Zcoin($XZC) is hosting a competition to develop a miner for its implementation of MTP (Merkle Tree Proof) Proof of Work algorithm.The MTP algorithm was devised by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich from the University of Luxembourg in their paper published on the 11 June 2016 titled
Egalitarian Computing. These are the same researchers who came up with Equihash that is currently used in ZCash and also Argon2 the winner of the Password hashing competition
Watch our video
here for a brief overview of what MTP seeks to achieve.
We are inviting miner developers to take part!
PrizesWinner of CPU miner:
USD7,000.00Winner of AMD GPU miner:
USD7,000.00Winner of NVidia GPU miner:
USD7,000.00The prizes shall be paid in Bitcoin equivalent (Bitstamp pricing) or Zcoin equivalent (Bittrex pricing) at the respective winner’s choice. The price will be determined on the time and date the winners are announced.
CriteriaDocumentation and completeness:Accurate and comprehensive documentation included with the submission (e.g., description and rationale of design, expected performance).
Accurate documentation on where the submission may be optimized or improved further.
CompatibilityThe submission can be built/run on a variety of systems various popular distributions of Linux (Centos and Ubuntu at the very least)) and Windows. Mac is optional but looked at favorably.
The submissions for CPU would run on modern CPUs in the past 5 years.
The submissions for GPUs can work on a variety of modern GPU cards in general:
AMD Radeon R7 series and up
Nvidia Geforce 700 series and up
QualityWhether the submission has self-testing capabilities or can be easily tested.
PerformanceThis is the most important criteria but not the sole determinant as a miner that cannot be worked on by others upon because of poor documentation or incompatibility with systems is less valuable than a well documented, easily improved upon less performing miner.
The hash rate of the submission over a variety of systems. Please in your documentation provide instructions on intensity/thread settings.
Submission and DeadlineThe deadline of submission for this competition shall be the 9th August 2017 6.00PM GMT+8. Early submissions are allowed and will be looked at favorably by the judges.
The MTP code can be obtained from the mtptest Github branch.
Submissions can be amended until the deadline through making commits through the Github repository specified for Challenge purposes.
For full details, please read our blog post here:
https://zcoin.io/mtp-open-source-miner-bounty-challenge/We also have a separate MTP audit bounty challenge here:
https://zcoin.io/mtp-audit-and-implementation-bounty/