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Gupax - WORK IN PROGRESS
Gupax (guh-picks) is a cross-platform GUI for mining Monero on P2Pool, using XMRig.
Contents
What is Monero, P2Pool, XMRig, and Gupax?
Monero is a secure, private, and untraceable cryptocurrency.
The Monero GUI software lets you run a Monero node (among other things). A Monero node connects you to other peers and lets you download Monero's blockchain. But you already knew all of this, right?
P2Pool is software that lets you create/join decentralized peer-to-peer Monero mining pools.
P2Pool as a concept was first developed for Bitcoin but was never fully realized due to many limitations. These limitations were fixed when SChernykh rewrote P2Pool from scratch for Monero. P2Pool combines the best of solo mining and traditional pool mining:
- It's decentralized: There's no central server that can be shutdown or pool admin that controls your hashrate
- It's permissionless: It's peer-to-peer so there's no one to decide who can and cannot mine on the pool
- It's trustless: Funds are never in custody, all pool blocks pay out to miners directly and immediately
- 0% transaction fee, 0 payout fee, immediate ~0.0003 XMR minimum payout
XMRig is an optimized miner which lets you mine Monero at higher speeds.
Both Monero and P2Pool have built in miners but XMRig is quite faster than both of them. Due to issues like anti-virus flagging, it is not feasible to integrate XMRig directly into Monero or P2Pool, however, XMRig is still freely available for anyone to download. The issue is: you have to manually set it up yourself.
Gupax is a GUI that helps with configuring, updating, and managing P2Pool & XMRig (both originally CLI-only).
Recap:
- XMRig mines to P2Pool which fetchs blocks from a Monero node
- Monero GUI runs the Monero node
- Gupax runs P2Pool/XMRig
With Monero GUI managing the Monero node on one side and Gupax managing P2Pool/XMRig on the other, it is (hopefully) very easy for anyone to start mining Monero at max hashrate in a decentralized, permissionless, and trustless manner.
Demo
Click me to load images!
Implementation
- OS: Gupax will be tested for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Maybe the BSDs
- Docs: All Gupax usage will have documentation on GitHub; General P2Pool/XMRig info will also be included
- Packaging: Gupax will be packaged in a bundled zip/tar that includes P2Pool/XMRig, and as a standalone binary that expects you to bring your own P2Pool/XMRig. Both will be the same binary, only difference being the first will include all necessary components. Maybe an installer as well
- Efficiency: The context for Gupax is a mining machine, it would be too ironic if it impacted the hashrate performance, and so, Gupax uses the very lightweight Rust egui library. By default egui is an "immediate mode" GUI, meaning frames are rendered 60x/sec. This is turned off in Gupax so frames are only rendered upon user interaction. This allows for a fast and lightweight GUI. For context, it uses around 5x less CPU when switching around tabs compared to Monero GUI
Planned
- Community Node: An option to use a trusted community Monero node instead of your own. At a small privacy cost, this allows users to immediately start mining on P2Pool without downloading the entire chain
- Update: Built-in update/upgrader for Gupax/P2Pool/XMRig and an (opt-in) auto-updater that runs at startup
- Config: All the basic configurations you would expect with P2Pool/XMRig (main, mini, peers, thread count, etc)
- Status: Status tab displaying mining statistics using P2Pool & XMRig's APIs
Goals
Gupax is:
- A simple GUI solution to P2Pool mining with max hashrate
- External mining software so Monero GUI isn't plagued with anti-virus issues
- Fast/lightweight because the context for this software is a mining computer
Gupax is not:
- A Monero node/wallet
Build
cargo build --release
On macOS, if you want the binary to have an icon in Finder, you must install cargo-bundle and compile with:
cargo bundle --release
The build.rs file in the repo root sets the icon in File Explorer for Windows. The taskbar icon & App frame icon (for all OS's) get set at runtime using pre-compiled bytes in src/constants.rs from images.