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Autolykos

Autolykos, named after the Greek God Autolycus for the original non-outsourcability built-in in version one. However, it became apparent that pool resistance was infeasible due to large players having an advantage with smart contracts. "Bypassing Non-Outsourceable Proof-of-Work Schemes Using Collateralized Smart Contracts" was presented by Alex Chepurnoy at the WTSC workshop associated with Financial Cryptography and Data Security 2020 in Malaysia.

Autolykos V2 has the following modifications

  • non-outsourceable puzzles were disabled. It turns out (based on more than one year of non-outsourceable PoW experience) that non-outsourceable PoW is not an attractive option for small miners.
  • Now, the algorithm is trying to bind an efficient solving procedure with a single table of ~2 GB (initially), which significantly reduces memory optimisations possibilities
  • Table size (memory requirements of a solving algorithm) grows with time
  • The table depends solely on the block height, so there is no penalisation for recalculating block candidates for the same height

Basic Ideas:

  • Like Autolykos-1, based on the k-sum problem, a miner needs to find k (k=32) out of N (2^n = 2^26) elements and the hash of their sum must be less than the target value (inverse of the difficulty)
  • k indexes are pseudorandom values derived from block candidate and nonce
  • N elements are derived from block height and constants, unlike Autolykos v.1, so miners can recalculate block candidates quickly now (so only indexes are depending on them)
  • Indexes calculation also involving the same table (which elements are last 31 bytes of H(i | | h | | M ), where i is in [0, N), h is block height, M is padding to slow down hash calculation (8kb of constant data).

So algorithm tries to make mining efficient for ones that store the table, which is 2^26 * 31 = 2,080,374,784 bytes initially (about 2GB). Thus Autolykos is now is friendly to all the GPUs.

Also, table size (N value) is growing with time as follows. Until block 614,400, N = 2^{26} = 67,108,864 elements (31 bytes each). From this block, and until block 4,198,400, every 51,200 blocks N is increased by 5 percent. Since block 4,198,400, value of N is fixed and equals to 2,143,944,600. Test vectors for N values are provided in the paper.

Difficulty Adjustment

Ergo uses the linear least square method to calculate difficulty. This function is based on the past eight epochs (8x1024 blocks), as described in this paper to obtain a target block interval of 120s (2 minutes), on average, during steady-hash.

Autolykos will adjust slowly in response to fluctuating hashrate, but this helps prevent adversarial hopping. This algorithm has a 1.9% error rate compared to bitcoins 9.1% error rate (exponential 10% hash rate growth).

You can use the difficulty & epoch monitor to get an estimate for the next difficulty due.

Why 2 minutes?

As Ergo is a P2P cryptocurrency that supports smart contracts, there is need for security buffer for all the issues and attacks possible; propagation delays, spam attacks, verifier dilemma etc

Can it be quicker?

Ergo already uses an epoch length of ~1.5 days (with normal block rate), compared to Bitcoin's two weeks. Having a quicker difficulty readjustment can lead to Timewarp attacks. More epochs were considered, but the retargeting function is also non-linear, so it can adjust sooner than the linear function in certain popular scenarios; and it is unclear whether any hard-fork would be required at this stage.

There is a discussion ongoing on ergoforum regarding a potential improvement to this algorithm.

Resources

Test Vectors

Solution Verification

Test Vectors - Ergo:
credit: Wolf9466#9466 on Discord

Height = 569806 (0x8B1CE)
Item count = 67108864 (0x4000000)
Prehash Item KAT:

Item index 0          : 0x00596fe417902d8fe61763deb06286d3bf787f3c8ea2cc3063724dd307993caa
Item index 4          : 0x00832cba40f67d525e9c449f17f46e3bfcdb663427d4289e35bc8e04b0c97765
Item index 255        : 0x003f44309d54120e5d41b36a245fea4098948f7e8c5c052247922b74a6c8e7b9
Item index 67108863    : 0x000701c3dd5db987aab0bb57f6e89ea9dbdc1dd88ffcac698bfde407d95063ce


Message = 0x9b8cb36a9b738fa3678521d00c938631e1a192bc1919f004d2cbabdaa33835b4
Nonce = 0x5d340003e9c460dc

Blake #1: 0xbd54dc777dc062c63b2f8cdd4d56f4f57b64d648420f62ef0e6f3935b0046fc99e7ea07b167ccadeaf2cd396504477697f5123e72887f61333358b5edbd5aa66

Blake #2: 0x6dbc710c2fb6e975d93af456686617b97595a0cec9dd22d57b8a7176d3f470b175eccfc1f97cecc13207fb68358c608930e5d7cfcdd0b3a4da8b9acb508e3248

Result = 0x0c3b54f29c8ac1a407f83cd09f3d61bc32996a3d58a7d9fe9fe0e0a08572e367f96b164cc3254ce5379622e007de97c76b1232030d899e0da83bc82e00000000