Autolykos: The Ergo Platform PoW Puzzle is a Proof of Work algorithm, but has several meaningful differences from Bitcoin’s PoW.
- Autolykos is memory-hard, reducing the disparity between specialized hardware (ASICs) and commodity GPUs, allowing ordinary people to participate in mining to secure the network and receive a reward.
- Autolykos originally adjusted difficulty using the linear least square method, which smoothed over eight epoch’s (each epoch is 1024 blocks x 2 minutes), as described in this paper.
- Autolykos v2 now uses predictive linear least squares method which makes difficulty adjustments 87% faster than original Autolykos difficulty algorithm.
- Autolykos v1 was originally pool resistant. However, it became apparent that it’s impossible to prevent pools with smart contracts, so they (over 90% of miners) voted to disable Ergo’s pool resistance so larger players could not take advantage of the loophole.
More information available on docs.ergoplatform.org