The Relaunch (v2)
We announced the plans for v2 back in October 2020 wherein we stated that the TurtleCoin® v1 network would start its path to it’s own destruction around block 4 million and ultimately kill itself off at block 5 million.
We expanded on this idea in the v2 overview article which included information about the v1 chain ramping down over time so that we make it to block 5 million in a predictable way. We’ve also stated that the v2 “pre-mine” (so to speak) will be equivalent to the number of coins expected to be emitted in v1 at block 5 million with the swap ratio (100,000:1) being maintained.
In the v2 FAQ we clarified what the total supply in v2 would look like at launch.
Right now, we estimate that the circulating supply of TRTL v1 at block 5,000,000 (when the chain ends) will be around 120,000,000,000 TRTL when accounting for the ramp down of the v1 chain. At the swap ratio of 100,000:1, this means that approximately 1,200,000 TRTL will be pre-mined on the v2 chain to fund the swap process (details below).
v1 Total Supply
Since that time, we have busted out our abacuses, carried the niner, and found a few extra toes so that we could calculate the expected amount of circulating TurtleCoin® on the v1 chain at block 5 million.
Note: Block rewards, and hence emission is defined in the code base, it’s pretty easy to run the calculation if you’ve got a few minutes.
What that calculation revealed was that, based on our ramp down mechanics, the adjusted total supply of v1 comes to 125,506,496,777.95 TRTL.
To be abundantly clear, there never will be more than just over 125 billion v1 TRTL in existence because the v1 chain will die, it will come to and end, at block 5 million.
The block explorer, the circulating supply page, etc. were updated to reflect the adjusted v1 total supply as a result of this fact.
So… where did the other 875 billion coins go?
Burning ~87.5% of v1 Total Supply
The Total Supply of TurtleCoin® v1 was just reduced from 1,000,000,000,000 TRTL to 125,506,496,777.95 TRTL. The remainder (874,493,503,222.05 TRTL) won’t ever be mined, no one has it, it will never exist.
However, from the perspective of the total supply (ie. economics) it’s basically a coin burn of ~87.49% of the total supply. The coins will never be minted, they’ll never exist, they just disappear from the total supply. Simple as that.
The v2 Total Supply
We’ve touched on this in the FAQ, overview, and few other articles and most recently in Podcast #002 – Coin Burn.
The Total Supply of TurtleCoin® v2 will be dynamic. At launch, the total supply will be the amount of the pre-mine (1,255,065.97 TRTL) generated to fund the swap process. As the chain is used, transactions are handled, and new coins are minted, the total supply will increase. If candidate nodes (Producers and Validators) perform… poorly… and their stakes are slashed, the total supply will decrease.
As we discussed in Podcast #002, the v2 supply consists of more than just Total Supply and Circulating Supply. There’s actually a few different buckets that currency lands in:
- Circulating Supply: The coins that are free to move within the network. Users can send it back and forth, buy things with it, move it around, etc.
- Staked Supply: The coins are actively in a stake (whether the entry fee for a candidate node or as votes) and cannot be freely moved without withdrawing the stake (and their votes)
- Slashed (Burned) Supply: The coins have been slashed or burned from the staked supply as a result of producers and/or validators not doing their job or doing it poorly. These coins are never coming back.
This means that the Total Supply = (circulating supply) + (staked supply).
Hold Up
Before you scrunch your nose, put your hands on your hips, and take to reddit or discord to give us the heretofore about an uncapped total supply in v2, let’s take a break and talk through some example numbers.
We’ll work with the following assumptions based upon the observations of v1 transactions and what we’ve discussed to date regarding v2:
- +95% of transactions in v2 will pay a
0.01TRTL transaction fee. - Block rewards will be a 1:1 match (1x multiple) of the aggregate base transaction fees in a block.
- v2 transactions require PoW when sending that takes an average of ~5s to complete.
- Block rewards are distributed as outlined in v2 overview
- The 100,000:1 swap and
0.01TRTL transaction fee will result in less transactions in v2 - No stakes are slashed because everyone does their part and follows the rules
- Stakes funds cannot be “spent” as part of the circulating supply
- Blocks (and thus rewards) are only created when there is enough aggregate transaction PoW in the mempool to do so
Today, we mine ~2,880 blocks per day (using a 30s average block time). This mints ~77 million v1 TRTL. Swapping those 77 million v1 TRTL, if we were still doing PoW in v2 and adhering to 30s block times (we’re not doing this), we would mint 771.26 new v2 TRTL per day.
How many transactions need to take place in v2 to generate that amount of TRTL. Simple really. 771.26 * 100 (drop the decimals) gives us 77,126 transactions per day or just under 1 transaction per second. Seems doable, right? Maybe…
77,126 transactions would take (at an average of 5s per transaction for PoW) about 385,630 compute seconds to complete. That’s about 4.5 compute days – just to maintain the v1 per day new coin emission (as of May 15, 2021).
compute time is used here because the transaction PoW is distributed in the sense that each user sending a transaction is responsible for their own transaction PoW. Simply put, 5 users mining their transaction each taking 5s would be a total of 25 compute seconds.
How many transactions in v2 would it take to mint 1,255,065.97 v2 TRTL (a doubling of the initial total supply)? Again, drop the decimals. Users will need to generate about 125,506,597 transactions to double the v2 total supply.
That’s 27x more user generated transactions than exists in the v1 chain after more than three years of use.
If every transaction takes an average of 5s of PoW work to complete, it’ll take an aggregate of 627,532,985 seconds to generate that number of transactions.
That’s 7,263 compute days (or 19.89 compute years).
Even if the transaction PoW is optimized by some new fangled mining hardware or software, and those transactions are distributed across all users thus shortening that 19.89 compute years to say 3 years of actual time, emission is essentially slowed to a trickle.
When you combine the transaction PoW requirements, a 1:1 match of new rewards, stakes being locked (where they can’t be spent), stake slashing, blocks only being minted when required, and the fact that the vast majority of transactions will carry fees of just 0.01 TRTL, the chances of rampant inflation on the v2 network seems pretty low.
10,000 TRTL – Kill your past lives – SHMUP I made on Steam – buy a key for 10k TRTL! @quantumpotato in discord.
TurtleCoin Core Goals
Fun, Fast, and Easy
For those of you that have been to the TurtleCoin website, the goals below may seem repetitive. For those of you that do not know, TurtleCoin was born with a few goals in mind:
The community is reminded of these goals every time they interact with the network, participate in discussions, and help spread TurtleCoin around the globe. These core values drive everything that is done within the community from core development, documentation generation, learning opportunities, support, and community project management. We take these goals very seriously and will do whatever we can to make sure that TurtleCoin remains true to the initial vision.
Decentralization of Mining Resources
What is Decentralization?
Decentralization is, to put it plainly, the process by which planning, and decision making are shifted away from a central authority or group. The process can take many forms but in our case in the context of a Proof of Work (PoW), it means that no central authority or group controls most of the resources needed to complete the PoW.
Why Care About Decentralization?
When most of the necessary resources to satisfy the PoW requirements end up centralized, those that control those resources can, when motivated to do so, take control of the network away from the community. Such control can manifest itself in ways such as:
Each of the above attack vectors result in a network that is no longer “Fun, Fast, and Easy”. These attacks are, in the eyes of many, fraud and in the very least theft. No one wants to use a network where their funds are constantly at risk.
In addition to the above sampling of on-chain attacks, centralization of mining resources also poses additional problems when those resources are controlled within, produced by, or otherwise restricted by one or two entities.
Where Does PoW Centralization Come From?
The most common forms of PoW centralization come from technologies designed to make PoW calculations more efficient, including:
ASICs and FPGAs are, to be fair, technologies that help secure PoW networks by increasing the overall hashrate of the network while drastically reducing the resources (electricity, physical space, management, monitoring, etc.) to do so. By increasing the efficiency of mining, others are encouraged to participate in the mining process. The more distributed hashrate a PoW network has, the harder it is to attack via the methods described above.
Supply Chain Centralization
Unfortunately, both ASICs and FPGAs are largely the product of a handful of special interest groups and organizations that create high barriers to entry and generally avoid transparency and accountability. This presents a problem in that a project that embraces these technologies today relies on just a few manufacturers to create the specialized ASICs and FPGAs needed to secure their blockchain.
While this may not sound like that big of a deal, all we have to do is think back to the countless instances in history where one group controlled the supply of a product or service.
Such centralization of manufacturing also presents a problem in that the production of ASICs and FPGAs for mining now falls under a limited number of jurisdictions. Governments could, and have, changed the legality of producing, owning, or operating such hardware on a moment’s notice. The fact that a single entity could control the hardware necessary for operating the network is in direct opposition of the goals of decentralization.
To prevent centralization of the manufacturing of the hardware there must be a multitude of manufacturers spread all over the globe. Only then is it possible to reduce the risk of a single group impacting the supply chain of ASICs and FPGAs.
Note: CPUs suffer from some of the same issues mentioned above; however, CPUs are general purpose integrated circuits that are commercially available in large quantities at affordable prices and their manufacturers are not solely focused on cryptocurrency mining activities.
TurtleCoin’s Commitment to Decentralization
The TurtleCoin community and core development team remains committed to the stance that TurtleCoin must be easy for all to mine, fair, open, and most importantly decentralized. We’ve posted numerous articles, videos, and GitHub threads reaffirming this commitment since the inception of the project. Notable examples of such include:
While others may deviate and split from their goals of decentralization, the TurtleCoin community remains fully committed to the vision that a decentralized PoW remains our best chance at long-term sustainability.
Upcoming Proof-of-Work Algorithm Change
The upgrade to CN Turtle at block 1,200,000 was a success; however, as mentioned in the Proof-of-Work Algorithm Change, we’ve had another algorithm change on the burner well before that upgrade. We always knew that CN Turtle would be a temporary step meant only to give us a bit of breathing room to test, what we hope to be, a PoW algorithm that will prevail in our quest for decentralization for longer than prior algorithms have allowed.
We have mentioned codename Chukwa in a few different places over the last few months. If you have not been following discussions in Discord or taken at look at the GitHub Chukwa Hashing Results thread, Chukwa is actually Argon2.
What is Argon2?
Argon2 is the memory hard winner of the 2015 Password Hashing Competition (PHC). Argon2 comes in three different versions; each with their own design goals.
The Argon2 IETF RFC draft recommends the use of Argon2id.
Why Argon2?
Argon2 was selected for the following reasons (in no particular order):
Argon2 is also relatively unique in that it allows for a high-level of customisation in how the hashes are calculated including parameters such as:
Argon2id Parameters
The various input parameters allow us to tune the implementation of Argon2 such that it makes sense for TurtleCoin.
Memory Requirement
Iterations
Parallelism (Threads)
1thread per hashing operationBenchmark Testing Results
We solicited single-core performance benchmarks from the community in the Chukwa Hashing Results issue thread on the main repository. The summary of those results are below.
Note: For brevity, we have truncated the summary table below to the algorithms we have used before and Argon2 parameters that meet the requirements above.
Chukwa Parameters
Given the above requirements and the testing results provided by the community we were left with 5 clear options. One option stands out and sits nicely in the middle among the group of options. It provides a healthy 2.5x increase in hashrate and meets the requirements above.
We’ve selected the following Argon2id parameters for the next PoW:
Note: You can play with different parameters with a simple Argon2 hash generator at argon2.online
TurtleCoin’s Argon2 Implementation
Like other PoW algorithm changes, there is quite a bit of work to be done to ensure that this network upgrade is a success at block 1,800,000. We have adapted the Argon2 reference implementation for our use.
Caveats
Miner Package Availability
At this time, we have found very few miner packages that support Argon2id. While the native CPU miner provided in the core project will happily support the algorithm for solo mining, we understand that the network and community requires the availability of mining pools. To help facilitate pooled mining, we are currently working on building pool support into the native CPU miner provided by the project.
GPU Mining Support
We have not currently been able to find any miner packages that support Argon2id GPU mining. While we are confident that the community at large will work towards having an Argon2id GPU miner available at some point, it is unlikely that a GPU miner will be available at the time of the upgrade. As a result, we fully expect a substanial drop in the network hashrate as a result of this upgrade. We are planning a difficulty reset to account for this drop at the time of the upgrade. This has a byproduct of making TurtleCoin a CPU only coin for the foreseeable future.
Completed
Core
We have completed the necessary changes in the core project to implement Argon2id at block 1,800,000 that will activate with block major version 6. The changes can be found on the codename_chuckwa branch of the TurtleCoin repository. This code has not been pulled into the development tree or master as of the time of this writing.
Support Packages
The necessary changes have also been applied to the development branch of the turtlecoin-multi-hashing Node.js module that pools use to validate miner shares.
Pool Changes
The necessary changes to the turtle-pool software have been completed on the chukwa branch.
In Progress
Testnet
We will also be launching multiple testnets to test the algorithm change including a difficulty reset to adjust for the anticipanted loss of GPU mining hashrate.
How You Can Help
We need help from the community to test this algorithm change to try to ensure that everything goes as smoothly as possible. The more people that are involved, the easier it is to spot issues and correct for them before the upgrade.
Community Reminder
As always, be mindful of TurtleCoin core releases. Watch or star the main TurtleCoin repo to help stay abreast of changes and updates. Join Discord and read the #announcements on a regular basis. Or, sign up for the @news role by typing *news in the chat and be alerted whenever a new announcement is posted in Discord.
Make sure you’re ready for the network upgrade as early as possible. As with any network upgrade, prior versions of the software will no longer be compatible with the rest of the network after upgrade completion.
Remember that you too can participate in discussions regarding the direction of the project via Discord and the TurtleCoin Meta Issues. Join the discussing regarding the PoW change via the Chukwa: The Argon2 PoW Algorithm discussion on GitHub.