Multiple people have requested a way to estimate your machine’s hash rate to evaluate if guessing is worth it or not. In case you’re not up to speed with Neptune’s mining lingo, guessing is the calculation of block hashes to find a hash digest that is lower than the threshold value. This is done by feeding the Tip5 hash function the block along with a nonce and then calculating the resulting hash. If the hash value is below the threshold dictated by the protocol, you win the block race and get to collect the guesser fee.

The higher your “guess rate” AKA hash rate, the more tickets you get in the proof-of-work lottery.

There’s not yet a way to inspect your guess rate through the dashboard or CLI, but I just added a benchmark to help with this.

You can run the benchmark fast_kernel_mast_hash found in the neptune-core repository through the command cargo bench fast_kernel_mast_hash to get your guess rate. It will report the time it takes your machine to calculate 1,000,000 guesses. If this takes 1 seconds, your guess rate is 1 million.

To get an estimate of your chance of finding the next block, you can (roughly) multiply this number by 400, since the average guessing time is about 400 seconds (200 seconds is used for composition, and block target interval is ~600 seconds) and then divide the result by the current tip’s difficulty. So with 1 million guesses per second, you should expect to find 40 % of all blocks, if the difficulty is 1bn. With a difficulty of 1 trillion, your win-rate would be 0.04 %, or 4 blocks out of 10,000.

The benchmark was added in this commit