So I noticed the difficulty for testnet4 is at 1, and I'm curious about how to mine there. I tried hooking up cgminer to a node I have running, but no luck with that.
Anyone figured out mining on testnet4?
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With the hashrate that they use to flood Test networks usually using ASICs, the network difficulty doesn't really remain low though. You can see the chart here:
https://mempool.space/testnet4/graphs/mining/hashrate-difficulty
Presently, difficulty is around 70.95 M, but he can enjoy it at 1 after 20 minutes since last block mined. Though that may be hard to come through due to the consistent activities happening on the network, yet my observation on the recently mined blocks shows 20 minutes difference in most blocks mined.
As for setting up your cgminer, if you're experiencing difficulty running it, check this thread; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5415335.0
And if you need clarity whether to still mine testnet or not check here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5516607.0
Just apply those changes: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5496494.msg64205870#msg64205870
Then, you will produce valid blocks locally. Getting it globally confirmed depends on your luck (if you propagate the block faster than other nodes, and if ASICs won't reorg it).
Of course, because in this way, you can get the most coins, out of the system, by using consensus rules in your favor. Because blocks with minimal difficulty are easy to mine, and push the timestamps forward, so that ASIC blocks can bring back the time to the past, and then, you can mine blocks with the same timestamps, over and over again (which is exactly, what you can observe, if you just look at block timestamps only).
So, people are just maximizing their profits. I estimate the equilibrium is somewhere around 1/6th blocks, mined by ASICs, which means around 83% CPU-mined blocks (which you can easily challenge with any CPU, as long as ASICs won't reorg them).
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