A popular request is the ability to mine Neptune Cash through a mining pool.

The current situation is that you need to run the neptune-core program to do what we call “guessing” but is traditionally called “mining”: the attempt to solve the PoW-puzzle by finding a nonce that makes the block hash fall below the threshold defined by the consensus mechanism. However, a more modern approach is to outsource the guessing to external programs like GPU binaries and mining pool servers.

To allow for external programs and mining pools to do the guessing, I’ve added two endpoints to the RPC client: pow_challenge to get the cryptographic information required to start guessing and pow_solution to provide a solution that meets the threshold. These two endpoints, at the time of writing, only live on the thv/external-guessers branch in the neptune-core repository.

Would this suffice to run a mining pool for Neptune? Are the data models adequate. Happy to hear feedback.

Another feature that we have in our pipeline is the ability to define callback programs (shell scripts?) that are run everytime the client experiences an event, such as a new block, a new block proposal (relevant for mining pools), or a new transaction.

Please note that the endpoint names and return types are still in flux; they might change prior to the next release.