Why does BiblePay’s mining reward amount change?

White WalrusBiblePay
Table of Contents hide
1. BiblePay’s mining reward system.
2. External miner released
3. Why reduce the mining reward?
4. What impact does the increase in difficulty do then?
5. BiblePay Difficulty & Subsidy table

BiblePay’s mining reward system.

Did you ever wonder why BiblePay’s mining reward amount changes every block?

If you go to Chainz BiblePay explorer, in the raw block tab, you can see the values for difficulty and subsidy.

For one month back, I mapped all the difficulty values and subsidy values on to a chart:

x-axis is the month and day in 2019. left y-axis is previous height’s difficulty number, right y-axis is miner subsidy value.

You can see that up until recently, the subsidy and (previous) difficulty were consistently in a small range. Subsidies stayed around 1300 BBP to 1400 BBP. Difficulty ranged between 2500 and 7500.

As I sorted the data by difficulty, I did not see a relationship between difficulty and subsidy initially. After diving in the code a little, the subsidy is based on the previous block’s difficulty.

External miner released

On Friday evening, Oct 11, 2019, Rob announced an external miner for BiblePay’s Proof of Bible Hash (an evolution of DASH’s x11 mining algorithm):

You can see a clear trend in the rise of difficulty as the modified minerd cpu miner was released into the wild.

It took a few days for the news to reach different people, but you can see a clear trend that difficulty is rising with subsidies lowering as a result.

Why reduce the mining reward?

Two thoughts:

  1. Any botnet that runs an external miner on multiple unauthorized computer is discouraged from mining with fewer coins per block. The higher the difficulty, the lower the payout.
  2. The more miners there are, a healthier cryptosphere exists theoretically making the BBP coin more valuable offsetting the lower subsidy. In other words, what you do mine is more valuable.

What impact does the increase in difficulty do then?

The sanctuary (masternode) rewards are currently the same as the miner subsidy. The impact is that sanctuaries currently receive a lower payout impacting their return-on-investment (ROI). There’s been talk of removing Quantitative Tightening (QT) and increasing the sanctuary percentage. This is yet to make it into code, but if it does, these two changes will have a significant impact on miner subsidies and sanctuary rewards.

BiblePay Difficulty & Subsidy table

You can download the dataset I used to generate the graph here:

previous-difficulty-subsidy.csv