Update on Photon mining on Bitcoin Cash.

Photon mining commenced on August 8th in block 963142. Since then, the Photon vault contract has generated about 4425 transactions as of September 25th.

There have been about 220,000 photons mined. The threshold target ends in about 10 zeros, which corresponds to about 4,294,967,296 hashes per win.

TL;DR: Most mining is now done by a handful of individuals using bespoke GPU mining software.

The vox app included an initial CPU miner, the CPU miner was upgraded to be multi-threaded after launch. Since that time, it appears the have been three (3) independant mining softare implementations for Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) and even one implemnetation for WebGPUs.

The mining algorithim for photons is secp256k1+sha256. Although no ASIC hardware exists BCH Secp256k1, it has become trivial to automatically generate mining software targeting specific GPUs.

The breakeven mining costs seems to be a couple hundred satoshis most days. However, given limited supply, and the very early stages of the project, miners are reluctant to sell at cost.

The total market capitalization of Photons is between $1-2k. The floor of the market is being maintained by speculators.

The ONLY currency that can be used to buy Photons is Bitcoin Cash. It is available on Cauldron, CatDex and TapSwap. The market for Photons is PERFECTLY isolated from broader finanical markets. No Centralized Exchanges (CEXs) support trading Photons or other CashTokens. There are no other blockchains where the project would be feasible.

The specification for SAFAs, which will be a Sha256 miner has been announced on BCR.