H3Dex Activation and PoC Rewards

Information on recent updates directly from the Official Helium Community Discord

Update 06/07/2022:

The team has issued a chain variable update poc_target_pool_size to 50.

The team has issued a chain variable update poc_challenge_rate from 250 to 350.

Since the chain var activation, we’ve seen a redistribution of Beacons from more dense areas to less dense areas, affecting rewards as a whole. Instead of reverting the change, the team is forging ahead as the performance improvements in the h3dex code allows us to look at solving this problem a different way.

I will outline how we can do this.

Increase the pool_size from 10 to 50. In simulations done by the technical community, it’s likely we can get back to a more even distribution of beaconing by adjusting this value.

What is Pool Size?

pool_size determines how many resolution 5 hexes we pick from the network (there are ~20,000 res 5 hexes on the network). Once we have 50 resolution 5 hexes, it is a weighted random selection for targeting.

Higher pool_size increases the diversity of Hotspots being targeted for beacons. There is a tradeoff here, in that we can’t just bump this up 100x, as there is a high calculation cost associated with it. We will start at 50 and monitor.

Increase the number of Challenges per block: It’s set at 250 at the moment. Once we increase the pool_size, we can look at how much computation headroom we still have, then we can bump up this value as well.

Performance fixes and tweaking reactivation for Hotspots on the denylist. These are in review and will be included in a Validator release (without chain variables). Put in simpler terms, the easier it is to compute Proof-of-Coverage, the higher we can bump up the pool_size and challenges per block.

Team is working out these issues in blockchain.

We will be updating the pool_size chain variable shortly and I’ll be back when that goes out.