Ore – A cryptocurrency everybody can mine

[Work in progress]

In its ideal form, mining is a fun, effective, and egalitarian way of distributing tokens. The promise of mining is that anyone with a computer can earn tokens by using it to solve mathematical puzzles. Unfortunately, mining today is not ideal. Most people who try mine cryptocurrency find they are unable to win any rewards due to the prohibitively high level of competition. We call this problem "miner starvation".

Starvation, in computer networking, refers to the failure mode that can happen when a process monopolizes a particular resource and prevents other processes from accessing it. This is exactly what happens in crypto mining today when rewards get dominated by a handful of professional mining firms and smaller players get pushed out of the game entirely. Ultimately, starvation prevents new users from being able to access the token via the same direct mechanisms that larger, more establish players have the privilege of using.

Ore solves the miner starvation problem with a new mining protocol and non-exclusive rewards. Rather than positioning every miner in a competition against one another to solve the same puzzle, Ore gives each miner their own individual puzzle to work on. As long as a miner provides a valid solution to their own puzzle, the protocol guarantees they will earn a reward. Even if large miners come online and begin mining Ore, they may win a large portion of the new rewards, but they can't exclude other miners from winning as well.

The computational difficulty of the puzzles is constant and the same for everyone, everywhere. Therefore, to avoid the uncontrolled reward inflation that would occur as computers get more powerful and miners solve increasingly more puzzles, Ore periodically adjusts the reward rate paid out to miners per valid solution. This reward rate fluctuates to maintain an average of 1 ORE mined every 60 seconds, regardless of how many miners there are and how their powerful their computers are.