[Ethereum] Geth –dev mode; define reward account for mining

You can't mine a dev chain on Parity because it does not run a Proof-of-Work engine. Instead, it runs InstantSeal which basically just creates a new block every 2 seconds if there are transactions available.

The dev chain is preloaded with an insane amount of development Ether. Just open your wallet, go to Accounts, click the Add Account button and then Recovery and then without entering anything, click OK.

You can also run with --jsonrpc-api parity_accounts and issue the following call in another terminal:

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST --data '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"parity_newAccountFromPhrase","params":["","password"],"id": 1}' localhost:8545

The trick is the account which can be recovered using an empty recovery phrase holds all the available tokens. This should be enough to get you started.

Read more on the configuration here: Private-development-chain; Read more on the engine here: Consensus-Engines

I'd suspect this is what has happened.

The current hash rate (as of Ropsten block 673252) is 0.011 GH/s, with the difficulty being 134,588,276.

Prior to the recent spam attacks, if we take block 586946 as an example from before the attack started, the hash rate was ~0.005 GH/s and the difficulty 105,432,944.

The Ropsten testnet was rescued from the spam attack by the donation of significant hash power, which was able to mine a completely new chain starting from before the attack, and replay all the transactions since. I'm suspecting that some of this hash power has remained in the network to help prevent the attack from reoccurring.

You're now mining in a more competitive, but safer, test network.