2022 May Update: Pi Network Coin
Update of this decentralized cryptocurrency that more-or-less people believed in.
Now, when Pi Network’s — Pi Coin- is on the MainNet, giving more and more slots for the KYC, it has now a certain value on the market reaching more than est. 5.000.000 people mining. Yes, being on MainNet Pi Coin has a price!
The pi coin is considered as something that will circle around in its ecosystem. For example, you will buy a shirt from a certain distributor, you will buy in Pi Coins, from there, on wholesales market for Pi you order a new pack of T-Shirts, whereby the Pi Coin stays in the eco-system.
- The Pi Network, developed by a team of Stanford graduates, enables users to mine coins using its mobile phone app, validating transactions on a distributed record. Unlike nodes on networks such as Bitcoin that use proof-of-work (PoW) protocols, Pi nodes use an algorithm based on the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP).
- Mission: Build a cryptocurrency and smart contracts platform secured and operated by everyday people.
- Vision: Build the world’s most inclusive peer-to-peer marketplace, fueled by Pi, the world’s most widely used cryptocurrency
How does a PI coin make money?
The first is the PI Network. This organization set out to find a way that would allow ordinary people to mine Bitcoins. Their solution means you can make money by mining crypto coins from your phone. Simply download the app, and once a day open it and automatically mine Bitcoin — for better results use mine referral, as you need an invite: milanovicboris. (no dot)
- Pioneer. This is the initial level for all users. The mining volume is calculated afterward, but you should get 1π for sign-in and about 1π/h, but in May 2022 when I wrote this (02.05.2022) my rate was 0.11π/h, but I had a lot of people that joined using my referral, only a few said in themself (Why not, it’s only one tap per day, on one single button- what can I (You) loose?)
- Contributor. To unlock this level, it is enough to mine cryptocurrency for three days;
- Ambassador. This rank is for users who invite other participants to join the Pi Network. As being one of those from the first point, I am now an Ambassador, planning to install a Node right now. Which will increase even my speed of mining and TO YOU TOO IF YOU USE REFERRAL of mine (milanovicboris) or simply click here.
- Node. Those participants have connected additional hardware to the network. This level is still in development and will be available later
A user can play more than one of the above roles. All roles are necessary, thus all roles are rewarded with newly minted Pi on a daily basis as long as they participated and contributed during that given day. The loose definition of a “miner” is a user who receives newly minted currency as a reward for contributions, all four roles are considered to be Pi miners. We define“mining” more broadly than its traditional meaning equated to executing a proof of work consensus algorithm as in Bitcoin or Ethereum.
- In SCP’s terms, for a node to get correctly connected means that this node must choose a “quorum slice” such that all resulting quorums that include this node intersect with the existing network’s quorums. More precisely, a node vn+1 is correctly connected to a main network N of n already correctly connected nodes (v1, v2, …, vn) if the resulting system N’ of n+1 nodes (v1, v2, …, vn+1) enjoys quorum intersection. In other words, N’ enjoys quorum intersection if any two of its quorums share a node. — i.e., for all quorums U1 and U2, U1∩U2 ≠ ∅.
The main contribution of Pi over the existing Stellar consensus deployment is that it introduces the concept of a trust graph provided by the Pi Contributors as information that can be used by the Pi nodes when they are setting up their configurations to connect to the main Pi network.
When picking their quorum slices, these Nodes must take into consideration the trust graph provided by the Contributors, including their own security circle. To assist in this decision, we intend to provide auxiliary graph analysis software to assist users running Nodes to make as informed decisions as possible. This software’s daily output will include:
a ranked list of nodes ordered by their distance from the current node in the trust graph; a ranked list of nodes based on a PageRank analysis of nodes in the trust graph a list of nodes reported by the community as faulty in any way a list of new nodes seeking to join the network a list of most recent articles from the web on the keyword “misbehaving Pi nodes” and other related keywords; a visual representation of Nodes comprising the Pi network similar to what is shown in StellarBeat Quorum monitor [source code] a quorum explorer similar to QuorumExplorer.com [source code]a simulation tool like the one in StellarBeat Quorum monitor that shows the expected resulting impacts to this nodes’ connectivity to the Pi network when the current node’s configuration changes.
An interesting research problem for future work is to develop algorithms that can take into consideration the trust graph and suggest each node an optimal configuration, or even set that configuration automatically. On the first deployment of the Pi Network, while users running Nodes can update their Node configuration at any time, they will be prompted to confirm their configurations daily and asked to update them if they see fit.
Mobile app users
When a Pioneer needs to confirm that a given transaction has been executed (e.g. that they have received Pi) they open the mobile app. At that point, the mobile app connects to one or more Nodes to inquire if the transaction has been recorded on the ledger and also to get the most recent block number and the hash value of that block. If that Pioneer is also running a Node the mobile app connects to that Pioneer’s own node. If the Pioneer is not running a node, then the app connects to multiple nodes and cross-checks this information. Pioneers will have the ability to select which nodes they want their apps to connect to. But to make it simple for most users, the app should have a reasonable default set of nodes, e.g. a number of nodes closest to the user based on the trust graph, along with a random selection of nodes high in PageRank. We ask for your feedback on how the default set of nodes for mobile Pioneers should be selected.
Mining rewards
The beautiful property of the SCP algorithm is that it is more generic than a blockchain. It coordinates consensus across a distributed system of Nodes. This means that the same core algorithm is not only used every few seconds to record new transactions in new blocks but also it can be used to periodically run more complex computations. For example, once a week, the stellar network is using it to compute inflation on the stellar network and allocate the newly minted tokens proportionally to all stellar coin holders (Stellar’s coin is called lumens). In a similar manner, the Pi network employs SCP once a day to compute the network-wide new Pi distribution across all Pi miners (pioneers, contributors, ambassadors, nodes) who actively participated on any given day. In other words, Pi mining rewards are computed only once daily and not on every block of the blockchain.
For comparison, Bitcoin allocates mining rewards on every block and it give all of the rewards to the miner who was lucky enough to be able to solve a computationally intensive randomized task. This reward in Bitcoin currently 12.5 Bitcoin (~$40K) is given to only one miner every 10 minutes. This makes it extremely unlikely for any given miner to ever get rewards. As a solution to that, bitcoin miners are getting organized in centralized mining pools, which all contribute processing power, increasing the likelihood of getting rewards, and eventually sharing proportionally those rewards. Mining pools are not only points of centralization, but also their operators get cuts reducing the amount going to individual miners. In Pi, there is no need for mining pools, since once a day everyone who contributed gets a meritocratic distribution of new Pi coin(s).
Transaction fees
Similar to Bitcoin transactions, fees are optional in the Pi network. Each block has a certain limit of how many transactions can be included in it. When there is no backlog of transactions, transactions tend to be free. But if there are more transactions, nodes order them by fee, with the highest-fee transactions at the top, and pick only the top transactions to be included in the produced blocks. This makes it an open market. Implementation: Fees are proportionally split among Nodes once a day. On every block, the fee of each transaction is transferred into a temporary wallet from wherein the end of the day it is distributed to the active miners of the day. This wallet has an unknown private key. Transactions in and out of that wallet are forced by the protocol itself under the consensus of all nodes in the same way the consensus also mints new Pi every day.
Limitations and future work
SCP has been extensively tested for several years as part of the Stellar Network, which at the time of this writing is the ninth largest cryptocurrency in the world. This gives us a quite large degree of confidence in it. One ambition of the Pi project is to scale the number of nodes in the Pi network to be larger than the number of nodes in the Stellar network to allow more everyday users to participate in the core consensus algorithm. Increasing the number of nodes will inevitably increase the number of network messages that must be exchanged between them. Even though these messages are much smaller than an image or a youtube video, and the Internet today can reliably transfer videos quickly, the number of messages necessary increases with the number of participating nodes, which can become a bottleneck to the speed of reaching consensus. This will ultimately slow down the rate, at which new blocks and new transactions are recorded in the network. Thankfully, Stellar is currently much faster than Bitcoin. At the moment, Stellar is calibrated to produce a new block every 3 to 5 seconds, being able to support thousands of transactions per second. By comparison, Bitcoin produces a new block every 10 minutes. Moreover, due to Bitcoin’s lack of safety guarantee, Bitcoin’s blockchain on rare occasions can be overwritten within the first hour. This means that a user of Bitcoin must wait about 1 hour before they can be sure that a transaction is considered final. SCP guarantees safety, which means after 3–5 seconds one is certain about a transaction. So even with the potential scalability bottleneck, Pi expects to achieve transaction finality faster than Bitcoin and possibly slower than Stellar, and process more transactions per second than Bitcoin and possibly fewer than Stellar.
CONCLUSION:
Mine / get the Pi coins while you can at these high rates, nobody believed in the cryptocurrency in the first place. Nobody believed in BitCoin so there is a situation in the past when a guy paid for a pizza for 6000 BTC! Now, I believe he would think it’s some kind of ‘Behind The Camera’ or ‘Just for Laugh’ thing.
USE INVITATION CODE: milanovicboris FOR FASTER MINING
More about Pi Network and Coin:
While scalability of SCP is still an open research problem. There are multiple promising ways one could speed things up. One possible scalability solution is bloXroute. BloXroute proposes a blockchain distribution network (BDN) that utilizes a global network of servers optimized for network performance. While each BDN is centrally controlled by one organization, they offer a provably neutral message passing acceleration. I.e. BDNs can only serve all nodes fairly without discrimination as messages are encrypted. This means the BDN does not know where messages come from, where they go, or what is inside. This way Pi nodes can have two message-passing routes: A fast one through BDN, which is expected to be reliable most of the time, and its original peer-to-peer message passing interface that is fully decentralized and reliable but is slower. The intuition of this idea is vaguely similar to caching: The cache is the place where a computer can access data very quickly, speeding the average computation, but it is not guaranteed to always have every needed piece of information. When the cache misses, the computer is slowed down but nothing catastrophic happens. Another solution can be using secure acknowledgment of multicast messages in open Peer-to-Peer networks [Nicolosi and Mazieres 2004] to speed up message propagation among peers.
Pi uses the other type of consensus algorithm and is based on the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) and an algorithm called Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA). Such algorithms don’t have energy waste but they require exchanging many network messages in order for the nodes to come to a “consensus” on what the next block should be. Each node can independently determine if a transaction is valid or not, e.g. authority of making the transition and double-spending, based on the cryptographic signature and the transaction history. However, for a network of computers to agree on which transactions to record in a block and the order of these transactions and blocks, they need to message each other and have multiple rounds of voting to come to a consensus. Intuitively, such messages from different computers in the network about which block is the next would look like the following: “I propose we all vote for block A to be next”; “I vote for block A to be the next block”; “I confirm that the majority of the nodes I trust also voted for block A”, from which the consensus algorithm enables this node to conclude that “A is the next block, and there could be no block other than A as the next block”; Even though the above voting steps seem a lot, the internet is adequately fast and these messages are lightweight, thus such consensus algorithms are more lightweight than Bitcoin’s proof of work. One major representative of such algorithms is called Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT). Several of the top blockchains today are based on variants of BFT, such as NEO and Ripple.
