Mining PegNet (PEG) Tokens With Your Spare CPU Resources

PegNet is a decentralized, non-custodial network of tokens pegged (stabilized) to different currencies and assets that allows for trading and conversion of value without the need for counterparties. It is a fully auditable, open source stable coin network using the competition of PoW and external oracles to converge on the prices of currencies and assets. You can mine PEG, the token of PegNet which can be seamlessly converted to any pAsset on the network with no spread, no slippage, and with infinite liquidity. The PEG mining is CPU-based thanks to its unique LXRHash algorithm and you can either solo mine or use a pool with the second option being more interesting and easier for most users with limited hashpower due to the way rewards are being distributed. PegNet was launched fairly with no premine and no ICO.

The miners in the PegNet network act as oracles for the pricing data of the PegNet assets. Miners are responsible for fetching the latest pricing data, and reporting the prices to the Factom Blockchain. Their prices will be submitted in a specific oracle chain on the Factom Blockchain. After each block is published, all of the entries within it will be analyzed by the miners and the reward will go to the miners that have given the most authoritative answers. Each entry that is published as part of the mining process must contain the Oracle Price Record (OPR). This allows the miners to give the PegNet network real-time price information. The OPR includes the full list of the PegNet assets as well as their current price in PEG. The hashing algorithm employed by PegNet is designed to be RAM access bound. CPU or GPU hardware has less of an impact on the overall performance of the hashing challenge. The PegNet provides a static 5000 PEG reward with every block with 10 minute block time with the reward distributed evenly among the top 25 graded OPRs (200 PEG each).

The only available pool at the moment for PegNet PEG mining is ORAX Pool that combines all the hashing power of many users in order to get more winning OPRs and then splits the award among all of the miners using it. Since every round the number of OPRs from the pool can vary the total block reward distributed among miners will be variable as well and in rare cases it can even be zero (no winning OPRs and no rewards). Going for solo mining PEG with little hashing power will make it harder for you to get among the winning OPRs, though if you do it would mean that you will get 200 PEG as a reward. So our guide here is for pool mining on the ORAX pool and not for solo mining.

To start mining on the ORAX pool you need to first download their client application orax-cli as it is being used both for registration on the pool as well as for mining. You need to run "orax-cli.exe register" on the system you are going to be using for mining and the first time you do so to select to create a new account, when running on the second and so on mining rig you can just select to use existing account and login with it. When registering you need to provide email address (login ID) and password for the pool as well as payment address, each mining rig will get a unique ID generated and you can set an alias to know which miner is which in the pool stats. The easiest way to obtain a wallet address is to use one of the exchanges that support PEG trading – VineX or ViteX DEX which should be fine as long as you will be mining and trading only, for holding PEG tokens it would be better if you go for local wallet. The third and newest addition is the Citex crypto exchange that has just announced it is also listing PEG for trading…

To start the actual mining process you need to run "orax-cli.exe mine". Have in mind that the first time you run the mining command it will take some time before the actual mining process starts, something like 10 or more minutes for the initial generation of 1GB map of the LXR hash (PegNet hashing function) and then run 1 minute test of the hashrate that your hardware is going to be capable of delivering, the hashrate estimate will then be reported by the miner. This is needed only the first time you run the miner on the mining rig, the next time it will start mining immediately, though no hashrate will be reported during the mining process. You can track hashrate and reward stats on the pool every 10 minutes after a block is finished and data is reported poolside.

By default the miner uses all of the available logical cores, though you cans elect the number of threads to use. Although the CPU load may be 100% when mining the actual power usage and operating temperature will most likely be lower compared to other CPU minable coins due to the specifics of the algorithm being used by PegNet. The LXRHash uses an XOR/Shift random number generator coupled with a lookup table of randomized sets of bytes. Using a 1GB lookup table results in a RAM Hash PoW algorithm that spends over 90% of its execution time waiting on memory (RAM) than it does computing the hash. Of course performance wise the CPU affects hashrate and it seems that unlike RandomX for instance where AMD Ryzen is doing quite well compared to Intel CPUs, here LXRHash does manage to provide some advantage for Intel processors. AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (6C-12T) processor manages to deliver around 45000 H/s while an Intel Core i7 6850K (6C-12T) processor gets you around 65000 H/s for mining PEG using the LXRHash algorithm.