Than the original chain does not need mining
At the end of March this year, bitmainland launched an ant miner X3 based on ASIC, which is mainly aimed at Monroe coin (XmR) and cryptonight algorithm dependent cryptocurrency. Monroe coin immediately issued a counter statement that it will change the core algorithm to fight against the invasion of ASIC computing power
what would be the result if it appeared in the world of digital cryptocurrency? That is, the wrong calculation results may be brought into the whole network without being discovered
More importantly, if a "calculator manufacturer" monopolizes the calculator market, it can also deliberately proce this kind of calculator with errors to change the mathematical rulesafter all, the "calculation" in the field of crypto digital currency is not as simple as 1 + 2 + 3. You can't compare paper currency with special currency by hand
the practical significance of computing power monopoly in mainland China
we have learned about attacks based on 51% computing power in various articles
but the reality is that although the global power of 78% was in Chinese mainland, fortunately, they were scattered in different pools and controlled by different people. p>
although all POW based cryptocurrencies have the risk of being attacked by 51%, few people can really launch attacks e to the dispersion of computing power
but what if the miners themselves don't want to attack, but the mining machinery manufacturers attack
still using the analogy just now, although each miner subjectively wants to do the problem checking independently, their calculator is manipulated remotely and gives consistent wrong answers. This may pose a great threat to digital cryptocurrency
however, the manufacturer with the absolute voice of mining machinery had such a problem in mainland China
in April 2017, the back door of antbled came out. Although this is described as a "vulnerability" in Chinese, antbled is more like a function that has been implemented and designed
anonymous people found that after an ant miner made by bitmainland was connected to the network, it would communicate with a domain name held by bitmainland on a regular basis and return the miner's serial number, MAC address and IP address to bitmainland's server. If the server of bitcontinent gives a negative signal, the miner will stop running
although bitcontinental responded that they could not shut down any mining machines that did not belong to them. However, the bitcoin core team has proved in experiments that this function has no verification. Anyone can shut down mining machines by forging DNS - but it also means that bitcoin mainland has the ability to shut down any sold mining machines
After, bitcontinent fixed this "loophole", but it caused heated discussion in the community. This has also set the tone that almost all pow blockchain communities are biased against mainland China
a few months later, under the leadership of bitcontinent, viabtc g out the first block and made a hard bifurcation with the blockchain of bitcoin. From then on, bitcoin BCH (bitcoin cash) appeared in the world
will the monopoly of mining machinery destroy the distributed system
facing this problem, we should have a clear answer now. That is, the monopoly of mining machinery will certainly affect the safe operation of pow digital cryptocurrency
the problem is not whether bitcontinental and its founder Wu Jihan are trustworthy, but that one of the values of any blockchain system is to operate safely without trust in any single company or indivial
even if the ASIC miner is not monopolized by bitmainland, the ASIC miner itself will increase the concentration of computing power
the ASIC used for mining has great requirements for ventilation, power and site, and has no use except for mining. At the same time, the calculation difficulty of the whole network is increased e to the powerful computing power
as a result, it is very difficult for external players to start mining in the next software on the computer as they did five years ago. And the recent centralized exchange is caused by frequent black incidents, which also proves that concentration in this unregulated market will definitely lead to insecurity
assuming that the bitcoin network runs on top of one million miners, no one can shut it down. And if the bitcoin network runs on 20 large mines, it's much easier to shut it down
and by the end of 2017, 78% of the effort was concentrated in mainland China, which led to a real possibility of Chinese mainland regulators' launching a deadly attack against the special currency. p>
moreover, most of the scenarios of using digital cryptocurrency are related to "decentralization". Once centralized, it means that these scenarios no longer exist. It turns a project that might have value into a pure waste of computing power
Then, what measures should we take in the face of this situationfirst of all, as the project side, it may be time to give up the pure POW mechanism. In fact, in many projects of issuing cryptocurrency, especially in asset securitization projects. Similar to the concept of stock in the real world, POS itself is more reasonable than pow
in the media that don't know about blockchain, we often hear such words as "bitcoin wastes a lot of computing power and has no value", which is reasonable to some extent. It is difficult for a POW based blockchain to bind the value of the project itself to the issued digital cryptocurrency - because the real value behind the price of the currency does not come from the project, but from the cost of maintaining computing power
and the hybrid mode of pow + POS is more like the future. In the hybrid mode, both coin holders and miners can participate in the major decisions of this community. If a decision is widely accepted, the blockchain will be soft forked to the latest state without excessive intervention of developers, and there will be almost no private resistance of miners or mining machines
secondly, as a retail miner, if you are still digging a pure POW mechanism currency, you should unconditionally support the bifurcation activities initiated by the community to resist the ASIC mining machine, even if it will lead to the failure of your mining machine
this may sound contradictory, but in the long run, it is better to promote the reform of the community and get more benefits in a currency controlled by the monopoly of computing power. Because in many conflicts between computing power and community in the past, the ultimate result is that the computing power owner will forcibly keep the old algorithm to hard fork the blockchain
just like Eth and etc, the classic Ethereum (etc), which belongs to the computing power master, has lost the support of developers and become an air coin with no vitality and impossible to develop applications
as a retail leek, you should be careful to trade the non mainstream digital currencies (except bitcoin) supported by bitmainland mining machinery, so as to avoid falling into a blockchain in which bitmainland controls the computing power completely
finally, if you are bitcontinent, what should you do
bitcontinent's goal is to become Intel, AMD and NVIDIA, make greater contributions to the whole computer instry, and become a great company, not just entangled in the immediate interests of mining
Wall Street financiers have long seen through the violence brought about by NVIDIA's video card mining. The rise and fall of the company's stock price has been consistent with the price of bitcoin, and even affected by the digital currency market. Citron, a well-known short seller, has recently been bearish on NVIDIA, arguing that the company has focused too much on providing services for digital currency miners rather than on serious businesses such as artificial intelligence, games and driverless driving
the mission of chip manufacturers is to provide more powerful chips to drive more intelligent services, and finally contribute to the real world, rather than become monopoly tycoons in the virtual world. When we no longer enter the gate of the virtual world, the only thing left is a deserted land
in an interview with US media last year, Wu Jihan disclosed that he would make an IPO with a market value of billions of dollars. As a company about to go public, bitmainland should not only be responsible to investors, but also accept investors' questions about the sustainability of its business. "If your mining machinery goes public, it will encounter a fork, what should you do?"
and this question, which needs to be asked after the listing, has already appeared: the current price of the split coin xmo after the Monroe team split is $7.50, while the current price of the real Monroe coin XmR is $194, and the split coin is completely abandoned by the Monroe community
before bitcontinent becomes the name of all blockchain communities, we can rely on the huge amount of capital accumulated in recent years to transform into an artificial intelligence chip company along the previous plan, rather than continue to develop a variety of digital currency mining machines to extract the last drop of oil before the ecological collapse
content source: phoenix.com
judge for yourself.
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