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Prerequisites

To better understand this page, we recommend you first read up on transactions, blocks and proof-of-work.

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What is Parallax mining?

Mining is the process of creating a block of transactions to be added to the Parallax blockchain. The word mining originates in the context of the gold analogy for cryptocurrencies. Gold or precious metals are scarce, so are digital tokens, and the only way to increase the total volume in a proof-of-work system is through mining. In Parallax, the only mode of issuance is via mining. Unlike gold or precious metals however, Parallax mining is also the way to secure the network by creating, verifying, publishing and propagating blocks in the blockchain. Mining laxes = Securing the Network Mining is the lifeblood of any proof-of-work blockchain. Parallax miners - computers running software - uses their time and computation power to process transactions and produce blocks.

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Why do miners exist?

In decentralized systems like Parallax, we need to ensure that everyone agrees on the order of transactions. Miners help this happen by solving computationally difficult puzzles to produce blocks, securing the network from attacks. More on proof-of-work Anyone is able to mine on the Parallax network using their computer.

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Cost of mining

  • Potential costs of the hardware necessary to build and maintain a mining rig
  • Electrical cost of powering the mining rig
  • If you are mining in a pool, these pools typically charged a flat % fee of each block generated by the pool
  • Potential cost of equipment to support mining rig (ventilation, energy monitoring, electrical wiring, etc.)
To further explore mining profitability, use a mining calculator.

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How Parallax transactions are mined

The following provides an overview of how transactions are mined in Parallax.
  1. A user writes and signs a transaction request with the private key of some account.
  2. The user broadcasts the transaction request to the entire Parallax network from some node.
  3. Upon hearing about the new transaction request, each node in the Parallax network adds the request to their local mempool, a list of all transaction requests they’ve heard about that have not yet been committed to the blockchain in a block.
  4. At some point, a mining node aggregates several dozen or hundred transaction requests into a potential block, in a way that maximizes the transaction fees they earn while still staying under the block gas limit. The mining node then:
    1. Verifies the validity of each transaction request (i.e. no one is trying to transfer laxes out of an account they haven’t produced a signature for, the request is not malformed, etc.), and then executes the code of the request, altering the state of their local copy of the PVM. The miner awards the transaction fee for each such transaction request to their own account.
    2. Begins the process of producing the proof-of-work “certificate of legitimacy” for the potential block, once all transaction requests in the block have been verified and executed on the local PVM copy.
  5. Eventually, a miner will finish producing a certificate for a block which includes our specific transaction request. The miner then broadcasts the completed block, which includes the certificate and a checksum of the claimed new PVM state.
  6. Other nodes hear about the new block. They verify the certificate, execute all transactions on the block themselves (including the transaction originally broadcasted by our user), and verify that the checksum of their new PVM state after the execution of all transactions matches the checksum of the state claimed by the miner’s block. Only then do these nodes append this block to the tail of their blockchain, and accept the new PVM state as the canonical state.
  7. Each node removes all transactions in the new block from their local mempool of unfulfilled transaction requests.
  8. New nodes joining the network download all blocks in sequence, including the block containing our transaction of interest. They initialize a local PVM copy (which starts as a blank-state PVM), and then go through the process of executing every transaction in every block on top of their local PVM copy, verifying state checksums at each block along the way.
Every transaction is mined (included in a new block and propagated for the first time) once, but executed and verified by every participant in the process of advancing the canonical PVM state. This highlights one of the central mantras of blockchain: Don’t trust, verify.

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The mining algorithm

Parallax uses the XHash mining algorithm. XHash is based on Ethash, which is the successor to an original R&D algorithm known as ‘Dagger-Hashimoto’. More on mining algorithms.
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