Ethereum Casper and fragmentation
after Ethereum is upgraded to version 2.0 POS mechanism, miners may switch mining machines to other networks
as Ethereum is finally ready to start its Ethereum 2.0 upgrade later this year, thus eliminating the long-term delay, the network will start to move towards the proof of rights model
therefore, the network will give up the workload proof consensus algorithm, so that eth miners have little choice. As their equipment will become obsolete, they will be forced to start mining counterfeit coins or re qualify as eth mortgagors. So, what is the current situation of Ethereum mining? With the coming transition, what will happen to the whole instry< At present, Ethereum consensus is based on POW system, which is similar to bitcoin (BTC). As a result, Ethereum's mining process is almost the same, as miners use their computing resources to earn rewards for each block they try to complete< However, there are still major differences between these processes. Although bitcoin mining has relied almost entirely on ASIC (large, loud machines designed specifically for cryptocurrency mining, most of which are concentrated in areas with low electricity prices), Ethereum's pow hash algorithm ethash is designed to support global chip manufacturers (such as NVIDIA and AMD). As Thomas Heller, global business director of cryptocurrency mining pool f2pool, explained in a conversation with cointegraph, GPU is much cheaper and easier to access than ASIC
"as ASIC is a very professional machine, when a new generation of procts is released, it is usually a huge technological leap. As a result, they have a much higher hash rate and are more energy efficient than the previous generation. This means that those manufacturers have spent a lot of money to research and develop it. Their machines are usually very expensive, and GPUs are much cheaper. "
Heller added that those who use GPU miners "have more flexibility to mine." For example, the popular NVIDIA geforce GTX 1080 Ti card can mine more than 15 different currencies, while ASIC units usually support only one currency
nevertheless, Ethereum is not completely immune to ASIC miners - at least in its current state. In April 2018, bitcontinent released antminer E3, an ASIC specially proced for mining Ethereum. Although widely praised for its hash rate of 180 megahashes per second and power consumption of 800 watts, it has received different responses from the Ethereum community. After the ASIC is inserted, a considerable number of GPU rig owners seem to suffer from loss of profits, and some are even forced to switch to other networks
"in the white paper, ETH must have ASIC resistance. I would like to say that the white paper stands for something "is one of the highest comments on the AR / ethermining topic about the topic discussed when antminer E3 was announced. Another reddit user argued that "the $800 only applies to 180mh."“ Split or die of a nation. "
some Ethereum users continue to suggest that bitmain's mining devices can lead to greater concentration, thus increasing the possibility of attack by 51%. Soon, a group of developers put forward "programmed workload proof" or progpow, which is an extension of the current Ethereum algorithm ethash, aiming to make GPU more competitive and promote decentralization
according to a paper published in March by Kristy Leigh Minehan, co-founder of progpow, about 40% of the hash rate of Ethereum is generated by bitmain ASIC. Alejandro de la Torre, the vice president of poolin, is the sixth largest pool of eth. He confirmed to cointegration that "GPU mining is still dominant" in Ethereum network, and added:
"at present, the profit of eth mining is not high, and the management threshold and cost of GPU equipment are higher than ASIC equipment. Compared with ASIC devices, GPU devices are more flexible, and you can use other algorithms to switch to other coins. "
progpow has not been integrated into Ethereum, and it is not clear when it will be finally implemented - in March, Ethereum core developers were debating whether progpow will really benefit the network in nearly two hours, and failed to reach a consensus. It is worth noting that a bitmain representative has previously told cointegraph that the mining hardware giant does not intend to extend the service life of antminer E3 to start operation after October 2020: "as far as we know, mining will end in October or some time after that."
a safe but uncertain future
indeed, Ethereum will stay away from mining in the future. Ethereum 2.0, which is planned to be launched later in 2020, is a major network upgrade on the blockchain, aiming to transfer its current POW consensus algorithm to a virtual POS (known as "block verifier")
more specifically, users are randomly selected considering their wealth in the network or their "interests". In other words, the more coins a POS verifier chooses to put in, the more coins accumulated as a reward
according to vitalik buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, e to the transition, the network will be more secure and the attack cost will be higher than the network of bitcoin, although the debate about the better consensus algorithm in the encryption community has lasted for many years. However, it is not clear when to start Ethereum 2.0, as many errors and management issues are reported to be delaying the process
another hypothetical benefit of POS system is that it has higher energy efficiency than pow blockchain. According to digiconomist, the cryptocurrency's total annual footprint is 59.31 terawatts per hour, which is comparable to the electricity consumption of Greece as a whole. However, since a report in July 2019 estimated that 74% of the exploitation of bitcoin was done using renewable energy, the environmental impact of bitcoin does not seem to be so serious
what will happen to the actual Ethereum miner? According to the documentation of Casper upgrade as part of Ethereum 2.0 roadmap, the network will initially support a hybrid model including both POW and POS, thus providing some space for block verifiers and GPU / ASIC miners. Jack O & 39, CEO of skale network; "There will definitely be a transition period when two networks are running at the same time," Holleran told cointegration The CEO of scale network (based on Ethereum's blockchain platform) gave a detailed description of this process:
"the transition from eth1 to eth2 takes time of course - it may be years rather than months. The good news about this slow transition is that dapps and defi platforms will be able to roam around based on survivability, security and real-world evidence of adoption. This is a positive impact on the Ethereum ecosystem. "
dig or not
once Ethereum is fully in the POS orbit, miners will have two options. One is to sell the equipment and use the money to accumulate more Eth and start mortgage. The other is the choice for GPU miners, which is simply switching to other ethash networks and mining counterfeit money. Nick foster, a representative of kabombacks, a US mining equipment dealer, told cointegration that most eth miners would choose the latter:
"what I want to say is that most of the miners have not really entered Ethereum or the mining of specific tokens. Yes, there is a certain amount of mineral deposits and holds, but I oppose the view that a large number of Shanzhai coin miners hold their coins at any time. "<
foster then described how he used 3gb GPU units to mine ethash's point-to-point blockchain asset ravencoin (RVN). Once it was unable to mine eth, he said, "this is the reason for mining crows. I immediately sold stability to BTC, and then sold it to US dollars to pay for my rights. I would say that a lot of people are adopting this strategy. "
as foster concludes, he wants eth miners to jump out of the network, and new players - those who don't invest in power infrastructure or drilling rigs - will take a stake in eth. He described the following:
"I can't imagine if I found a five-year lease with $0.04 of electricity and I was mining eth, I decided to sell everything and then continue to pay the rent so that I could hold eth as a share. Substitute. "
Marc fresa, founder of asic.to, a mining firmware company, agreed in a conversation with cointegraph: "if you invest in mining, you won't bet because you have enough room to grow."
one of the main counterfeit coins that may benefit from POW miners leaving Ethereum is Ethereum classic (etc), which is a more conservative version of the blockchain. It is reported that there is no POS related plan. As it also runs on the ethash algorithm, the startup of Ethereum 2.0 may lead to the migration of miners, so its hash rate may have a significant peak
eth's larger pools have similar options. When asked about the company's plans for Ethereum after pow, Heller told cointegraph that after the announcement of Ethereum's POS upgrade, f2pool launched a sister company called story.fish in early 2018. Story.fish has started to provide mortgage services for other POS and delegated POS projects, such as tezos (xtz), Cosmos (atom) and Cardano (ADA), e to numerous handover delays. For prin, e to the transition to POS, it "may temporarily give up supporting eth mining," de la Torre told cointegraph
other top eth pools, namely nanopool, ethermine, pool center, sparkpool and spiderpool, did not respond to requests for comment from cointegraph.
Shelley Goldberg, a well-known investment consultant working for brevan Howard asset management and Roubini global economics, believes that as an analogy, it is like soybean futures and Intel stock. Many people may think that gold and bitcoin are both currencies because they can be used to buy goods and services. Or, both are commodities, because trading commodity futures needs to meet the minimum standards of account opening funds, and comply with the relevant futures and option contracts. But gold is a commodity, bitcoin and blockchain are technologies
in what unit are abstract things measured
Stefan Weiler, vice president of goldmoney, a global financial services and technology company, believes that gold is real and has physical and measurable natural advantages, rather than abstract man-made money, including fiat money. Therefore, gold has measurable mass and weight to determine its unit (gram, Troy, ounces, etc.). But bitcoin doesn't have this feature. Weiler pointed out that "abstract things can only be measured in their own units.". So the bitcoin value of "weighing" is literally not comparable to the value of gold
Stefan has worked in the world's top financial institutions for more than 10 years. He was senior director of commodity strategy at Goldman Sachs and research director of commodity hedge fund BBL commodities. In 2014, the hedge fund gained 51.3% return and won the title of "new fund of the year"
Weiler explains this problem by comparing the units between bitcoin and gold:
when comparing the units of gold and bitcoin, we must first define which unit to measure, gram... Kilogram... Or ton? Or ounces? Weiler uses the market capitalization of the two companies (apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and seaboard (nysemkt: SEB) as a metaphor to illustrate how unit size / amount distorts the price: comparing the price of a unit of bitcoin and an ounce of gold is a bit like comparing seaboard's shares (US $4179 per share) with Apple's shares (US $116 per share), and concludes that, Seaboard's market value is about 35 times that of apple. Considering only the stock prices of the two companies without considering the shares (i.e. units) issued, it is obviously not enough. Weiler believes that a similar situation will occur when comparing gold and bitcoin
neither is money
by definition, money is a widely accepted means of payment as a medium of exchange. The classification of gold as a commodity currency goes back a lot to the early days of capitalism, when people could trade gold for cattle. But this model doesn't work because gold is often in short supply. Gold is a tradable tool and asset-backed currency, because it can be exchanged for a certain amount of US dollars, but if you take the gold nugget to the grocery store to buy something, the grocery store will not sell it to you. Unless we go back to the Bretton Woods system when gold was fixed against the US dollar, gold is not directly linked to any currency
there is no doubt that bitcoin is becoming an acceptable means of payment both offline and online, such as offline stores, home depot and online transactions, such as expedia.com, which are also accepted by many countries, such as Estonia and Denmark. But it is still not widely accepted around the world
money is national legal, which means that each Congress uses it in monetary policy. The Fed can print as many dollars as it can to stimulate the economy. At present, more than 50 banking organizations in the world have joined the R3 blockchain alliance, but bitcoin does not rely on the government, banks and other third parties
unlike money, both gold and bitcoin are in limited supply. The gold supply of the earth depends on the underground reserves, and the creation limit of bitcoin is 21 million
Goldberg believes that although the value of bitcoin exceeds that of gold for the first time, there is no comparability between bitcoin and gold
the two are not irreplaceable
gold was first used around 700 BC, and after that, nothing with the same properties as gold has been found or created. Metallurgists have made alloys that look and feel like gold, but they are not gold because they do not meet physical delivery standards. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has numerous alternatives, because countless "altcoin" cryptocurrencies have sprung up to challenge it, such as Ethernet, which follows Casper rules
according to cryptocoincharts, the market value of 3694 cryptocurrencies has reached 27.8 billion US dollars. Of course, bitcoin has an overwhelming market share, but who knows what other cryptocurrency popularization or some technology will challenge and destroy the current market in the future. Not long ago, many bitcoins were stolen from Mt. GOx exchange. Last summer, a project using blockchain technology was hacked and lost millions of dollars. So there is still room for improvement
gold is a commodity, but bitcoin is not. Gold is a basic commodity or hard asset that can be used in business, and it can be used as a material to proce other commodities. People can also use gold for physical delivery and then make it into some other form for use. Although bitcoin is storable, it is not physical and cannot be held, felt or transferred. " Goldberg said
are bitcoin and gold risk averse
for centuries, gold has been regarded as a safe haven asset or used as a hedge against inflation, but this attribute is not permanent, because there are many alternatives, such as the Swiss franc and tips. Bitcoin is different. In fact, China's three largest bitcoin exchanges recently stopped withdrawing money under pressure from the people's Bank of China for fear that bitcoin would be used to transfer money abroad. Bitcoin has not experienced inflation since its birth, so its anti inflation property has not been verified< However, they are similar. Shelley Goldberg believes that bitcoin and gold are rare, their prices may be volatile, and each serves as an alternative investment to those lacking confidence in legal tender and monetary policy. Bitcoin trading is not as easy as gold, because people have to buy bitcoin through online trading platforms or invest in over-the-counter bitcoin trusts. There may be a bitcoin ETF in the near future, as the US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a proposal to launch an exchange traded fund backed by bitcoin. A final decision will be made by this Saturday
on February 14, SEC officials met with brother Tyler Winklevoss and brother Cameron Winklevoss, advocates of bitcoin ETF, to discuss the above proposal. The market expects that once bitcoin ETF is listed, it will attract a large amount of capital investment, reaching at least $300 million. With this development, bitcoin will become an easier trade
cryptocurrency supporters believe that bitcoin is the medium of exchange and storage value in the future. However, the volatility of bitcoin is a problem when only the downlink deviation is measured instead of the standard deviation& quot; This method better shows the risks of bitcoin becoming a widely used currency, "Weiler said
in his analysis, Weiler believes that "the volatility of bitcoin is significantly higher than that of gold and currency
Weiler believes that although bitcoin's short-term performance is impressive, it still has serious limitations in terms of utility and savings compared with gold and precious metals. At the same time, Shelley Goldberg also believes that the relative value of bitcoin is basically nothing except speculation. In addition to the expectation that trump will relax the financial regulatory environment in the United States, China, India, Venezuela and other countries have tightened the supervision of bitcoin. Therefore, with the currency instability in emerging markets, the uncertainty of Trump's policy and the expectation of stock market adjustment, there are still good reasons to buy gold.
The core of Ethereum 2.0 upgrade is Ethereum 2.0 fragmentation and POS consensus mechanism. The adoption of POS consensus mechanism is to improve the energy efficiency of Ethereum protocol and increase the security of Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum 2.0 is partitioned, so that the Ethereum chain no longer needs to process each transaction on the chain through each node
in the fragmentation system, each node only needs to process about 1% of the transactions or less, which greatly improves the efficiency of the blockchain. After the implementation of eth2.0, not only the network performance has been greatly improved, but also investors can rece the investment in heavy assets (+ slf0037). The implementation of consensus protocol Casper and fragmentation technology has made great changes to the underlying protocol of the network, and further promoted the development of blockchain expansion technology, and continuously reached the commercial standard. As of 16:00 on January 7, 2021, more than 2.3 million eth have been locked in the network, accounting for 2% of the total supply of Ethereum. However, this is still only the first phase of the update. According to official information, uniswap V3 has been deployed to the Ethereum main network. According to the official article, uniswap V3 is the most powerful version of the agreement so far. Centralized liquidity provides unprecedented capital efficiency for liquidity providers, better execution for traders, and the core infrastructure of decentralized finance. As far as Ethereum's roadmap is concerned, V Shen said that as the merger date approaches, many aspects of the roadmap are becoming more and more feasible. It is optimistic that the upgrade will be completed by the end of this year. After the merger, the execution chain will run within the consensus chain, and each beacon chain block will include a block from the execution chain. He also said that the merger requires a lot of complex technologies to make the whole process as simple as possible. For users, clients, developers and smart contracts, the merger will be smoother and users need not worry too much. At present, many centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges, decentralized pledge agreements and basic service providers have entered the stacking track of Ethereum 2.0. It is not difficult to imagine that more service providers will emerge in the future, and the Ethereum 2.0 stacking plate will also become the standard configuration of exchanges and wallets. How long can we dig the pow chain of eth 1.0? There is no clear answer. But it is certain that before Ethereum is completely transformed from POW to POS, Ethereum foundation must take a long time to prove that the POS chain is safe. Only in this way can all developers and users safely complete the switch, so that the entire ecosystem worth more than 100 billion US dollars can truly and completely run on the beacon chain
no one knows how long it will take to complete the project, which is a big unknown, and these unknowns may be a great resistance to the transformation of Ethereum 2.0. Therefore, we are optimistic that the pow chain can continue to dig for at least two to three years
the Xueshuo innovation blockchain Technology Workstation of Lianqiao ecation online is the only approved "blockchain Technology Specialty" pilot workstation of "smart learning workshop 2020 Xueshuo innovation workstation" launched by the school planning, construction and development center of the Ministry of ecation of China. Based on providing diversified growth paths for students, the professional station promotes the reform of the training mode of the combination of professional degree research, proction, learning and research, and constructs the applied and compound talent training system
Cspr is also known as Casper. This project is attached to Ethereum ecology, and it can smoothly transfer the projects on Ethereum based on its own compiler, so as to build and continue the prosperity of Ethereum ecology. It is worth mentioning that cspr (Casper) has also established dev organization, which can provide technical and financial support for its own ecological developers. This is also a very important point. After all, with the support of technology and funds, it can develop in the long run. Another point is that cspr has a very good enterprise relationship, which can connect the traditional world with the blockchain world and further promote the common prosperity of the instry
in fact, according to the relevant information, about 20000 users have snapped up these schemes, but most investors have not won the lottery, and only a few have successfully applied for them. Of course, in response to this, cspr (Casper) has come up with a fourth plan, and more than 10000 people have applied for this plan