Added support for Ethereum Classic (ETC) & UBIQ (UBQ)

[blackmennewstyle]

Hi everyone,

Following my initial pull request #1514 which added support for Conceal #1507 (comment), i have added support for Ethereum Classic (ETC) and also Ubiq (UBQ) .

Following the previous amazing work from @jon4hz regarding Uncle and Orphaned #1501, i also fixed an annoying bug in the EthereumPayoutHandler.cs, which technically impacts all Ethereum (Uncle) blockchains.
In a very particular case-scenario, when a miner/pool has enough hash-rate-power and is able to mine two blocks with the same blockHeight #1583 (comment).
They are always respectively an Uncle block and Regular block.
I have seen some people deleting one of them in their bug report, which is a huuuge mistake, since they have both a block reward and deleting one is basically: stealing coins from miner(s) :'(
The issue has been reported multiple times #1080 (comment) but it's very difficult to reproduce on most mainnet but it is very easy to encounter on some testnet like on ETC for example.

How to setup miningcore for ETC Mordor testnet

geth node

geth --mordor --config /home/ceedii/.ethereum/mordor.toml --http --mine --miner.threads 1 --unlock 0x421Afb2ce225D3A2d3DD6e63Fe57E124B40e20Af --password /home/ceedii/.ethereum/mordor/help/pool.password --allow-insecure-unlock --verbosity 4 --log.debug > /home/ceedii/.ethereum/mordor.log 2>&1

(Please refer to the online documentation - https://geth.ethereum.org/ - for further assistance if any doubt)

By default the etchash implementation i made in miningcore, based on this user contribution #1415 (comment), comes ready for mainnet.
For being able to mine on the ETC Mordor testnet, it is mandatory to change the 2 following two lines accordingly, in the file miningcore/src/Native/libetchash/ethash.h:

//#define ETCHASH_FORK_BLOCK 11700000 // classic mainnet
#define ETCHASH_FORK_BLOCK 2520000 // mordor

You will need then to compile or recompile miningcore.

miningcore config.json
An ethereumclassic_pool.json file is provided in the folder miningcore/examples/. However, it is mandatory to use:

"chainTypeOverride": "Mordor",

Lastly, do not forget to fill that section:

"dagDir": "<Your directory for the dag file>",

The following applies only if you are running your node on the same server/machine with miningcore and want to take advantage of geth automatically generating the DAG files.: If you use a .toml file just like i did, the answer is inside this file.

In any other cases, or if you are not sure, just fill that option with "" => "dagDir": "",

How to setup miningcore for ETC mainnet

geth node

geth --classic --config /home/ceedii/.ethereum/classic.toml --http --mine --miner.threads 1 --unlock 0x421Afb2ce225D3A2d3DD6e63Fe57E124B40e20Af --password /home/ceedii/.ethereum/classic/help/pool.password --allow-insecure-unlock --verbosity 4 --log.debug > /home/ceedii/.ethereum/classic.log 2>&1

(Please refer to the online documentation - https://geth.ethereum.org/ - for further assistance if any doubt)

By default the etchash implementation i made in miningcore, based on this user contribution #1415 (comment), comes ready for mainnet.
But in case you previously made the change for the ETC Mordor testnet, it is mandatory to change the 2 following two lines accordingly, in the file miningcore/src/Native/libetchash/ethash.h:

#define ETCHASH_FORK_BLOCK 11700000 // classic mainnet
//#define ETCHASH_FORK_BLOCK 2520000 // mordor

You will need then to compile or recompile miningcore.

miningcore config.json
An ethereumclassic_pool.json file is provided in the folder miningcore/examples/. By default it comes already setup for mainnet:

"chainTypeOverride": "Classic",

Lastly, do not forget to fill that section:

"dagDir": "<Your directory for the dag file>",

The following applies only if you are running your node on the same server/machine with miningcore and want to take advantage of geth automatically generating the DAG files: If you use a .toml file just like i did, the answer is inside this file.

In any other cases, or if you are not sure, just fill that option with "" => "dagDir": "",

How to setup miningcore for UBIQ mainnet

gubiq node (gubiq is a fork of geth)

gubiq --config /home/ceedii/.ubiq/mainnet.toml --http --mine --miner.threads 1 --unlock 0x6101Ee22AB2cd3907E5CA0b70EF12A2afE842A56 --password /home/ceedii/.ubiq/mainnet/help/pool.password --allow-insecure-unlock --verbosity 4 --log.debug > /home/ceedii/.ubiq/mainnet.log 2>&1

(Since gubiq is a fork of geth, please refer to the online documentation - https://geth.ethereum.org/ - for further assistance if any doubt)

miningcore config.json
An ubiq_pool.json file is provided in the folder miningcore/examples/. By default it comes already setup for mainnet:

"chainTypeOverride": "Ubiq",

Lastly, do not forget to fill that section:

"dagDir": "<Your directory for the dag file>",

The following applies only if you are running your node on the same server/machine with miningcore and want to take advantage of gubiq automatically generating the DAG files: If you use a .toml file just like i did, the answer is inside this file.

In any other cases, or if you are not sure, just fill that option with "" => "dagDir": "",

How to setup miningcore for UBIQ testnet
Sadly, there is no POW Ubiq testnet or should i say there is one but it is not open to the public. Apparently, it suffered from previous users abuses and it will not be open again to the public anytime soon.
Well, at least that was the experience and feedback i received when i tried to ask for access on reddit and also discord.

So hope you enjoy my modest contribution and happy block hunting 🔥 🚀

(My modest UBIQ (UBQ) mining pool: https://ubiq.cedric-crispin.com/)

[Censseo]

Amazing work. I saw your PR few days ago and tested it on Mordor, it works, but I was facing kind of same issues than with open etc pool. I don't feel good using geth in an unsafe way, and with docker it doesn't want to unlock at all, still didn't figure out why. And second thing, I don't get why there is a dagfile, it completely crush the thing at it takes ages to generate, more than 30 min at each start, I still don't understand if there is an issue on this on my side and I think it is not relative to your PR.
Anyway good job and thks for the work 🙂

[blackmennewstyle]

Thank you. I never tried to run miningcore through docker but i think the reason we are using unsafe on geth is maybe because of the same reason we are disabling rpc-login with monero, the C# library used in miningcore can't do identification in some context if i am not mistaken.

It needs the dag files for sending jobs and accepting the shares it receives, if you are running miningcore and geth on the same server, you can actually directly put the folder path where geth generates them in the config.json: "dagDir": "/home/ceedii/.etchash/", that will skip the generation on the miningcore side since geth automatically generates them.

You might want maybe to update your miningcore repo since i made some modifications recently.

[Censseo]

I run all of my mining pool services on docker with docker swarm. I would be happy to share with you about that, you should come to our discord: https://discord.gg/B9uxQHgp :)
and our pool: https://jjpool.fr

[jon4hz]

Actually the DAG isn't 100% necessary. For example open-ethereum-pool does validation with a light cache only.
I made a first test to do the same with miningcore here: https://github.com/jon4hz/miningcore/commit/ac71e5755aedb591122e454c67e1f7c02fa73526

However I'm not sure if there are any downsides to using a light cache only. It would make operating a pool much easier but I don't know if there is a performance impact.

[blackmennewstyle]

Oh yes my bad, for some reason i convinced myself it is, i will modify my documentation, thanks for the heads-up as always :)