In my previous post I introduced you all to the blockchain platform known as Ardor. I promised you all that I would show you how you can “mine” Ardor if/when you get some. Ardor is a proof-of-stake coin, so there is no traditional proof-of-working mining where you have to burn electricity with an ASIC/GPU to earn additional coins. Proof of stake means that you’ll get rewarded by the network based on how much of stake you have in the network itself – ie how many coins you own. The more coins you have the bigger your share of the block rewards. Ardor doesn’t mint any new coins into existence once a new block rolls around so what happens is you are rewarded by the _transaction fees_ people pay and which are included into the block you “forged”/solved.
Naturally if you do not have very large sums of Ardor your chance of forging your own block are very slim. That’s where the concept of a forging pool comes in. It’s the same concept as with traditional mining pools. With forging pools people lease their active balance to a common pool address and the pool distributes the rewards from solved blocks proportional to each user’s percentage share in the pool – ie how many coins you leased to the pool.
Notice I said _leased_ and not sent. With Ardor you never have to move your coins or relinquish ownership of your coins to earn rewards by forging. What you merely do is lease the balance of your account to the pool’s account. Now all of a sudden from the Ardor network’s point of view this new account has the accumulated balance of all its lessors.
In the beginning there weren’t that many Ardor forging pools. There used to be one very popular pool but now it’s shut down sadly. The one I’m currently using is available at: http://www.ardorpool.org
Even this pool is not very big – as in the total number of active users. What can I say, I guess we can really use your help, so join in and forge away. So without further ado let me tell you what you need to know and how to starting forging at this pool.
Basics:
- If you lease your ARDOR to the pool, you are just leasing your forging power. The actual ARDOR stays in your wallet. The pool cannot transfer or spend your ARDOR.
- Do not send your ARDOR to the pool, but only lease your forging power!
- If you spend your ARDOR, it will immediately reduce your share of the pool because you own less ARDOR.
- If you already take part in the pool and receive ARDOR, these new ARDOR will count too. However, the new ARDOR will only be taken into account after 1,440 blocks.
Fees:
- The pool does not have any fees!
- If your earned ARDOR are paid out, 1 ARDOR transaction costs will be deducted!
- If you lease your ARDOR to the pool, 0.1 ARDOR transaction costs must be paid!
Payments:
- Your earnings are paid out automatically, if you have earned more than 10 ARDOR.
Participate:
- If your ARDOR-Client is running on your computer, select the ARDOR-Chain and click on “More info” in the left upper tile (the tile showing your current account balance).
- Click on “Account leasing” in the appearing window at the top.
- Enter the address of the pool as recipient: ARDOR-MGY9-EEJW-T6NX-5PZDA
- Period: This is how many blocks long you lend your forging power to the pool. It is best to enter the maximum value of 65,535.
- For fee it is best to enter 0.1. Every action on the ARDOR platform costs a fee. Lending ARDOR costs at least 0.1 ARDOR.
- Then enter your passphrase and click “Lease balance”.
- After 1 440 blocks your forging power is automatically added to the pool and you get a share of the pool earnings.
Happy forging!