It's been many months since my last Adventures of STEEM mining post. A few things have changed since then.
One major thing was that Equihash was brought into the code since the last hardfork to use as Proof of Work or POW. Implementing Equihash into Steem was only a speculation before then when @dantheman had put together a bounty for its development.
Equihash was wanted to make mining a bit more fair, as it was speculated that a few miners (rabbits and supercomputing or gtx) had a GPU exploit when STEEM mining was supposed to be CPU only. These mining accounts had dominated the mining scene since as far back as anyone can remember.
When the network switched to this new hardfork, rabbits and supercomputing were no longer in the queue! However, a chat member in the Steemit Chat said he was working on a GPU miner and dominance would continue in about a week's time. Equihash, which was also used for the cryptocurrency ZCash, did have open-source GPU miners available. That chat member had commented that the Equihash mining aspect in the steemd code was pretty inefficient.
Also, along with the last hardfork came a reduction of the mining reward. Instead of receiving 1 SP after signing a block, about 0.185 SP will be received, which is what a top 19 witness gets now, too. This reduced reward could be a reason why the dominating accounts have left, in search of other more profitable ventures.
Later on, @abit had published a shortcut on GitHub (v0.16.0 equihash mining shortcut) that instead of actually hashing with Equihash, would keep submitting a hardcoded pow. This will broadcast every round and as it turns out, due to a bug in the steem code, the network accepts the work as valid when it should have checked.
Here is what the queue looks like now:
See my witness schedule live visualization for an up-to-date real-time view.
There seems to be a consistent 171 miners in the queue at all times, perhaps this is the maximum. This means it takes about 3 hours to go from the bottom to the top and be scheduled to produce a block in the next round. A lot of miners have multiple account names so they may enter the queue multiple times.
Looking in the blockchain explorer steemd.com at a few of these miner's broadcasted pow's and comparing the hardcoded work from @abit's mining shortcut show that they are a match!
There are accounts that start with gtx, but they don't nearly dominate the queue as much as in the past. Now, there are many other miners participating now, with several dominating accounts arising. It could be possible that rabbit might be disguised as some of the generic names though, who knows? Mining is another way for account creation to happen on Steem, instead of having a parent account power up a new account with the account creation fee.
Finally, the proposals for the next hardfork do mention removing POW mining though, so the Adventures of STEEM mining series may be close to an end, along with all the drama and idiosyncrasies of STEEM mining.
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