The difficulty reset. The race is on.

The final parameters

The honest consequence, updated for reality: at difficulty ≈30.4 million, finding a block takes on the order of 10¹⁷ hashes. Within the first day the network was producing blocks every few minutes — hashrate in the hundreds of terahashes per second, essentially all of it resurrected Sia-era ASIC hardware. The much-discussed CPU/GPU window never existed: the chain opened already at ASIC scale. Solo mining with hardware you already own is a lottery ticket, not a plan.

CPU & GPU — and why this site no longer ships a miner

Realistic expectations, with the fork behind us: at network scale a CPU or GPU will essentially never find a solo block, and nothing about that changes with better software. Where small hardware still matters is pooled mining — contributing shares to a pool run by people with real infrastructure — and testing, development, and private networks.

Accordingly, xorminer — the getblocktemplate miner built here before fork day — is maintained as reference code rather than a production miner. What's in it for a builder:

• A byte-exact Python implementation of the live PoW pipeline (the 164-byte header, both BLAKE2b passes, the xor-key mask), validated against all of the official test vectors from the node source tree — a spec you can run.
• Tested plumbing — template building, coinbase construction, submission, stale-tip handling — plus a documented pluggable-kernel protocol, exercised end-to-end on fork-simulation networks.

$ git clone https://github.com/bitcoinxor/xorminer
$ python3 -m xorminer --selftest

The giants woke up — Sia-era BLAKE2b ASICs

The twist this site flagged before fork day played out exactly: BLAKE2b had been ASIC-mined before. The Sia network's 2018-era hardware — Obelisk SC1, iBeLink BM-S3, and boxes built on the same chips — hashes BLAKE2b at rates no GPU touches, and the final header design courts it deliberately: the construction supports four ASIC message profiles, and profile 0 presents the hardware an 80-byte message in the shape of a Sia mining job. Resurrected Sia fleets are the network's hashrate today.

• If you own retired Sia hardware: it went from closet paperweight to productive miner in one fork. Power it on, check it POSTs, find your controller passwords.
• Per-vendor compatibility is being mapped in the open — a community tested-device compatibility matrix already exists. Detailed per-unit guides land here as we can verify them.

Pooled mining — how to judge a pool here

The final header design has a role written into it for pools: the secret xor_key masks the block hash so that a miner can verify its own shares but cannot tell a share from a winning block — only the key-holder can, which defeats block-withholding attacks against the pool. Expect serious pools on this chain to use it. Beyond that, the questions worth asking any pool are the custody ones: does it hold balances, or do blocks pay miners directly? Can you recompute your payout from public data?

One live answer to those questions is Bitcoin Xor, the pool behind xorpool.com. It is non-custodial: the pool never holds a balance, because every block pays miners straight from its coinbase. It runs two endpoints — DATUM (recommended): point a rig at the pooled endpoint for a shared TIDES payout at a 2% fee, or build your own block templates on your own node and pay 1% (the DATUM in a box guide covers both a one-command install and the manual steps); and a solo Stratum V1 endpoint (winner-takes-all, 2% fee). Shares exist only for statistics and difficulty. Each worker gets its own page with its accepted and rejected shares, its hashrate, and every block submission with the node's accept-or-reject verdict, so rented or remote hashrate can be audited from the outside. To keep the chain healthy the pool deliberately limits its own size: when its share of the network grows too high it stops taking new connections until it falls back. Edge endpoints in Asia (hk.) and Europe (eu.) prefix the same host names.

DATUM     stratum+tcp://datum.xorpool.com:23335    (recommended, 2%)
Your own  datum.xorpool.com:28915 from your own DATUM gateway  (1%)
Solo      stratum+tcp://stratum.xorpool.com:23334   (2%)
Worker    bc1q…yourAddress.rigname
Password  x

Use a fresh bech32 address per rig if you want separate stats per rig; the address is the payout target, the suffix after the dot is just a label. Live pool hashrate, blocks and per-miner pages are at xorpool.com; the patched DATUM Gateway and the stats app are published at github.com/xorpool.