SERO Mining Guide for Beginners — Mine SERO on Your PC

This article mainly explains how to install SERO from binary package and use it to mine SERO coins. For more information, please visit our SERO Product Technology WIKI.

Bonus Design

SERO issued a total of 1 billion SERO coins, of which 25 % were awarded as community node contributions, that is, 250 million SERO coins were awarded to SERO miners for mining. Mining bonus follows these rules:

Bonus will be issued within 10 years, and a certain amount of SERO coins will be mined each year until 250 million SERO coins are mined.

As the initial SERO community network capacity is still relatively small, we use this strategy:

• 250 million SERO coins are used as a bonus pool, when the miners succeed in generating a block, the corresponding SERO coins will be drawn from the bonus pool as a reward according to the rules.
• After generation of 2,100,000 blocks, the bonus is reduced by about 1.4 times.
• In order to encourage miners to package more transactions, the consensus will compare the “gas usage” of the two blocks before and after.

4/5​ for the block bonus when the current block consumes less than or equal to the previous block.

When the block consumption gas is greater than the previous one, you can get an extra bonus for the block reward 2/5.

• To ensure fairness when the capacity of nodes is small, we set an initial difficulty value.

If the difficulty of generating block is less than the initial value, the bonus will be given in proportion to the initial difficulty.

If the difficulty of the block is greater than or equal to the initial value, the bonus will be paid according to the full amount.

Starting from the BetaNet-Release version, mines will be mined with the POW consensus. The SERO tokens on BETANET will be mapped to Main Net by 1:1, and the distribution of node maintenance bonus on the Main Net will follow the SE-Random consensus.

The Versions of BETANET

• RC version: Betanet’s release in Release Candidate will require several versions of adjustments from the official BetaNet, the ledger will be cleared after the release of the RC version.
• Release version: The official version of BetaNet will be deployed at 24:00 on December 31, 2018. The ledger will not be cleared when subsequent versions are updated.

In order to ensure the initial security of the network, mining during BetaNet requires a license from the SERO team.

Mining application process:

• Run full node service (gero) or client wallet (wallet)
• Import or create a mining user and get the public key address of the user.
• Join SERO’s miner community on gitter.
  This is highly suggested, so that problems you encounter in using SERO can be raised in the community.
• Send an email to license@sero.vip with subject “Application for BetaNet mining license” explain your information and attach your public key address.
• The SERO team will generate a license corresponding to the public key address within 48 hours and will respond to your email.

After the BetaNet-Release version is released, each application of mining will be strictly reviewed.

Step by step SERO mining setup.

1. Install SERO

There are two options for you to install SERO on your own computer

• One is to install the all-node service program (gero) and operate the gero through the command line console.
• The other is to install the wallet directly and operate it through the GUI interface.
  Note: This article only explains how to install the gero service from the "binary package" released by SERO.

If you want to install gero from source, please refer to

• From Source Code — base on CentOS7

If you want to install wallet, please refer to

• SERO Tutorial — Wallet Manual

Download the latest version of gero binary package via github.

Readers can download the latest binary package by visiting the link https://github.com/sero-cash/go-sero/releases

In the Assets section, you can see the binary packages for different system environments

• gero-[VERSION]-darwin-amd64.tar.gz corresponds to the 64-bit MacOSsystem
• gero-[VERSION]-linux-amd64-v3.tar.gz corresponds to 64-bit linux3kernel system
• gero-[VERSION]-linux-amd64-v4.tar.gz corresponds to the 64-bit linux4kernel system
• gero-v0.3.1-beta.rc.5-windows-amd64.zip corresponds to 64-bit WIN7/WIN8/WIN10 system

When BetaNet-RC5 is released

• The latest Ubuntu & CentOS7 distribution defaults to the Linux3 kernel.
• The latest Fedora distribution defaults to the Linux4 kernel.

Note: This article is based on the CentOS system, and other systems are similar in the use of binary packages.

Take the binary package corresponding to CentOS7 as an example and download it:

$ pwd

/root

$ wget https://github.com/sero-cash/go-sero/releases/download/v0.3.1-beta.rc.5/gero-v0.3.1-beta.rc.5-linux-amd64-v3.tar.gz

$ ls

gero-v0.3.1-beta.rc.5-linux-amd64-v3.tar.gz

$ tar -xvf gero-v0.3.1-beta.rc.5-linux-amd64-v3.tar.gz

$ ls

geropkg gero-v0.3.1-beta.rc.5-linux-amd64-v3.tar.gz

geropkg is the directory that extracts the binary program. Let's see what's inside:

$ ls geropkg attach.sh bin clean.sh czero startup.sh stop.sh

Description of each file:

czero is the zero knowledge proofs library of SERO

bin has SERO's main program gero in it

startup.sh is the service startup script

stop.sh is the service stop script

attach.sh is the console startup script

clean.sh is the script to clear the account data

• *Note: * After execution, the keystore directory will not be cleared, but the ledger data will be resynchronized.

Determine datadir

• The first important directory of SERO is datadir, which stores synchronized account data.
• Another important directory is keystore, which contains the encrypted account file and the license file for minning, like this:

In order not to affect the synchronised data when upgrading geropkg in the future, we separate the data directory, such as:

$ mkdir .sero-data

$ ls -a

. .. .sero-data geropkg gero-v0.3.1-beta.rc.5-linux-amd64-v3.tar.gz

Start gero

Execute startup.sh to start gero

startup parameters of startup.sh

./startup.sh [--datadir DATA_DIR] [--keystore KEYSTORE_DIR]

Where DATA_DIR is used to specify the datadir location, and KEYSTORE_DIR is used to specify the location of the keystore directory.

This script follows the rules below

• If keystore is not specified, gero will create it under datadir by default.
• If datadir is not specified, gero will create it in the user's home directory by default.

Let’s enter the geropkg directory and make sure it has a log file directory

$ cd geropkg

$ mkdir log

$ ls

attach.sh bin clean.sh czero log startup.sh stop.sh

Then execute the startup.sh script

$ startup.sh --datadir "../sero-data"

/root/geropkg/czero/lib/

/root/geropkg/bin/gero --datadir=../datadir --port 60602

We can check log to determine if gero is working properly

$ tail -f log/gero.log

You will see text similar to the following

As long as you see the text IPC endpoint opened, the startup is successful.

2. Create Account

Start console

Start the console by executing attach.sh

Startup parameters of attach.sh

./attach.sh [DATA_DIR]

where DATA_DIR is used to specify the location of datadir when gero is started. If not specified, gero will look for datadir in the default location.

$./attach.sh "../sero-data"

If you see a console interface similar to the one below, the console will start successfully.

Create account

Now we can create an account by typing the command below:

Note: The greo console supports pressing [TAB] to complete the command

> personal.newAccount("123456") "4GYNYzECNovCniXiYi1VV58vk97U1vWF7KfSRJCTFVv95kbdVhWYX4kjkcYBpw2zzfDZfaeEqB8YhANGDGFkG3SP"

Set the password in the newAccount function input. Please remember the password. If you lose it, you will lose control of the account and cannot retrieve it. The return value is the public key address PK of the created account.

• PK can be safely given to the other party as a transfer receiving address

If you want to view the account created by this node, you can call the following command to get the public key of all accounts:

> sero.accounts ["4GYNYzECNovCniXiYi1VV58vk97U1vWF7KfSRJCTFVv95kbdVhWYX4kjkcYBpw2zzfDZfaeEqB8YhANGDGFkG3SP"]

For security, if the account is not used for 5 minutes after it is created, it will be locked. If the account is locked, you need to enter a password to unlock the account.

> sero.sendTransaction(...) Error: authentication needed: password or unlock > personal.unlockAccount(sero.account[0],"123456") true

Note: The bonus from mining will default to the account created by the current node, which is the account represented by sero.account[0].

The command to exit the console is:

> exit

3. Install Mining License

Next we need to apply for a license from the SERO team, which requires the following steps:

Join SERO’s gitter community

The link for SERO gitter community is
https://gitter.im/sero-cash/miner

gitter is a free instant messaging tool in github.com. It has good integration with gitHub and can be logged in through gitHub/gitlab/twitter account. Some important notices about miner will be posted here.

Send an application email for the license

The account has been generated above. Please send the public key PK of sero.account[0] to license@sero.vip by email and explain your information.

Note: The public key can be used as an asset acceptance addressand provided to a third party to generate transactions. Disclosure of the public key will not reveal your information in SERO.

Install the license

The SERO team will generate a BetaNet mining license for you within 48 hours and reply to you.

** You’ll receive a copy of your license in the mail body and one copy in the attachment. Both the copies are identical.**

You need to create a license directory in the keystore directory and copy the license file BLIC.DATA into this directory.

$ cd ../datadir

$ mkdir keystore/license

$ echo "1169..[IGNORE]..51a85" > keystore/license/BLIC.DATA

The license is now installed

Safety instructions
The license is generated based on your mining public key, and the licenses generated by different public keys are different. At the time of mining, the license will be used for zero-knowledge proofs, and the proofs generated each time will be different. Therefore:

• The license will not be exposed in the block.
• Consensus will check if the block you generated is licensed.
• As long as you don’t reveal your tracking key TK and private key SK, it is safe to disclose the license and public key.

Will not reveal the identity as a miner.

Other users cannot use your license.

4. Start Mining

Voila! now we can start mining easily, let us enter the console again, and then start mining:

> miner.start()

The command to stop mining:

> miner.stop()

To see if mining is in progress:

> sero.mining
true

return true to indicate that mining is under way

View the current block height:

> sero.blockNumber
32165

See if you’ve mined SERO coins:

> sero.getBalance(sero.account[0])
{
  tkn: {
    SERO: 2.03085359120665e+22
  }
}

The above unit is Ta (1 SERO = 10^{18}Ta), converted to SERO coins can be called:

> web3.fromTa(2.03085359120665e+22)
"20308.5359120665"

5. In The End

The basic mining process starting from the binary package installation is here. If you want to learn more about the principle of SERO or detailed operation tutorial, you can visit our official website to download the white paper, or visit our SERO product technology WIKI.

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Important links

Website : https://sero.cash
White paper V1.0.6 : http://sero-media.s3-website-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/Sero_ENG_V1.06.pdf
Twitter : https://twitter.com/SEROdotCASH
Telegram : https://t.me/SeroOfficial
Telegram News channel : https://t.me/SEROannouncements
Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/SEROProtocol/
Github : https://github.com/sero-cash/go-sero
Gitter Community : https://gitter.im/sero-cash/Lobby?utm_source=share-link&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=share-link
SERO Blockchain Explorer : https://explorer.web.sero.cash/blocks.html
SERO Smart Contract Editor : https://remix.web.sero.cash/
SERO Introduction Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqFUhXskgNg
SERO’s 20x encryption speed vs Zcash demonstration video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bc6yHTLSl5M