Epic Mining Status Update July 2021
Unpacking the beating heart of the network
Hashrate follows price
Because $EPIC is mined 60% on RandomX, 38% on ProgPow, and 2% ASIC, we see Epic hashrates respond individually, as would be expected. The primary competition for Epic CPU miners, in other words, what they would be mining if they weren’t mining Epic, is $XMR Monero. GPU miners’ alternatives include $ETH, $ETC, $RVN. In each case, Epic mining is significantly more profitable than its competition.
62% ETH + 38% EPIC = 200% ROI:
Source: Bitcointalk.org
Hashrate per algorithm, April - July 2021. Source: explorer.epic.tech
Individual Difficulty Adjustments
BTC adjusts its difficulty every two weeks. EPIC adjusts every two hours. This makes Epic much more responsive to market conditions.
Pools
Of the top 10 mining websites, only miningpoolstats.stream shows accurate information on the coin.
As the recent overnight shutdown of 54% of the BTC hashrate shows, networks that are too geographically concentrated can suffer performance problems.
BSV, with just 199 full nodes and a single pool controlling 78% of hashrate, is also dangerously centralized.
Source: CoinDance
Geographic Dispersion: Decentralized < Distributed
Epic mining nodes coverage: 59 countries, achieved in <2 years
Update 15-Aug-21: up to 101 countries now!
Ecosystem Health: Independent Pools
As the value per coin continues to grow, competition for the 1440 blocks per day on offer will be such that for most people, pool mining is the way to go. The Epic ecosystem is fortunate to benefit from healthy competition at the pool level, as operators invest in their capabilities:
51pool.online
51pool.online, based out of Germany, is a startup that was created to focus on offering mining pool services for Epic. Lead developer Johannes Hahn is an ongoing contributor to the Epic Blockchain protocol.
Epicmine.org
Epicmine.org, based out of Europe, is another startup created specifically to focus on providing Epic pool mining services. Lead developer Sullivan focuses on ease of use, with mining rigs being able to be configured by telegram bot.
Fastepic.eu
Fast Epic, based out of Poland, brings a strong privacy focus with its keybase integration. Using Keybase open source anonymous messenger as a bridge for coordination of mining pool operations is an underappreciated bit of sexy opsec.
Icemining.ca
$EPIC is at present overwhelmingly mined by individuals cracking full blocks by themselves. Icemining.ca’s “party mode” allows miners to play together.
19.2% of hashrate is coming through icemining.ca and their 700 miners.
One of the barriers to wider awareness of Epic within the mining community is the unique multi-algorithm design, whereas most coins are single-algo.
To be continued… what would you like to see covered in the next installment of this series? Please let us know in the comments below. Like what you see? Come check us out at t.me/epiccash.