Did the BTG network maintain miners and hashrate after the change to Equihash-BTG (Equihash <144,5>)?

There was virtually no loss of miners or hashpower after the July 3rd change in our PoW algorithm to Equihash-BTG (also known as Equihash<144,5> or Zhash.)


Many people are confused by the reduction in hashrate, which was a natural result of the change in PoW algorithm.

On GPUs mining Equihash, output is 12x faster when doing <200,9> (previous algo) compared to <144,5> (current algo). This means that the same amount of mining power that generates 100k of hashrate with <200,9> would produce 8.33k of hashrate with <144,5>. This would be a reduction in hashrate (measured as solutions per second), but not a reduction in hashpower (measured in the size of the mining network’s dedicated hardware.)

If the exact same number of miners remained after the PoW change, we would expect the hashrate to be 1/12th the prior figure.

As anyone can see on BitInfoCharts, our hashrate in late June was around 26Msol. If we lost zero miners, we would expect 26/12 = 2.16 MSol after the PoW change. The actual figure was about 2Msol, showing a very slight drop - very few miners lost, despite the software changes.

In early July, many makers of mining software were still improving their code to be more efficient with <144,5>; the necessary optimizations are dramatically different from <200,9>. Moreover, at the time of our upgrade, there were no efficient options for AMD miners. As a result, most AMD miners moved to other coins, but enough additional NVIDIA miners joined the BTG network to mostly make up the difference.

Summary: the hashrate declined to about 1/12 the prior rate, as expected, but the hashpower in terms of hardware dedicated to mining BTG remained roughly the same.

How has the network fared since then?

Since August, mining software has improved and become available for more hardware variants. In addition, confidence in BTG has improved, and the price of BTG appears to have been rising to reflect that confidence.

Our hashrate has been steadily improving. Here’s a chart of the past 60 days:

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There is some confusion between hashpower and hashrate. Power consists of processors doing work. Rate is a measure of solutions per second.

We often estimate hashpower in hashrate. This works well to compare one GPU to a different GPU when both are using the same algorithm.

However, you can not use hashrate to compare power between two different algorithms, because the algorithms have different hashrates when powered by the same GPU.

An extreme example

Consider two imaginary coins, Centricoin and Decentricoin, each with a small mining network.

Centricoin uses SHA256 for PoW. It is showing a hashrate of 10,500,000,000,000 (or 10 Terahash.)

Decentricoin uses Equihash<144,5>. It is showing a hashrate of 40,000 (or 40 Kilohash.)

Which has the larger, more powerful network?

A commonly available SHA256 miner can be purchased for well under $500 which produces 10.5 Terrahash. The Centricoin network may be a single miner.

Commonly available GPUs for about $500 produce 40 or 50 hash of Equihash<144,5> . The Decentricoin network consists of thousands of miners.

Clearly, Decentricoin has a vastly larger and more powerful network.

Conclusion: raw hashrate can not be used to compare the relative power of mining networks that use different algorithms.

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good explainations and clearly, many coin used equihash 144.5, its prove equihash 144.5 good algorithm and decentralisation