Dutch version here

02–02–2020

Introduction

In this story an explanation is given about mining of the crypto currency Gulden.

From the start of the Gulden in 2014 the scrypt algorithm was in use for the mining of the Gulden, but it got so many disadvantages that it was decided to look for a suitable alternative for scrypt. The biggest disadvantage of the scrypt algorithm was the presence of scrypt jumppools. Jumppools are pools of miners that with a very large hashrate only love Gulden when the difficulty is low, so they can easily and quickly mine a number of blocks. As soon as the difficulty went up again she “jumped” to another coin to do the same trick. The behavior of these pools caused a very fluctuating hashrate and therefore a varying block time. It happened regularly that 5–6 blocks were found within a minute and then 15 minutes nothing. The Jump Pools dominated the Gulden Network and that was not good for the stability and decentrality of the network.

SIGMA

Since October 17, 2019, the Gulden team has implemented the Sigma algorithm and since then it is possible to mine Gulden solo without additional equipment.

Sigma is a proprietary algorithm based on the Argon algorithm. Sigma is ASIC and GPU resistant and can only be used for CPU mining. Sigma can be set, managed and activated via the desktop wallet of Gulden. With this, Gulden brings the crypto mining back to the normal user and the decentrality of Gulden has been improved again. The large base of miners also ensures a stable working network. At the moment of writing the number of miners is about 300 of which the largest miners has only 4% market share compared to about 40 in the scrypt era with 2–3 poolminers with 45% market share.

If you want to know more about the technical backgrounds of SIGMA and the reasons for choosing Sigma, I recommend this blog.

Pool mining

Other algorithms are often used in the form of pool mining. This is not (yet) possible with Sigma because of the simple fact that there are no pools that support the Sigma algorithm. In addition, it makes no technical sense to mine in a pool because your solomining is just as effective and even more profitable. You only have to wait a while to find a block against pools that often pay out in fractions of a block, but of course they take some of that in the form of fees. Pools have no advantage over the solominer.

How to get started

Actually very simple,