Is this article wrong/scammy? Is it possible that miner earn more by mining several different coins at once through minergate?

Question

https://ambcrypto.com/mining-in-the-bear-market-made-easy-fast-and-cheap-with-minergate/

This one claims they can mine more efficiently by mining several coins at once.

I have a hard time believing that any pool can outperform "normal" pool.

What's the story.

Is this possible? Is this guy legit?

Let's for simplicity sake we got to pick numbers from 0 to 7. Say the hashing function is add 5 modulo 8. Of course the "right" nonce is 3. That's because 3+5 is 0 module 8.

Say the hash/signature or whatever of the transaction is 1. Mining is finding an extra nonce, if added to 1, would hash to 0 (or below difficulty). Something like that right. We try and found that the extra nonce is 2.

Say we have 2 coins. Say the starting nonce is 1 and 2 respectively. I wonder if it's possible to to add extra nonce to 1, then try to find an extra nonce where the hash is 0. Turns out if we add 1 to the extra nonce, we got the right answer.

We just add all the extra nonce and got the nonce that hash to the right number for 2 coins.

Is that possible?

My understanding of how mining works is quite a bit shaky here.

Is my understanding correct?

Is miner gate offering merge mining for coins that do not support it?

Answer 1

You can possible optimize revenue by switching to mining another coin dynamically, but it isn’t possible to mine two different coins in a given grind attempt.

The exception are chains which are merge-mined. Each merge-mined chain block is committed to a block of a main-chain block, a Bitcoin block for example. Validators of the merge-mined coin can validate POW of the main-chain (eg Bitcoin) and enforce separate consensus rules.

The difficulty of a merge-mined coin can be equal or higher than that of the main chain.

Therefore, if there is any significant value in the merge mined coin, a Bitcoin miner would be incentivized to include valid block commitments in each Bitcoin block it attempts to mine.

Answer 2

I can't contribute to this discussion mathematically, but I have experience of merge mining on MinerGate. I can say that there's no difference in hashrate if you mine some cryptonight currency alone or if you mine two cryptonight currencies at the same time. Unfortunately, Monero is not available for merge mining since this summer, I guess. I don't know how it works, but it really works.

Answer 3

I've found the explanation on Cryptocompare website. It says: "This is quite a complex process. All the transactions for both networks are ordered and their merkle trees hashed out. The two blockchains are classified as the parent and the auxiliary blockchain. The Auxilary blockchains merkle root is inserted into the extra nonce section of the parent blockchain – i.e. Bitcoin or Litecoin with Dogecoin and Namecoin as the auxiliary chain.

As the information of one chain’s set of hashes has been incorporated into a superfluous part of the other blockchain then a proof of work can be considered to have been achieved if a solution with a specific difficulty has been performed.

In the case of Bitcoin and Namecoin, the difficulty is lower for Namecoin as there is less network power on that chain – i.e. the number of zeroes in the hash is less. The problem with this is that if a relatively large pool in the Bitcoin network switched to merge mining it could take a very large portion of the namecoin hashing power.

There are three scenarios:

1. The merged miner finds a solution where the difficulty is too low to provide a valid hash and proof of work for either chain.
2. The merged miner finds a solution where the proof of work has been achieved for the auxiliary chain, but not for the parent chain.
3. The merged miner finds a solution for that is greater than the difficulty requirements for both the parent and the auxiliary blockchains.

In case 1 nothing happens and the merged miner inserts a new nonce value and rehashes. In case two the miner has found a solution for the Namecoin network and propagates its solution throughout that network, if mining in conjunction with Bitcoin. In case three solutions have been found for both of the chains and so a all the required information for confirmations is propagated to dedicated miners of both networks and the merged miner has won both Bitcoin and Namecoin or Dogecoin and Litecoin."

I think merged mining is a legit technology. More than that I was mining Monero together with DigitalNote last year. It really works.