Connect SHA-256 hardware directly to the Spearmint network.

01 What this service is (and is not)

Two things share a name on this site and it matters to keep them apart. Spearmint is the decentralised network and the software that runs it, operated by whoever runs nodes and miners. Spearmint Mining is a mining service operated by Instant Access from Pennsylvania, USA: a Stratum server, a Spearmint Core node behind it, and the accounting that apportions block rewards among the miners whose work produced them.

Computing-power contributors collectively mine Spearmint blocks. When a block reward is earned, the mining service calculates each participating miner's share and distributes the applicable mining reward to the Spearmint address supplied by that miner. That sentence is the whole service.

The service is not an exchange, a brokerage, a bank, a payment processor, a custodial wallet, a money-transfer or remittance business, a marketplace for SPMTC, or a way to move value between users. None of those functions exist in the software, and none may be added without a fresh legal review. The compliance page explains the reasoning in plain English.

02 SHA-256 mining

Spearmint uses the same proof-of-work as Bitcoin: a miner repeatedly hashes a candidate block header with double SHA-256 until the result falls below the network's current target. Finding such a header is the "work"; the network verifies it in microseconds. The block reward — 50 SPMTC at launch, halving on the published schedule, plus any transaction fees — is created by the network's rules inside that block's coinbase transaction. Nobody issues it. Any hardware that mines Bitcoin can mine Spearmint, and because difficulty retargets every block (ADR), the network settles to whatever hashrate is actually present rather than waiting 2,016 blocks.

03 Pool connection

Two endpoints are planned. Neither is live. They are published now so that miner configurations can be prepared and so that the values are on record before launch.

Both endpoints speak standard Stratum v1, which every SHA-256 ASIC firmware supports. The TLS endpoint prevents an intermediary from rewriting your payout address in transit; use it where your firmware allows. The pool will publish its TLS certificate fingerprint on the transparency page.

04 Worker setup

There is no account to create and no password to remember. Your Spearmint payout address is your identity on the pool, and a worker name after a dot tells the pool which of your machines is which.

username

<your spmtc payout address>.<workername>

password

x — ignored; any value is accepted

example

spmtc1qw508d6qejxtdg4y5r3zarvary0c5xw7kv8f3t4.rig01

worker name

letters, digits, hyphen, underscore; up to 32 characters; optional

• The address must be a Spearmint address — bech32, beginning spmtc1 — whose private key you hold. The pool validates the checksum on login and rejects anything else.
• Do not use an address given to you by an exchange or any other third party. If a payout arrives at an address whose keys someone else holds, that party has the reward and the pool cannot recover it.
• Do not use the pool's own address, which you will never be asked for. Rewards are paid to the address in your username and nowhere else.
• Several machines can share one address with different worker names. Statistics are shown per worker and summed per address.

05 Difficulty and shares

The network target is far too hard for a single machine to hit on a predictable schedule, so the pool asks each worker for easier proofs called shares. A share is a block header hashed below a per-worker target set by the pool; it proves that the worker did a known quantity of SHA-256 work toward the current block template, and it is credited to the payout address in the worker's username.

• Variable difficulty. The pool adjusts each worker's share target so that it submits roughly one share every 10–15 seconds, regardless of whether it is a desk unit or a full rig. Higher-difficulty shares count for proportionally more.
• Valid share. Meets the worker's target, references the current template, and is not a duplicate. Counted toward the reward calculation.
• Stale share. Valid work, but for a template the pool had already replaced when it arrived — usually because a new block was found. Recorded but not credited; a stale rate above about 2% usually points at latency or a worker that is slow to switch jobs.
• Rejected share. Does not meet the target, is malformed, or is a duplicate. Recorded and not credited.

Occasionally a share also satisfies the network target. That share is a block. The pool broadcasts it to the Spearmint network through its Spearmint Core node and the reward process on the rewards page begins.

06 Pool fee

pool fee

1% of block rewards attributable to participating miners proposed

The fee is compensation for operating the mining infrastructure: the Stratum servers, the nodes behind them, the share accounting, monitoring, and the payout runs. It is taken from each block reward at the moment that reward is apportioned, before any miner's portion is calculated, and it is shown on every block record. It is not a fee for transferring cryptocurrency, because the service does not transfer cryptocurrency on anyone's behalf; it distributes mining rewards that the pool's own work produced. If the percentage changes, the change is announced in advance on the transparency page and applies only to blocks found after the stated height.

07 Reward methodology

Spearmint Mining apportions each block reward by PPLNS — pay per last N shares proposed. When a block is found, the pool looks back over the most recent shares whose summed difficulty equals twice the network difficulty at that moment. Every valid share inside that window is paid in proportion to its difficulty; shares outside it are not. Because the window is defined in work rather than in time, it grows and shrinks with the pool's hashrate and cannot be gamed by hopping in when a block looks due.

The alternative most large pools use is PPS, where the operator pays a fixed amount per share whether or not the pool finds a block, out of its own reserves. That is deliberately not used here. Under PPS the operator owes miners money it has not yet mined, which makes the relationship one of credit rather than mining. Under PPLNS every SPMTC a miner receives can be traced to a specific block the pool found and a specific set of shares inside its window. Nothing is paid that was not first mined.

Transaction fees included in a block are apportioned on the same basis as the subsidy. Full worked figures are on the rewards page; the formal statement is the Mining Reward and Payout Policy.

08 Payout schedule

The minimum exists for one reason: a payout is an on-chain transaction, and paying fractions of a coin every day to every address would spend more in network fees than it delivered. It is set as low as is operationally practical, and the 30-day sweep ensures the pool does not accumulate anything belonging to miners who have stopped.

09 External payout address

You must supply a Spearmint address you control. The pool has no way to generate one for you and will not offer to; the node software you can run yourself does that, as will any wallet built for the network. The address is where rewards go, and it is also how the pool knows who you are.

• The address is the identity. Shares are credited to the address in the worker's username. Rewards for those shares are paid to that address. There is no separate profile the address is attached to.
• There is no address-change feature, by design. The pool cannot redirect a reward earned under one address to a different one. If you want rewards to go somewhere else, mine under the other address. Anything already earned stays with the address that earned it. This removes the most common way pool payouts are stolen — someone logging in as you and changing the destination — and it removes any moment at which the pool decides where your coins go.
• Optional notifications. If you want an email when a block is found, a payout is sent, or a worker goes offline, you can register an address by signing a short message with the payout address's private key on your own machine and pasting the signature. That proves control without a password and without the pool ever seeing the key. Registration is optional and changes nothing about where rewards go.
• Lost keys cannot be recovered. The pool never held them. Any payout already sent to an address you can no longer spend from is gone, exactly as it would be on any blockchain.

10 What you will not find here

These are not features that are "coming later". They are outside what a mining service does, and adding any of them would make Spearmint Mining a different kind of business with different obligations. The regulatory change-control document exists so that no future developer can add one casually.

11 Questions