Mining without a middleman.

01 · The problem

Proof of work ended up with a few pools.

A small miner who mines alone waits weeks for a block, so they join a pool. The pool evens out the luck — and in exchange it holds their payouts, takes a fee, picks the transactions and casts their vote.

Thousands of miners, a handful of operators. Every one of them is a single point that can be hacked, pressured or simply disappear with the balance.

02 · The idea

The pool is part of the protocol.

A share is a block header that met a target 3,000 times easier than a block’s. Miners publish them like transactions, about a hundred a second across the network.

Every block carries the shares it has seen in its settlement, and every full node checks each one. A share has eight blocks to make it in, so one block that leaves it out doesn’t make it disappear.

03 · The price

A fixed price makes censorship pointless.

The obvious rule — a block splits its reward among the shares it includes — has a flaw: leave everybody else out and your own shares are worth more. In our simulation a miner with 45 % of the hashrate earned 1.4 to 1.8 times its fair share that way.

So PowMachina pays every share a fixed price from a pot that holds about sixteen blocks of reward. Leaving shares out earns nothing; the same censor ends up with 0.99 of its fair share — less than if it were honest.

Simulated with powm-sharesim, which is in the public repository. Run it yourself.

04 · Your work stays yours

Mine through anyone. Nobody can take it.

Your payout address, your finality key and your share’s weight are hashed into the proof of work itself. Change one bit and the share is worthless.

That makes mining through a stranger’s node safe: it can refuse your work, but it can’t redirect it. No accounts, no trust, no withdrawal button.

05 · The payout

Paid by the chain, once a day.

Each settled share adds to your credit, which lives in the chain’s state — every node knows it, and every block commits to it. Once a day the block reward itself pays it out to your address, from 0.05 POWM up.

A small miner with one CPU gets paid like everybody else: less, but steadily, without waiting weeks for a lucky block.

06 · CPU and GPU

Two lanes, half each.

Processors mine RandomX, graphics cards mine a memory-hard algorithm over a dataset that changes every week. Each lane has its own difficulty, and the chain never takes more than two blocks of one lane in a row.

A share is priced against its own lane’s block, so a CPU share and a GPU share of the same work are worth the same. Rented CPU power can’t rewrite the chain alone: it would need the graphics cards too.

07 · Finality

The miners who did the work sign it.

Every block carries its miner’s finality key. The quorum for a block is everybody who mined in the day before it, each lane holding half the weight. Once more than two thirds have signed, about 40 minutes later, no amount of hashrate can rewrite it.

Nobody appoints the quorum and no key list ships with the software. Mining through a public stratum, your key stays yours, so the server can’t vote with your hashrate.

Before a block is final, deep reorgs are already expensive: an hour-deep one needs 2.7 times the network’s work.