Community bounty

Why?

As it stands right now, there are two primary miners dominating the miner queue.

rabbit
gxt-1080-sc

They have made normal CPU mining absolutely impractical for many miners, and in the process, centralized mining. This is not a huge issue for the stability of the steem blockchain itself, but it has made many miners in the community feel uneasy. It is for this reason that today I am hosting a community bounty for an open source GPU. This bounty will serve an incentive for any existing gpu miners to open source there mining software. It will also serve to as incentive for new gpu miners to come out.

How?

I am asking anyone reading this to donate some SBD to the bounty. To increase the bounty, please send any amount SBD to Hive account@picokernel with either a memo mentioning the bounty, or a comment in the thread. I will then act as the escrow. If you have created an open source miner I ask that you submit a link to it to me in private message on slack or rocketchat, or post down below in the comments a link to the source code.
50% of all the bounty will be given to an openCL/AMD miner, and 50% will be given to a Cuda miner. In addition to that, all SBDs generated from this post will increase the bounty.

Win condition

Any GPU miner submission is eligible for the bounty prize if it meets the following conditions: 1) it supports ECDSA operations in the GPU kernel; 2) it is licensed with a copy-free license (e.g. MIT, BSD); 3) it is not simply a derivation of an earlier submitted GPU miner perhaps with some performance optimizations; 4) it is submitted no later than 2 weeks after the first eligible GPU miner submission. All eligible GPU miners submitted within the two week window are ranked according to the following rules: if one GPU miner has better performance (within some prior specified margin of error) according to mining benchmarks compared to another GPU miner, the faster one is ranked higher; and, if the performance of two GPU miners are close enough to each other within the margin of error, the earlier submission will be ranked higher. If there is only one eligible GPU miner submission on the ranked list, the submitter of that GPU miner will win the full bounty prize. Otherwise, the submitters of the top two ranked GPU miners will share the bounty prize: 75% goes to the submitter of the rank 1 GPU miner submission, and 25% goes to the submitter of the rank 2 GPU miner submission.

Thank you folks. This is a good cause to help decrease centralization and increase the health of the steem platform. If you have any questions or concerns you can get in contact with me on steemit.chat. #bounties will be where I post updates about how we are managing the funds and who the winners are.