Contents
What is Ergo
As you can see on the official website, Ergo positions itself as smart money. According to the website, Ergo builds advanced cryptographic features and radically new DeFi functionality on the rock-solid foundations laid by a decade of blockchain theory and development.
The developers outline six main components that make the project stand out against others in the crypto niche. They are vision, consensus, light clients, survivability, economy, and applicability.
Vision of Ergo Developers
According to the website, Ergo was created in response to stagnation in the blockchain area. As a result, the developers implemented various technical and economic ready-to-use ideas that add value but do not reduce the known advantages of blockchain systems.
Ergo’s primary focus is to provide an efficient and secure way to implement financial contracts, which are the most widely used application of blockchain technology. Unlike the traditional financial system, no bailouts, blacklists or other forms of discrimination should be possible on the core level of Ergo protocol.
So they want to implement something similar to what Ethereum looks like today. It's important to note that Ergo works on a separate blockchain.
Ergo Consensus Algorithm
Autolykos, Ergo consensus protocol, is based on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm. PoW was chosen because it’s widely studied and has high security guarantees.
However, Autolykos has several meaningful differences from Bitcoin’s PoW. For example, you can mine Ergo’s native token ERG with just 3GB of RAM, which makes the niche much more accessible. Ergo also has storage rent to reclaim lost and forgotten coins.
Ergo’s Light Clients
The developers are making an example of Bitcoin Core full chain wallet: it takes a few weeks to sync and load all the data. This is highly frustrating, so Ergo enables light clients (i.e. programs that let you interact with the network) to synchronize with the network by downloading less than a megabyte of data. Thus, a regular user with any device can join the network and start using Ergo.
Thinking Long-Term
Ergo is prepared for the changes that might be expected in the future. For example, miners can vote to increase or decrease maximum block size, storage fee factor, etc.
For more fundamental changes Ergo is going to follow a soft-forkability approach. If an overwhelming majority of the network accepts a new feature, it is activated. Old nodes which vote against the new feature continue to operate normally. Thus hard forks should not be required in Ergo.
Ergo’s Economy
This is the most curious part of the project. What makes Ergo special is the storage fee for outdated coins. If a cryptocurrency remains in the state for 4 years without being moved, a miner may charge a small fee for every byte kept in the state.
It is similar to cloud storage services when users pay to store their documents, music, and other files outside their devices.
It gives Ergo several advantages. First of all, ERG mining will always be stable. On the other hand, Bitcoin’s max supply is 21 million which means that transaction fees will be the only source of income for miners after the last coin is issued. In this case, Ergo miners will have an additional source of income.
Secondly, state size growth becomes controllable and predictable reducing hardware requirements for Ergo miners. And lastly, by collecting storage fees from outdated boxes, miners return lost coins to circulation. It helps prevent a drastic decrease of circulating supply due to lost keys.
Ergo Applicability
The developers want to make the Ergo network a popular place for smart contracts execution. Ergo’s script is Turing-complete which means that the functionality of Ergo-based apps is unlimited.
Ergo’s Price
On July 22, 2021 ERG costs $4.98. It’s a 5100% increase compared to the minimum of $0.09 registered on March 13, 2020. But it’s also a 83% decrease compared to the maximum of $29.58. This price was registered on April 27, 2018, according to Coingecko.
You can't see this leap on the chart, but ERG reached $5-6 in April 2018.
Ergo’s local peak in 2021 was registered on May 19. Back then the price reached $18.
ERG increased by 1775% over the last year. This is more than the yearly growth of Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Where to Buy Ergo
Ergo (ERG) is traded on several popular crypto exchanges: Coinex, Waves, and Gate. According to Coingecko, Waves offers the best liquidity. You need more money to move the ERG exchange rate by 2% in either direction.
Wallet for Ergo
Ergo offers two options: Ergo’s official wallet and Yoroi. The former is a fully functional desktop wallet, whereas the latter works in the web browser. Ergo wallet offers a wider range of options. It has a multi-signature feature that allows you to perform crypto transactions on the wallet only by mutual consent of several people.
You can download Ergo wallet here or Yoroi here.
Ergo Mining
As we already mentioned, requirements to mine Ergo are reduced. GPUs with 3GB of RAM would suffice, similarly to the popular Ravencoin cryptocurrency.
To start mining on 2Miners pool, you need to create a wallet (one of the mentioned earlier) or use a crypto exchange address. Then download the mining software. We recommend lolMiner which we already covered here, nbminer, TeamRedMiner and T-rex.
lolMiner and nbminer work with both AMD and Nvidia GPU. TeamRedMiner works only with AMD cards, while Nvidia is suitable only for Nvidia GPUs.
You can find all mining software in the archive linked here. The password to the archive is 2miners, no spaces or dots at the end.
After you download the files, edit the bat file. You should replace the wallet address with yours, the one you created before. You can also change the rig name and replace RIG_ID with a new name containing only Latin letters, numbers, and symbols “_” and “-“.
Here is lolMiner setup to mine Ergo:
lolMiner.exe --algo AUTOLYKOS2 --pool erg.2miners.com:8888 --user YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID
Here is nbminer setup to mine Ergo:
nbminer -a ergo -o stratum+tcp://erg.2miners.com:8888 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID
Here is TeamRedMiner setup to mine Ergo:
teamredminer.exe -a autolykos2 -o stratum+tcp://erg.2miners.com:8888 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID -p x
Here is T-Rex setup to mine Ergo:
t-rex.exe -a autolykos2 -o stratum+tcp://erg.2miners.com:8888 -u YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS.RIG_ID -p x
Ergo Mining on Miningrigrentals and NiceHash
Hashpower rental is possible for Autolykos2 algorithm. Please find below the settings for the most popular rig rental services: Nicehash and Miningrigrentals.
Here is Miningrigrentals setup to mine Ergo:
Name: 2Miners ERG Type: Autolykos v2 (ERGO) Pool Host: erg.2miners.com:8888 Workername (-u): YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS Password (-p): x
And this is how to setup NiceHash to mine Ergo:
Custom pool name: 2Miners ERG Algorithm: Autolykos Stratum hostname or IP: erg.2miners.com Port: 8888 Username: YOUR_WALLET_ADDRESS Password: x
All the settings are always available on How to start page of the pool. If you know what is SOLO mining and if you want to go SOLO for Ergo join follow these simple steps.
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