Duinocoin mining: How does the Kolka system work?
Slow is better than fast - Kolka turns the performance madness upside down
The Duinocoin (DUCO) is based on a SHA1 hash chain and uses the Kolka system created by the DUCO developers themselves to reward weak miners fairly. How does this work?
With all other cryptocurrencies, miners are rewarded who are as fast as possible, energy-hungry and therefore expensive. Those who use more money get more coins. With Duinocoin, it's the other way around: an Arduino UNO/Nano is the cheapest and most efficient way to mine DUCO.
Coins for CPU power
Mining all cryptocurrencies is primarily about reward - in the form of coins that you get for using hardware (investment) and energy (operating costs). With all cryptocurrencies, the more money you put into the miners and the electricity bill, the more rewards / coins you get. Those who have a lot of money make a lot of extra money, and those who can't afford high-end equipment like an ASIC miner and a hefty electricity bill don't get any rewards either. This is how our meritocracy and the turbo-capitalism we live in works.
The Kolka code (here a part of Kolka V1) rewards the use of few, simple and power-saving miners.
The Duinocoin wants to be socially and environmentally friendly and turns the principle around through "Kolka": The highest reward currently goes to the Arduino UNO, which is probably the weakest hardware for mining. The ATMEGA328P is a small 8-bit RISC microcontroller with 16 (up to 20) MHz, 32 KByte flash memory, 1 KByte EEPROM and just 2 KByte internal RAM. And it works the other way round for mining farms, too: The first four miners are rewarded with 100% each, miner #5 only with 96%, #6 with 92% - and each additional miner receives 4% less. So mining farms of rich investors with thousands of Arduino UNOs make no sense. Wonderful!
Where does the name "Kolka" come from?
If you search for a Kolka algorithm, all you find is the Horn of Kolka and the fishing village of Kolka in northwestern Latvia. As Duinocoin developer Robert Piotrowski (revox) explains in the white paper for his coin, he derived the name from "Coca Cola" - well... you have to have some imagination for that.
How does Kolka work?
The Kolka system is supposed to provide some kind of justice for slow miners. Kolka does this in various ways. Since several improvements were necessary, there are four Kolka versions so far, each of which builds on the other:
1. Kolka V1 (March 2020)
Kolka V1 uses different difficulty levels (Difficulty) for AVR and ESP microcontrollers as well as for PCs. The reward depends on the hashrate and the time needed, the number of shares per time unit, the number of miners in the account, the Difficulty value and randomness.
2. Kolka V2 (June 2020)
Of course, there was an immediate attempt to abuse the Duinocoin system and its simple DUCO-S1 algorithm. On fast PCs, it is easy to simulate the computing power of hundreds of Arduinos. Since Kolka V2, miners who send in too many shares per time unit are therefore slowed down. It is also checked whether the hashrate matches the specified platform.
3. Kolka V3 (March 2021)
Kolka V3 dynamically adjusts the difficulty to the miner's processing power. If the shares for a particular platform are submitted very quickly, the algorithm increases the Difficulty for the miner.
4. Kolka V4 (May 2020)
Kolka V4 evaluates the UniqueID of AVR and ESP chips and sends it to the servers. This is to detect whether they are real microcontrollers (and not simulated miners).
If you want to take a closer look at the Kolka algorithm, you can find the actual code (kolka.js) on Github.
