Glossary

Account Id¶

The numeric representation of a SIGNA account address. It is a long number like 1234567890123567890123.

Base target¶

The base target is calculated from the last blocks and adjusts the difficulty for miners. The lower the base target, the harder it is for a miner to find a low deadline. It gets adjusted by the network in a way that the coin can have a stable block time on average.

Binding¶

The process of assigning a plotter id / account id to an address, generally a pool. In SIGNA bindings are called Reward Assignments.

SIGNA Account¶

A SIGNA account consists of a passphrase, from which you can derive the SIGNA address (S-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXX) and the Account Id (1234567890123..).

Deadline¶

A deadline represents a duration in seconds. The lowest deadline wins the round once its duration expired (measured since the start of the current round).

Mining Software¶

The mining software scans your plot files and submits deadlines to the pool or wallet when solo mining. Only a 4096^th of your plot file contents is scanned each round.

Network Difficulty¶

Network Difficulty, or NetDiff in short, is a value that can be read as an estimate on the total amount of space in Terabytes dedicated to a coin. Since this is a value that changes with every block in relation to base target, it should be taken into an average over at least a day before considered to be somewhat accurate.

Nonce¶

When generating a plot file, you generate something that is called nonces. Each nonce contains 256 KiB of data that can be used by miners to calculate deadlines. Each nonce will have its own individual number. This number can range between 0-18446744073709551615 (2⁶⁴). The number is also used as a seed when creating the nonce. Because of this each nonce has its own unique set of data.

Plot file¶

The file holding your stored hashes for mining. It consists of nonces. When creating plot files you have to ensure to not reuse nonces (indicated by start_nonce and the nonce_count of the plot file) as the content of the plot file would be identical and does not earn additional rewards.

Plotter Id¶

An alternative name for the account id. The Plotter Id is the first number in a plot file name.

POC¶

Proof-of-Capacity, the consensus algorithm of HDD mining coins, like SIGNA, BHD, etc.

POC1¶

The old legacy plot file format of SIGNA, not used anymore.

POC2¶

The currently used plot file format of SIGNA. Adopted by other coins like BHD etc. File name format: <plotter_id>_<start_nonce>_<nonce_count>

Reward Assignment¶

The SIGNA terminology for a binding.

Solo mining¶

Submitting deadlines to a wallet directly is called solo mining. With solo mining you don't share rewards with anyone else but also only receive rewards when you win a block.