Conceal Hardfork — Emission and Mining Algorithm Evolution

4 min readDec 9, 2020

Forward

Over the next month, the team will update the Conceal Roadmap to include a renewed focus on the betterment of Conceal Network and its native asset, $CCX.

When Conceal Network was first started, the aim was to incentivize small miners to participate by creating a unique block reward emission model, offer an energy efficient custom mining algorithm, and provide the ability to earn interest on those earnings by cold staking. The focus was on the decentralization of the network.

In short, those innovations did not work. What we now have is the exact opposite of decentralization (and the results are very clear). We have large miners that centralize hash, earn the majority of block rewards, and continuously sell, which never lets the price of $CCX appreciate.

Since the focus has always been on decentralization, we could not continue to let his happen.

To that end, the Conceal Network community unanimously voted to radically redefine and adopt both the block rewards emission model and the mining algorithm, which requires a hardfork.

Conceal Network is scheduled for a hardfork on December 18, 2020. The fork block is 661300.

Emission Change

The Conceal Network mining block reward will effectively be cut in half to 6 $CCX per block and remain fixed until the maximum supply of 200M is reached. The original emission equilibrium design between coins minted through cold staking and coins mined by PoW will remain unchanged for now.

Making $CCX more scarce, with an immediate cut to the minimum block reward of 6 $CCX, will help with future price stability and remove any needless inflation.

The project aim has remained unchanged. The focus continues to be on decentralization and the proper thing to do is make changes that support this goal. We want to give back the network to small miners and provide an environment that fosters fair distributed PoW mining for more than 100 years.

Below is the new emission curve showing the immediate block rewards emission to 6 $CCX per block. Mining rewards will be extended well beyond 100 years.

For comparative purposes, below is the old emission rewards model.

The sharp reduction of $CCX block rewards will instantly increase the scarcity of $CCX. This reduction in the mined supply of $CCX combined with the existing and future demand for $CCX, would potentially cause the value and price of $CCX to appreciate.

Algorithm Change

Conceal Network will implement the Cryptonight-GPU mining algorithm, developed by Psychocrypt and Fireice_uk. Cryptonight-GPU (CN_GPU) is an ASIC, Botnet, and FPGA resistant mining algorithm that assures a fair GPU based supported network.

CN_GPU relies primarily on GPU core compute performance and is the first mining algorithm that is specifically designed to use floating point math at a single-precision (FP32).

Floating-point operations per second (or Flops), represent just how many computations (additions and multiplications) can be handled per second by a GPU. FP32 refers to the level of accuracy of those numbers (and is the number format).

A CPU generally consists of 4 to 8 CPU cores, while a GPU generally consists of hundreds of smaller cores. Since ASIC, Botnet, and FPGA builds rely on specialized low memory CPU computation, a mining algorithm based around GPU core compute performance renders them unprofitable.

GPU performance with the CN_GPU mining algorithm relies on physical core count and its clock in Mhz, making AMD and Nvidia GPUs very similar in performance.

The team is already testing the CN_GPU mining algorithm across different AMD and Nvidia GPUs (with similar generations), with results being comparable. Newer generation GPUs will continue to be evaluated.

The goal of the CN_GPU mining algorithm is to assure fair GPU mining:

AMD and NVIDIA GPU lineups are equalized. Low-end and high-end GPUs are measured based on core compute performance (Flops performance).
To eliminate any CPU and Botnet mining advantage.
To force ASIC or FPGA design to be cost-prohibitive.

At the time of this writing, the new Nvidia 3000 GPU series leads the pack with an increase of cores and Flops performance on CN_GPU.