Welcome to the wonderful world of the Gitcoin mining round! This is where the fun really begins, as well as the opportunity to score many points.

As before, the balances are all contained in LEDGER.txt, and we've provided the same sample miner script.

The only commits that can be pushed are ones that:

• Increments an existing ledger entry by 1, or adds a new ledger entry with balance: 1; and
• Has a SHA1 starting with the number of zeros specified in difficulty.txt.

Your goal is to mine as many Gitcoins as possible. The round will end at:

2014-01-29 16:15:00 +0000

At that point, the next round will begin, accessible both at:

@stripe-ctf.com:current-round, and @stripe-ctf.com:round661

You'll still be able to clone this code as:

@stripe-ctf.com:round660

After each round, we'll order all of the participants by number of Gitcoins mined. We'll then run Elo [1] to update their rating (starting from 1000). Your level score will be your rating, which sticks around from round to round, plus any bonus points you've accumulated.

Bonus points are earned in each round where you've mined at least one Gitcoin. For each such round, we'll give you the number of bonus points specified in that round's points.txt (for this round, 15).

For a detailed view of how the round is progressing, check out [2].

Note we'll dynamically adjust the values in the .txt files in order to rebalance the contest (just like the Gamemakers from the Hunger Games).

• difficulty.txt: The number of leading zeros in a valid Gitcoin commit.

• miner: A sample Gitcoin mining script.

• round.txt: The round number.

• points.txt: The number of bonus points that participation in this round is worth.

• end-time.txt: The round end time, as a Unix timestamp [3].

• start-time.txt: The round start time, as a Unix timestamp [3].

• LEDGER.txt: Contains the current Gitcoin balances.

• README.md: This file.

This nonce prevents mining before the round begins: Rss5EY9TIY

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system [2] https://stripe-ctf.com/leaderboard/1 [3] http://www.epochconverter.com/