Plebpool in Top 500. Running Total donated now at 300 ADA

We at plebpool.com couldn’t be happier. We have entered the Top 500 pools (source adapools.org). Furthermore the donations keep rolling in each and every epoch (current epoch 272) and our running Total donated to https://www.lifechangersa.org/ stands at 300 ADA or roughly R5700 at todays exchange rate. Thanks to everyone that has delegated. You are making a difference!

The Life Boat resource Centre

https://www.lifechangersa.org/life-boat

Latest Donation – another 60 ADA

EpochPool RewardDonated%# Meals @ R35 bought
268362 ADA60 ADA~16.6%~37 meals
269349.5 ADA60 ADA~17.2%~37 meals
270349.5 ADA60 ADA~17.2%~37 meals
Donations made by Plebpool.com to https://www.lifechangersa.org/ up to Epoch 270 🙂 Thanks for all the support! Much appreciated. Photos and stories to follow. The breakdown shows our contribution and what it buys here in South Africa! With this donation lifechangersa is able to feed approx. 7 people a meal a day!

https://www.lifechangersa.org/online-store

120 ADA donated! ;)

We are very proud to have donated our first ADA contribution to our benefactor https://www.lifechangersa.org/ here in South Africa. Please also consider supporting their lifeboat initiative https://www.lifechangersa.org/life-boat. You can find their online shop here https://www.lifechangersa.org/online-store. More info to follow on where this donation will be used to help people in need 🙂 We will continue to support as we mint more blocks!

More on Slot Battles, Orphaned and so called ‘stolen’ blocks

It seems Orphaned blocks do not indicate any issues with the pool, if you’re checking orphaned blocks on https://pooltool.io/ for example then you’ll often see that another pool’s block was accepted by the chain, this is often referred to as a ‘slot battle‘. Slot battles used to have a lot do with geography and trying to spread the block your pool produced faster than another pool, however that lead to some unfortunate centralization issues on the cardano network and has since been done away with. The winner of a slot battle (the pool who’s block is accepted by the chain) is now determined randomly using a pool’s VRF, which cannot be gamed by pool operators. When nodes receive two valid blocks for a single slot, the block with the lower VRF Proof value is chosen as the latest block and is propagated throughout the network. The other block becomes orphaned and unused. Slot Battles are unavoidable in Ouroboros Praos and the result of them is a matter of luck. However, Stake Pools with less active stake have an edge in winning slot battles because they are more likely to generate lower values of VRF_Proof over a larger competing pool. so whats VRF exactly?

Staking pool operators need to generate a few key pairs:

  • An operational cold key pair. The key grants the right to sign blocks to the KES key.
  • Key Evolving Signature (KES) key pair. The key is used for signing a new block. The key expires periodically and a new one is computed. (every 90 days)
  • Verifiable Random Function (VRF) key pair. The key is used to find out whether a node is a slot leader in an ongoing slot. The node does it every second.

So logfile output from our ‘stolen’ block said the following

STOLEN: Leader for slot ‘30620534’ but “stolen” by another pool due to bad luck (lower VRF output) 🙁

4th Block minted!

We are happy to announce we have minted our 4th block 😉

26-05-2021, 22:49epoch 268slot 90260block 5770413

We are the slot leader for the following still to come in epoch 268

LEADER: slot[30620534] slotInEpoch[207734] at[2021-05-28T07:27:05+00:00]
LEADER: slot[30667521] slotInEpoch[254721] at[2021-05-28T20:30:12+00:00]
LEADER: slot[30810831] slotInEpoch[398031] at[2021-05-30T12:18:42+00:00]
LEADER: slot[30841547] slotInEpoch[428747] at[2021-05-30T20:50:38+00:00]