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Introduction

One of Quai Network’s innovations is the idea of a decentralized mining pool. This allows miners to start producing hashrate on Quai Network without the need to set up a node or trust a centralized mining pool for payouts. It allows node operators to earn income by providing this service to other miners without installing or setting up any software beyond the go-quai that they already run. By virtually eliminating the marignal cost of running a mining pool, we also expect competition to increase and fees to decrease for users overall. Furthermore, there is currently no way for miners to indicate their preference for Quai vs Qi, or specify a lockup period with traditional mining pools.

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Background

Traditional (centralized) mining pools and the alternatives that exist in the market currently offer 2 primary benefits:
  1. Users can spread out the volatility in payouts among thousands of other miners, earning consistent stable payouts.
  2. Users can mine without the infrastructure costs, maintenance costs, or upkeep requirements of running and keeping a consensus client up to date.
Quai inherently mitigates the first factor via the introduction of WorkShares, which reduce the mean time between payouts at the protocol level. DePools mitigate the second factor by eliminating the marginal cost of running a node. Node operators don’t need to develop their own mining pool software with the overhead of tracking and distributing payouts, paying high infrastructure costs, full time salary employees, etc. All it takes to run a DePool is a flag to enable it, and another flag to set your fee, that’s it!

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Prerequisites

Quai Network NodeA Quai Network node to use as the pool endpoint.
Publicly accessible nodeEnsure that port 8200 is publicly accessible to miners.

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Installation

Please follow the instructions for how to Run A Node before continuing to the next section.

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Configuration options

Ensure that you are on the correct branch. This feature is released in a special branch. To start, you can run: 
git clone https://github.com/dominant-strategies/go-quai
cd go-quai
git checkout decentralized-pool
make go-quai
By operating this service you earn a fee on all the blocks your miners find. The default is a 0.1% fee, which is competitive with standard centralized mining pool fees of up to 1% for new coins. However, you can afford to charge less than centralized pools due to the vast reduction in infrastructure, development, support, and maintenance costs. If you would like to change it, specify the following flag with your fee as a percentage. --workshares.fee 0.1 The following flags must be specified either in your start command, or config.toml. Most aren’t specific to this feature, but they ensure that your node accepts incoming connections.

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Start command flags

./build/bin/go-quai start --node.quai-coinbases "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000001" --node.qi-coinbases "0x0080000000000000000000000000000000000001" --node.miner-preference 0.5  --workshares.pool=true --workshares.fee 0.1 --rpc.http-api "quai,net,workshares" --rpc.ws-api "quai,net,workshares" --rpc.ws-addr "0.0.0.0" --rpc.ws-origins "*"