first miner's block 1. These are the community gates that follow it; none has a date.
| Gate | Definition | How it is measured | What opens when it passes |
|---|---|---|---|
| G-C1 First 100 keys | 100 distinct vote keys with a block in the last 24 h | /api/live miners over a day |
the #first-blocks channel goes live; the leaderboard shows ranks |
| G-C2 First block by a card the project does not own | a block whose key is not in the project's fleet list | the observer's key list against the fleet file (the Discord guard already reads it) | the "first outside block" post, with the owner's permission |
| G-C3 First outside-reproduced benchmark | a card row on /miners measured by someone outside the project, with driver, OS and version (Discord rule 6) |
the bench-table ingest with by: reported by a miner |
the census starts (4.4) |
| G-C4 First pool not run by the project | a pool at an address the project does not control with 10 percent of blocks for 7 days, the member key in its headers | the explorer's payout-address share | pool-0 stays at 1 percent; the app's pool list gains a second entry |
| G-C5 First 1,000 independent keys | X5 as decided on 6 October: 1,000 keys above dust over 30 days, independent in autonomous system, machine fingerprint and pool attestation, top-10 share of window weight under 50 percent; a silent key counts only if its AS is its own | the observer's AS and fingerprint columns (owed, one app-owner item) | journey phase 5 closes; mainnet genesis is the next gate |
| G-C6 First outside proving customer | one rollup's job proven and paid on its own chain | the job market's payout contract | phase 4's second half |
4.2 The first 1,000 miners: where they come from
The no-airdrop constraint shapes every row: nothing is offered for joining; the only pay is mined emission; the message is the number and the file. Costs are agent hours for the content and the answering; the expected counts are this lane's estimates and labelled so.
| Channel | Expected keys (approximate) | Hours | The message | Rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| r/gpumining (the Reddit kit's day-7 post: eleven cards, MH/s, W, MH/W) | 150 to 300 | 6 (post, 48 h of answers) | the card table; "devnet coins have no value; nothing is for sale"; the ledger | rule 2.10 (no referral or promo links); the founder reads the Expanded Rules first |
| r/EtherMining (the Merge story, under rule 7's disclosure) | 100 to 200 | 4 | four years after the Merge, what runs and the command to check it | one linked post per seven days; nobody sent to Discord |
| HiveOS forum and the custom-miner listing | 100 to 250 (rigs, so more hashrate than keys) | 4 plus the first real Hive run | the HiveOS card verbatim, "Hive itself is untested so far; report what breaks" | the first reported rig run gets a bench row and the Miner flair |
| Bitcointalk ANN | 50 to 150 | 3 plus daily answers for a week | the ANN format: no premine, no sale, the dev fee, the card table | no bounty, no signature campaign |
| Miner Discords (lolMiner, BzMiner, Hive, the Kaspa and Ergo mining rooms) | 100 to 200 | 3 | two sentences, the card table, the ledger, "nothing is for sale" | one message per server in its projects channel |
| The miner-software authors (lolMiner, BzMiner, Team Red, Rigel) | 0 to 300 keys on the day one of them ships Igneum | 8 (the worker protocol document, the vectors, the dev-fee template mechanism explained so their fee works in solo mode) | "a fee template is 1 in 100 by a counter; your fee rides the same mechanism" | their fee is theirs; the protocol carries none |
| r/CryptoTechnology, r/zkproofs, r/Monero (the design rooms) | 30 to 80 | 4 | the prover, the verify command, the vs RandomX table | comments only where the rules say so |
| The hardware census itself (4.4), once G-C3 passes | 100 to 300 over the first months (people come to get their card measured on a public board) | 0 beyond the board | "your card's row, measured by the chain, not by us" | scrubbed, no machine names |
| Total | 630 to 1,780 keys, median about 1,000 | 32 |
Every row is the Reddit kit's existing text or an extension of it; the only new content is the census board and the worker-protocol document for the miner authors.
4.3 The pool at launch
Decided in 3.5: project-run pool-0 at 1 percent, member keys in headers, PPLNS, 60-s rounds, the dev fee off in pool mode because the pool fee is the same 1 percent to the same software address. The outside pool is a gate (G-C4), not a hope: the pool crate is public with its README, and the app's pool field takes any host.
4.4 The leaderboard and the census
| Board | Ranks | Never ranks | Source | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Keys (/live, the address page, Earnings line 4) |
30-day weight (blue blocks per key in the window), with days mined and signing presence | hashrate | getFinalityWeights |
a renter who arrives today has no weight; a laptop that mined for 30 days outranks a rented rig's first week; the board is the chain's own security table, so it cannot lie without the chain lying |
Cards (/miners, the census) |
efficiency per card model: MH/s, W, MH/W, and the per-program timing spread from the hourly swap (the frontier lane's "8,760-question hardware census", frontier.md 4.3) |
people | the hourly program's per-card timings, the bench-table ingest, scrubbed | the public benchmark the litepaper promises, made continuous; a chip that does better than the GPU curve shows up on this board first |
The census is new: RandomX programs are per hash and no pool sees their timing; Igneum's hourly program with per-card racing produces the census as a by-product (frontier.md 4.3). It is the one leaderboard a miner wants that no chain has, and it doubles as the chip alarm.
4.5 The story each miner tells
Written in copy law (short sentences, no antithesis, no aphorism).
| When | The three sentences |
|---|---|
| First week | "I installed it in five minutes and the first block was mine inside the hour. Every block pays my address straight away. My 4070 is on a public board with its watts." |
| First month | "My key has a vote now. It signs finality every 30 seconds and I can see the checkpoint it is in. After 30 days my weight is full, and the rented farms that showed up last week sit under me." |
| First year | "The program has changed 8,760 times and my card still mines it. My card has proved 400 shards for a rollup I have never heard of. Nothing was sold and nothing was given away: every coin I hold was mined." |
5. The surfaces to change
| Surface | Today (polish.md) | Should show | Hours | Gate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ember, Cards | card name, switch, "worker Metal, 40 GPU cores" (audit 2.2) | expected MH/s and W from the priors, "about N blocks a day on today's network", the proving tier sentence | 1.5 | every model in the priors shows a number |
| Ember, Mine (before the first block) | the blocks strip, 10 minutes (app.js:1052-1127) |
the Poisson count-up line; the pool suggestion when the gap passes 8 h | 2 | the line shows from the first job to the first block |
| Ember, Mine (the block card) | an event line | the block card of 3.3, saved PNG, the explorer link | 4.5 | the four thresholds; the PNG with no network call |
| Ember, Earnings | "£0.00 earned", mined IGN never shown (Q18) | IGN a day, blocks and IGN in 30 days, shards and IGN, a typed price, share of network, weight rank, days, signing streak | 6.5 | every line names its RPC field on hover; a view test per line |
| Ember, Prove | state line "0 assigned · 0 proven · 0 paid" | the shard card "your card proved shard N of block M, 1.15 IGN" | 1 | a card on the first paid record on Devnet 2 |
| Ember, Settings | pool field designed, not built (pool.md section 7) |
the pool field, the terms box from welcome, the dev-fee line reading "off in pool mode: the pool's 1 percent is the same fee" |
3 | a member connects from the app and shows the terms |
| Ember, first run | two prompts, one unexplained (Q3, Q14) | signed and notarised; the firewall step named on the Cards screen | 7 plus the project lead's certificates | 3.1 gates |
| Wallet | one account, no finality state on the address page (Q33, Q37) | the first-transfer card with the five state words; the address page with the latest lock | 3 (plus Q9's 6) | a devnet transfer walks the five words on screen |
Site /miner |
"Install. Start. The card mines and proves." plus feature lines | the first-hour timeline (download, the one prompt, first share, first block, first payout) with the measured times from the Devnet 2 gate | 2 | the times on the page equal the gate's log |
Site /live |
miners with a block in 10 minutes | the weight leaderboard with days mined and signing presence; the 10-minute view as a toggle | 3 | top 100 by weight; a stopped key falls one place a day |
Site /miners |
six rows, two models, "not measured" MH/W (Q51) | the census: one row per model, MH/s, W, MH/W, keys on that model, median first-block time | 4 | every model with three or more keys |
Site /address |
balance, blocks, noindex | the public profile of 3.6 behind the app's opt-in | 3 | renders for every key in the window |
| Explorer block page | Miner = payout address | "found by key id N, rank 41, day 23 of 30" | 1 | on every block |
| Pool page | stat strip, connect, lookup, blocks, no payments table (Q71) | payments, luck in the standard convention, "payouts follow blue confirmation, not finality", finality state | 3 | the comparator rows in polish 3.6 |
| Discord | nothing live (Q7); roles Miner and Prover by hand | the bot live; #first-blocks; Voter and Window roles from chain facts | 8 | ten first blocks on Devnet 2 posted; a role granted by a signed message |
| Total | 52.5 plus the certificates |
6. What not to build
| Idea | The line that kills it |
|---|---|
| Gamification paid from a fund (a weekly prize, a "block of the day" bonus) | there is no fund; every coin is mined under the 80/20 rule and the signing bonus, and a prize paid by the project is a premine by another name |
| Referral in coins | no referral paid in coins from a fund: there is no fund; and r/gpumining rule 2.10 bans referral codes outright |
| An airdrop for installing, posting or reproducing a benchmark | an airdrop in exchange for anything is a sale by another name; the rule is "nothing is for sale" on every surface |
| NFT badges for the rungs | the rung is a chain fact already (weight, days, signatures); a token for it adds a contract, a market and a price to a thing that must stay a number |
| An off-chain points system | a number a company server has to be trusted for; the ladder's rule is that every number is a chain fact anyone can read from an RPC |
| A rank-by-hashrate board | a renter tops it on the first day; the only board is weight, which takes 30 days |
| A "top earners" board in fiat | there is no price; a typed price is the user's and stays on their machine |
| A Discord level bot (MEE6-style XP for messages) | a number a server owner sets; it rewards talking, not mining |
| A bounty for the first ASIC, or a device bounty | ruled out (M1, M22); a device bounty is a sale of the chip |
| Streaks that penalise a miss (lost rungs, demotion) | the signing bonus already prices a miss (72 until you sign again) and nothing is burned; a second penalty on top is the burn the owner refused |
| Any surface whose number needs a company server to be trusted | the observer, the API and the Discord bot are conveniences; every number they show must be reproducible from a node, or it is not shown |
7. Verdict table
| Proposal | Evidence (chain, year, number) | Newness | Hours | Gate | Recommend |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Signed and notarised installers | SmartScreen warns on any file without reputation (Microsoft Learn, 2026); polish Q3 | everyone has it; we lack it | 7 plus certificates | no interstitial on a fresh Mac; the Windows one gone by 1,000 downloads | do now |
| The Poisson count-up before the first block | 2miners shows pool luck (kas.2miners.com, 2026); no app shows a solo miner's own running chance | nobody has it | 2 | the line shows until the first block | do now |
| The block card with a saved PNG | EtherMining's rig photo 2,528 points in 2021 (section 1.1); the Helium miner photo 860 in 2021 | nobody has it in a miner app (approximate) | 4.5 | PNG with no network call | do now |
| Earnings in IGN first, a typed price second | NiceHash shows fiat first (polish 3.1, approximate); Q18 | someone has fiat; nobody has "typed price, never fetched" | 6.5 | every line names its field | do now |
| The weight ladder: vote, signature, full window, rank, streak | rule v2 (Igneum, 2026): weight is 30 days of blocks per key | nobody has it | 6 (across Ember, address page, Discord) | a Devnet 2 key walks every rung on screen | do now |
The weight leaderboard on /live |
Kaspa pools rank workers by hashrate (approximate); Helium ranked hotspots by HNT (section 2) | nobody ranks by consensus weight | 3 | top 100 by weight | do now |
The hardware census on /miners |
frontier 4.3; the litepaper's promised benchmark | nobody has it | 4 | every model with three keys | do now |
| Pool-0 at 1 percent, member keys | 2miners 1.0 percent fee (2026); spec 09 member votes | the member-key pool is new; the fee is standard | 0 beyond Q67 to Q73 (about 20) | G-C4 | do now |
| #first-blocks and the Voter and Window roles | Discord kit roles (2026); chain-side facts | nobody grants a role from consensus weight (approximate) | 5 | roles from a signed message | do now |
| The public address profile behind an opt-in | Helium's explorer hotspot page (2021), section 2 | someone has it (Helium); ours adds the vote and the signatures | 3 | renders for every key | prototype |
The first-hour timeline on /miner with measured times |
the devnet laptop's 7 minutes and the 5090's first minute (bench log, 4 Oct 2026) | ethereum.org and kaspa.org have no measured install time (approximate) | 2 | the page equals the gate's log | prototype |
| The worker-protocol document for miner authors | lolMiner 0.75 percent Kaspa fee, T-Rex 1 percent (their READMEs, 2026) | standard | 8 | one outside miner ships Igneum | prototype |
| A dust line that scales with the network | section 1.4: an 8 GB card never votes past about 500 GH/s | a finality-lane question | 0 here | the finality lane's answer | watch |
| Sound on a block | every pool page has a block sound option (approximate) | standard | 0.5 | off by default | watch |
| Anything in section 6 | never |
8. Three headline findings for the coordinator
-
At the litepaper's 100 GH/s network a solo 8 GB card finds its first block in 1.6 hours expected and 46 percent of them see no block in the first hour, so the first-hour dopamine for the most common tier is the Poisson count-up line and the pool's first share under a minute, not the block; at 1 TH/s that card finds a block every 16 hours and never reaches the 100-block vote line (44 blocks in 30 days), which the finality lane must weigh against the 1,000-independent-keys gate.
-
Igneum's 30-day vote window is a level system no other chain has, and it is free: the rungs (first block, 100 blocks for a vote, a signature in a checkpoint, 30 of 30 days, rank by weight, a signing streak) are chain facts from
getFinalityWeights, cost about 6 agent hours to show across Ember, the address page and Discord, and cannot be topped by a renter inside 30 days. -
In a 105-post sample of miner joy on Reddit (69 with a room median), the posts that rise highest are the miner's own: "my card paid for itself" at 777 times the room's typical score, the rig photo at 417, the hashrate milestone at 409, against 66 for the network's own milestone and 56 for the first pool payout; so every shareable surface Igneum builds carries the miner's card, rank and days, not the project's number, and the saved block card (4.5 hours) is the first of them.
Sources
Repository files (the mission worktree, read 7 October 2026): CLAUDE.md; docs/analysis/horizon/polish.md (sections 1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 3.6, 3.7, 3.10, 4.5); docs/analysis/vote-or-burn.md section 5; docs/analysis/tail-emission.md; docs/analysis/horizon-2026-10.md section 1; docs/plans/ledger-decisions.md (item 3, the standing decisions, the 6 and 7 October decisions); docs/plans/pool.md; pool/src/config.rs; docs/spec/09-pool-protocol.md; docs/plans/miner-ui-3.md and miner-ui-3-audit.md; docs/plans/testnet-go.md; docs/design/miner-dev-fee.md; docs/community/discord-hooks.md; docs/analysis/prover-tiers-real-cards.md; docs/analysis/horizon/frontier.md 4.3; docs/bench-log.md (4 and 5 October 2026 entries); site/journey.json, site/live.html, site/explorer.html, site/miner.html, site/miner-bench.json; the litepaper text; the Reddit kit on branch reddit-kit (docs/community/reddit/outreach.md, outreach-week-1.md, discord.md).
Fetched by this lane (all 7 October 2026):
- https://2miners.com/faq (payouts every 2 hours; thresholds per coin page)
- https://kas.2miners.com/ (1.0 percent fee, 50 KAS minimum, 771 miners, luck 441 percent, last block 2 minutes ago)
- https://solo-kas.2miners.com/ (SOLO fee 1.5 percent, 99 miners)
- https://p2pool.io/ (min payout 0.00027 XMR; "several days to a week to find a share")
- https://github.com/Lolliedieb/lolMiner-releases (Kaspa fee 0.75 percent, Autolykos 1.5 percent)
- https://github.com/trexminer/T-Rex (1 percent, 2 percent on Octopus and Autolykos2; the antivirus note)
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/operating-system-security/virus-and-threat-protection/microsoft-defender-smartscreen/ (page dated 23 April 2026)
- https://www.ssl.com/code-signing/ (reputation through use for OV and EV)
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/102445 (Open Anyway)
- https://developer.apple.com/programs/ (USD 99 a year) and https://developer.apple.com/support/compare-memberships/ (notarisation included)
- https://shop.certum.eu/open-source-code-signing-on-simplysign.html (from EUR 49, out of stock)
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/trusted-signing/ (Basic 5,000 signatures a month; price not shown)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium_Network and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chia_(cryptocurrency)
- https://api.pullpush.io/reddit/search/submission/ (r/EtherMining, r/chia, r/HeliumNetwork, r/kaspa listings used as a cross-check of the sub-lane's sample)
Fetched by the Reddit sub-lane (scratch mission-reinvent/reddit-sample.md, 105 posts, every URL in its table 1 and quotes in table 3; the Arctic Shift archive for medians; the ninjastic archive for bitcointalk). The URLs cited in sections 1.1 and 2 above are from that file.
Fetched by the chains sub-lane (scratch mission-reinvent/chains.md, 96 URLs in its sources list): the Helium HIPs 10, 15, 17, 20, 25, 51, 53, 54, 70 and the denylist repository; the Chia blog posts of 11 Nov 2020, 23 Feb, 17 Mar, 24 May, 13 Jun, 15 Jun, 30 Jun, 7 Jul, 3 Aug 2021 and 19 Mar 2022 and releases 1.0.0, 1.1.0, 1.2.0; Etherscan's hashrate CSV; bitinfocharts ETH and ETC; Decrypt on ETC; api.kaspa.org; the BzMiner, lolMiner and Team Red release pages; asicminervalue; the Monero node RPC, xmrchain, the RandomX repository and getmonero.org; the Ravencoin whitepapers, releases and blockbook; the Ergo releases, docs and explorer API; the 2miners stats APIs and blog; CoinGecko for every price. Pages that refused the fetch (Mashable, The Verge, Bloomberg, Forbes, CNBC, Polygon, PCMag) are cited through Wikipedia and marked so in that file.
Figures labelled approximate come from memory and were not pinned to a page today.