Recovering Contributions After Reinstall

If you delete the Wattcoin app or reinstall your operating system, your local mining data is gone. Your wallet can be recovered from your seed phrase — but what about the mid-round contributions you already made? Those contributions were always broadcast to your peers and stored in their round ledgers, but there was no way to retrieve them after a reinstall. You had to wait for the next round to start earning again.

A recent patch on top of v1.0.307 adds peer-to-peer contribution recovery. When you start mining after a reinstall, your app automatically pulls your existing mid-round contributions from your peers. Here is how it works.

The Gap: Stored but Not Retrievable

Even before this patch, every mining round your app broadcast your contribution to all connected peers. Peers validated and stored it in their local round ledgers. This validation is critical to consensus — but the mechanism was one-way. Your contributions safely existed on every peer's machine, but your app could not ask for them back after a local data loss. The round settlement data (rewards) was permanently committed to the chain, but mid-round progress was stranded on other nodes unless you never lost your local copy.

How Peer Recovery Works

The recovery process is automatic. Ten seconds after your app connects to the peer network, it queries every connected peer for their current round snapshot:

1. Connect to peers
   Your app connects to the Wattcoin peer network using your configured seed nodes.
2. Request round snapshots
   After a brief stabilisation delay (10 seconds), your app sends a GET /api/v1/round/contribution request to every connected peer.
3. Merge contributions
   Each peer responds with their current round ledger — a snapshot of every miner's contribution for the current round. Your app scans the responses for contributions matching your wallet address and merges them into your local round ledger. If multiple peers report different values, the most recent (highest-timestamp) entry wins.
4. Resume mining
   Your contribution total is restored. Mining continues from where you left off within the current round.

Why Peer Recovery Matters

In a Proof-of-Energy network, every kilowatt-hour of verified energy expenditure earns rewards proportionally. Losing mid-round contributions meant losing the energy you already spent — and the rewards it would have earned at round settlement. For miners who reinstall mid-round, peer recovery closes this gap entirely.

This mechanism also improves network robustness. Because every peer stores a copy of every miner's contribution for the current round, the network can tolerate individual node failures without losing contribution data. As long as at least one peer remains online, your contributions are recoverable.

What Happens If No Peers Are Online?

If your app starts and no peers are reachable, mining will not begin. The button shows "No peers" and the app waits until at least one peer connects. This is intentional — without peers, there is no one to validate your contributions, and no round snapshot to recover from. Once a peer comes online, the recovery process runs and mining can start.

This is also why standalone mining was removed: Wattcoin is a peer-to-peer network, and fair energy accounting requires cross-verification. Every contribution is validated by multiple peers before it counts.

Read the whitepaper for the complete Proof-of-Energy specification →