Time: 13 Dec, 2024  16:00 （UTC+8）

Guest: CoinFuMasterShifu, Core dev of $WART

Host: Yui, BIT community manager

Opening

Yui:Welcome everyone to join our exclusive AMA with $WART today. 

It's my pleasure to meet you all. I'm Yui, the Community Manager from BIT.

Today we are honored to have CoinFuMasterShifu, the core developer of Warthog, with us. 

So before we start the AMA, let's ask Shifu to briefly introduce himself.

Shifu：Hi yes, this is a written AMA because we are not doxxed. I have a technical background in mathematics and statistics and after university I joined a project before, called "Bamboo" or "pandanite" but their founder disappeared.

Then I joined Warthog around 3 or 4 months after its inception. And I had some ideas in the back of my mind for a new proof of work variant. I then made it come true in Warthog, but we will talk about that later.

Yui: Thanks a lot. The community will remain muted while the AMA is going on. 

You are welcome to interact with emojis, and the comment feature will be open after the AMA ends.

So let's start today's AMA.

Can you briefly introduce Warthog Network and its unique consensus mechanism, PoBW?

What is the vision behind PoBW, and how does it differ from traditional Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS)?

Shifu: Warthog Network is a Layer 1 cryptocurrency written from scratch. We are a highly innovative project trying to push today's boundaries in the crypto space. One of our innovations is PoBW.

PoBW stands for "Proof of Balanced Work", and this is a new method that I designed to do Proof of Work on a combination of different hash functions. I have even written a paper on this concept, it can be found on my GitHub profile. It turns out that for efficient mining we cannot ignore one hash function so we need to find a balance, hence the name Proof of Balanced Work.

For Warthog's Janushash algorithm, we combine 2 algorithms: Sha256t (triple sha256) and Verushash v2.2.

This way we combine a ASIC/GPU algorithm with mostly a CPU algorithm and voila we have a new mining algorithm which requires CPU and GPU.

ASICs won't work because they cannot be easily paired with a CPU and we also have included a feature of diminishing returns for high Sha256t hashrates when CPU hashrate is not scaled as well.

In summary this is very different from Proof of Stake. But it's also different from traditional PoW because now we cannot just focus on one hardware strength.

Our vision is to go back to the roots of Satoshi's ideals and bring back mining to the people - and not to the big farms.

Yui: Wow is very detailed in his explanations and instructions and can see the team put a lot of thought into it. 

Shifu: Yes it was a very long way, we needed several iterations, And also the algorithm itself was a long way to implement because of a hacker in the early days, I needed to tweak it again and again to avoid them getting all the coins.

But I successfully defended against them, and in a sense this also hardened the algorithm.

Ironically, without these "attacks", we would not have this good algorithm today :)

How does PoBW operate in practice?

What are the main advantages of PoBW compared to other consensus mechanisms?

How does Warthog Network ensure security and scalability?

Shifu: In the source code, our Janushash PoBW implementation works very similarly to normal PoW, in fact one can implant it into any other PoW crypto project.

But in practice, mining is quite different.

GPU and CPU need to mine Sha256t and Verushash respectively at the same time and they need to be connected with sufficiently high bandwidth.

The main advantage over traditional PoW is that we break specialization since Sha256t and Verushash need to be mined at reasonable efficiency at the same time.

This throws big farms out of the game; they are usually focused on GPU or CPU mining only, i.e., they have an imbalanced setup.

With no big farms or botnets in the network, we attain greater decentralization of hashrate at the miner level and higher mining yields for the average miner.

More decentralization, along with the fact that ASICs cannot easily join the network, gives us a higher level of network security, while scalability is similar to that in traditional PoW projects.

Regarding the Warthog Network ecosystem, which applications or use cases can benefit from its unique algorithm?

How do miners participate in the network, and how are rewards distributed?

Shifu: I think the main application of the PoBW theory is the creation of mining algorithms that put a focus on multiple hardware strengths, for example Warthog's Janushash algorithm that requires a GPU and a CPU for mining.

As long as a miner has a decent CPU and a sufficiently capable GPU, they can start mining profitably; even APUs work. Simply download iedoc's bzminer and choose a pool, or mine solo directly to your node which has a built-in stratum server. 

This helps achieve better decentralization.

From the miner's perspective, mining is just as simple as in traditional PoW, and rewards are distributed like in Bitcoin, with a halving every two years.

The only difference is that you have more fun trying out different CPU/GPU combinations and get better mining rewards because huge farms don't compete with you.

We even made a calculator that can simulate different combinations, which you can find here: https://wartscan.io/calculator. Our goal is to make mining great again for the people and I think we have achieved this goal to a good extent with PoBW.

What role does the community play in the development of Warthog Network?

How can both technical and non-technical individuals get involved?

Shifu: We don't have premine and did not start with a dev allocation.

That's mainly a good thing but at the same time Warthog's growth depends on community donations to afford listings, website design and wallet implementations.

Therefore the community plays a very important role in the development of the project.

But I can say that we have a great and engaged community. Everyone can just make proposals or contribute.

Technical individuals help with debugging or even implementation of things and non-technicals can make useful proposals for project growth.

We recently introduced the Discord forum to leverage our community involvement.

And it was a great success.

Yui: I feel that the Warthog community members are very friendly and active. Yesterday I shared an AMA with a Russian group and some Russian users spontaneously said they could help with translations and questions, it was really great.

Shifu: Oh at this point I also want to thank slixe from Xelis.

He wants to support our project because he thinks good projects should help each other.

Without the help of our great community we would not be where we are today.

We even had someone who wrote a plugin for Hiveos when my original miner did not have it.

Also all additional members came from the community including myself.

What is your key advice for potential investors and developers?

What are your thoughts on the future of PoBW and Warthog Network's place in the crypto space?

Shifu: For investors my key advice is to understand that we are not just another copy of a copy, we are a fresh rewrite with revolutionary concepts.

This means that there may be bugs in the project but at the same time we have put countless hours of hard work into it and we are here to stay and grow.

Every developer is welcome to contribute.

We have a very interesting road ahead:

finalizing browser nodes, a new browser wallet extension, new improved website, hard-coded DeFi etc.

I am very excited about these unique features and especially when you consider how much PoBW is praised already today, I'm sure our innovative use of fresh ideas will reserve us a special place in the crypto space.

Ending

Yui: Thank you so much for the wonderful sharing.

I believe our community members have a better understanding of $WART.

We look forward to bringing more community events in the future. 

Everyone is welcome to chat and share together in the BIT community.

See you soon!