The State of PAI Mining - January 19, 2022
The PAI Blockchain hash rate as of 2nd week of January 2022 is approximately 65 GH/s. Over the past week, however, block rewards were paid out to a total of only 18 addresses, with the top 5 most profitable of those addresses accounting for over 50% of the hash rate. This indicates that mining is currently being done by one or a very small number of miners, which is not ideal for a protocol designed to be truly decentralized.
The amount of standard (non-specialized) computational resourcesâe.g., CPUs & GPUsârequired to generate this amount of hash power would be remarkably expensive to rent, own, and/or maintain. There are two logical explanations why the current miners are able to still mine while achieving their own goals:
The miners controlling this hash power have access to free or greatly subsidized compute resources.
The miners have developed a specialized chip for mining PAI Coin more efficiently (e.g., an ASIC).
Recall that a modified (âproprietaryâ) hash function was activated at block height 205953. The fact that the current miners were able to adapt to this change and resume mining in such short order seems to indicate that the first explanation is more likely than the second (since modifying their miner software codebase would be easier than manufacturing a new chip).
In the grand scheme of things, however, the explanation does not matter.
Why?
Because the PAI Blockchain is truly decentralized and has no ultimate governing authority.
By virtue of these properties, PAI protocol cannot (and should not) exclude participants based on some suspected or perceived inequity. This would go against the very nature of a censorship-resistant protocol and decentralization.
What can be done, however, is for otherâcurrently dormantâsupporters to wrest back control. As explained above, no single entity is likely to be able to do this alone due to the outsize expense required. A collective effort, on the other hand, could be effective in reducing the profit margins of the currently dominant miners and help to distribute the network.
This collective effort is easily facilitated by mining through PAI Coin Pool. All you have to do is log in to paicoinpool.com, download and install the PAI Miner, and run it in the background any time youâre at your computer (and even when youâre not!). It is not expensive to do.
While such an effort will likely not be profitable for individual miners, it is the first step toward restoring balance to the PAI Blockchain. Anyone interested in the future of PAI and its long-term success should contribute by mining with whatever devices they have.