Ethereum consensus interval
although the price of Ethereum continues to decline, there are still many investment opportunities. Nowadays, many people invest in Ethereum through virtual currency trading in the realm Kingdom, which is not affected by the rise and fall of prices, but also can invest less money in the shortest time to obtain more income.
There is an essential difference between Ethereum and bitcoin. What is the difference? Bitcoin defines a set of currency system, while Ethereum focuses on building a main chain (which can be understood as a road) to allow a large number of blockchain applications to run on this road
from this point of view, Ethereum's application scenarios are more extensive, which is why we say that Ethereum marks a simple monetary system in the era of blockchain
1.0, and a transformation to other instries and application scenarios in the era of blockchain 2.0
however, there is no perfect thing in the world. Although Ethereum has expanded the application scope of blockchain in all walks of life and improved the speed of transaction processing, it also has some disputes and doubts
first, the solution to the lack of scalability of Ethereum: slicing technology and lightning network
the bottom design of Ethereum, the biggest problem is that Ethereum has only one chain and no side chain, which means that all programs have to run on this chain equally, consuming resources and causing system congestion. Just like last year's very popular Ethereum game "encryption cat", when this game was very popular, it once caused Ethereum network paralysis
to improve the processing capacity, Ethereum proposes two ways: shard and lightning network. Let's introce these two technologies respectively
(1) fragmentation technology
vitalik buterin, founder of Ethereum, believes that the reason why mainstream blockchain networks such as bitcoin process transactions very slowly is that every miner has to process every transaction in the whole network, which is actually very inefficient. The idea of fragmentation technology is: a transaction does not need to be processed by all nodes in the whole network, as long as some nodes (miners) in the network are allowed to process it. Therefore, Ethereum network is divided into many pieces. At the same time, each piece can handle different transactions. In this way, the network performance will be greatly improved
however, the slicing technology is also controversial. As we all know, the important idea of blockchain technology is decentralization. Only when the whole network witnesses (processes) the same transaction can it have the highest authority. The Ethereum slicing technology is similar to the group witness, not all nodes witness together. In this way, it will lose the absolute "decentralization" attribute, and can only achieve the purpose of high performance by sacrificing certain characteristics of decentralization
(2) lightning network
lightning network uses the way of transaction under the chain. What does that mean? It means: when the participants of lightning network transfer money to each other, they do not need to confirm the transaction through the main chain of Ethereum, but create a payment channel between the participants and complete it under the chain
however, lightning network is not separated from the main chain. Before establishing a payment channel, you need to use the assets on the main chain as collateral to generate a balance proof, which indicates that you can transfer the corresponding balance. In the case that both parties of the transaction hold the balance certificate, both parties can make unlimited number of transfers under the chain through the payment channel
only when the off chain transaction is completed and the assets need to be transferred back to the chain, the balance change information of the main chain account will be registered on the Ethereum main chain, and no matter how many transactions occur ring this period, there will be no record on the main chain
another real benefit of lightning network is that it can save the cost of miners for you. At present, when we trade on the main chain of Ethereum, we need to consume gas and pay for miners. Once we move the transaction to the lower chain, we can save this part of the cost
Of course, lightning network is not perfect. When using the lightning network, the assets on the main chain should be used as collateral; And this part of assets as collateral can not be used before the user completes the transaction under the chain. This also determines that lightning trading is only suitable for small transactionsthe above is the problem of insufficient scalability of Ethereum, as well as the two main solutions: fragmentation technology and lightning network
Second, there are loopholes in Ethereum's smart contract and the infamous Dao event
Ethereum's smart contract is very powerful, but there are loopholes in any code. The biggest controversy of Ethereum's smart contract lies in the so-called loopholes, that is, security issues. According to relevant research, 34200 (about 3%) of the nearly 1 million smart contracts based on Ethereum contain security vulnerabilities, which will allow hackers to steal eth, freeze assets or delete contracts, such as the infamous Dao incident
(1) what does Dao meanbefore introcing the Dao event, let's first introce what Dao is. Dao is the abbreviation of decentralized
autonomous organization, which can be understood as decentralized autonomous organization. From the perspective of Ethereum, Dao is a kind of contract or a combination of contracts on the blockchain, which is used to replace the government's review and complex intermediate proceres, so as to achieve an efficient and decentralized trust system. Therefore, Dao is not a specific organization, that is to say, there can be many Dao, all kinds of Dao
(2) the infamous Dao event
however, when we talk about Dao now, we basically refer to the Dao event, that is, the infamous hacker attack event we just mentioned. As we know, the English word "the" refers to "the Dao event". The Dao event
refers to "the Dao event", because we just said that Dao is not a specific organization, there can be many Dao, all kinds of Dao
in 2016, slock.it, a German company focusing on "smart locks", launched the Dao project on Ethereum in order to realize decentralized physical exchange (such as apartments and ships). Since April 30, 2016, the financing window has been open for 28 days
unexpectedly, this Dao project is very popular. It raised more than US $100 million in just half a month. By the end of the whole financing period, it raised a total of US $150 million. Therefore, it has become the largest crowdfunding project in history. However, it didn't last long. In June, hackers took advantage of the loopholes in the smart contract to successfully transfer more than 3.6 million Ethernet coins and put them into a Dao sub organization, which has the same structure as the Dao. At that time, the price of Ethernet currency fell directly from more than $20 to less than $13
this event shows that there are loopholes in smart contracts, and once the loopholes are exploited by hackers, the consequences will be very serious. This is why many people criticize Ethereum and say that its smart contract is not smart
to solve this problem, many foreign companies begin to provide code audit services in order to solve the vulnerability problem of smart contract. From a technical point of view, some teams are currently testing smart contracts. Most of these teams are led by professors from Harvard, Stanford and Yale, and some of them have obtained investment from leading institutions
in addition to the problems of insufficient expansibility and loopholes in smart contracts, the controversy over Ethereum lies in the POS consensus mechanism it pursues, that is, the proof of equity mechanism. Under the proof of equity mechanism, if anyone holds more money and holds it for a longer time, he will get more "rights" (interests) and have the opportunity to get bookkeeping power, Bookkeeping can also be rewarded. In this way, it is easy to create the oligarchic advantage of "the stronger the stronger"
Another problem is the chaos of ICO. ICO is a common way to raise funds for blockchain projects, which we can understand as pre-sale. The outbreak of ICO projects on Ethereum has caused illegal activities such as fund allocation and money fraud under the banner of ICO, which has caused security risks to social and financial stabilityafter 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.
before the birth of bitcoin, global information transmission was realized through the Internet's TCP / IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Interconnection Protocol) protocol to achieve high-speed and low-cost transmission. However, with the development of interconnection technology (Internet, Internet of things, VR / AR), the ways of interaction between people and objects, people and information are more diversified, More entities are digitized or token, just the sharing and transmission of information can not meet the economic and social development, so when the entity is digitized or token, people pay more and more attention to the value transfer and how to transfer these assets and values point to point
on October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published bitcoin's white paper "bitcoin: an e-cash in peer-to-peer network" for the first time, and proposed to realize value transfer through decentralized bitcoin network. In the bitcoin system, all participants in the whole network are the supervisors of the transaction, and both parties can complete the transaction without establishing a trust relationship. Blockchain technology has changed the way we obtain and share information, creating a new distributed, point-to-point ecological society
before the emergence of bitcoin network, we have been unable to transfer and transmit the value of point-to-point through the Internet without the help of third-party trusted institutions. Bitcoin network is the first value transfer protocol (VTP) running on the information superhighway. At present, with the maturity of blockchain technology, the application scenarios of blockchain are not limited to bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoinpc tries to combine the above and below blockchain to form the ecological environment of the third blockchain, and further uses VTP protocol to realize point-to-point value transmission
since 2009, with the value of bitcoin being accepted by more and more people and the price rising, bitcoin market has graally become a mecca for global investors. The reason lies in the continuous improvement of investment threshold, continuous compression of investment profit margin and excessive policy intervention compared with other instries, The symbolic significance of blockchain technology and the low value of currency market have become the fundamental reasons for the continuous influx of funds
at present, the blockchain technology in the market is mainly divided into three times:
& #10146; The first era is a point-to-point e-cash system represented by BTC< br />
➢ The second era is the open smart contract complete solution represented by eth< br />
➢ The third era is to solve the problem of eth performance shortage and block congestion, and strive to achieve better commercial value of public chain cluster
it can be inferred that after nearly a decade of crazy speculation in the early stage of the currency market, the next decade will usher in the golden age of value investment. At this time, how to choose an undervalued and high-quality project has become the primary task, just as Bill Gates invested in Coca Cola
what is BPC
BPC, full name bitcoinpc, bit capacity, is a new cryptocurrency based on proof of capacity (hereinafter referred to as POC)
BPC is a digital asset and application platform of blockchain. It provides a new proof of capacity, and provides bitcoinpcasset and bitcoinpcid functions at the bottom of the system, which makes it very convenient for people to carry out asset digitization business, not just to create native tokens on the blockchain
by taking the capacity of hard disk as the basis of consensus, BPC makes its proction more decentralized, makes it more secure and credible, and enables everyone to participate in the proction of cryptocurrency, and generates credit and value through mathematics
BPC's choice of computer hard disk mining is a disruptive innovation. There are CPU, GPU and hard disk as mining equipment in computer. CPU and GPU can not avoid becoming AISC mining machine in the end. At the same time, CPU and GPU will cause a lot of energy waste. The hard disk has the characteristics of anti AISC and power saving. The hard disk can keep its operation only by simple disk scanning. BPC chooses hard disk mining to avoid the defects of CPU and GPU perfectly. The maximum mining capacity of a single mining machine is 8t, avoiding some POC currencies, After a certain stage of development, small households can't enter the market, but big ones are playing. They are playing the same way as POW mining. Small capacity PC mining machine makes it easier to lay out the ecology, enter thousands of households, and realize the idea of Zhongben congren mining. The revolution of POC mining has already started, and the next wave of bull market will proce the leading currency of POC. We'll see< Deterministic: the behavior of the program is deterministic, and the consensus is reached, and the non deterministic factors are excluded in the design of the system
2. Time: Based on POC mechanism, BPC provides system call based on block time stamp, which can regard the whole blockchain as a time stamp server and obtain the time stamp when any block is constructed< Randomness: bitcoinpc runs in two ways to obtain random numbers:
(1) when each block is constructed, the consensus node will reach a consensus on a random number and fill it into the field of the block, and the mining program can read the word segments of any block
(2) the mining program can use the hash value of the block as a means of generating random numbers, Because the hash value of a block is random, a weak random number can be obtained by this method< Data source: bitcoinpc provides two kinds of deterministic data sources:
(1) blockchain ledger
the program can access all the data on the whole blockchain through interoperability services, including complete blocks and transactions, as well as each of their fields. The data on the block is deterministic and consistent, so it can be accessed safely
(2) contract storage space
every node deployed on bitcoinpc has a private storage area which can only be accessed by the node itself. The consensus mechanism of bitcoinpc ensures that the storage state of each node is consistent. Bitcoinpc does not provide a direct way to access the data outside the chain. It needs to send the data outside the chain to the inside of the chain through transaction, so as to convert it into the above two types of data sources before it can be accessed
5. Node call: bitcoinpc nodes have the ability to call each other, but cannot call recursively< High performance: bitcoin PC adopts lightweight VM (virtual machine) as its node's execution environment, which has fast startup speed and small resource occupation, so it is suitable for short programs like nodes. JIT (just in time compiler) technology can significantly improve the execution efficiency of virtual machine
7. Extensibility: the calling relationship between nodes of bitcoinpc is static, and the calling target cannot be specified at runtime
8. Low coupling: bitcoinpc system adopts low coupling design, and the block program communicates with the outside through the interoperability service layer when executing< High efficiency and energy saving: the mining economic model of POC makes miners become a community of ecological interests, and uses money as a new means of proction to replace the original power consumption resources, which makes the whole ecology of BPC expand automatically. Everyone in the world who can buy a hard disk can participate in mining<
BPC application scenarios
superconcting transaction: bitcoinpc will incubate blockchain superconcting transaction projects in the future<
smart Fund: bitcoinpc will increase investment in smart fund projects in the future. It is very similar to the Dao project based on Ethereum, but it tries to improve security through some methods to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Dao
cross chain interoperability: bitcoinpc provides support for the implementation of cross chain interoperability, which can not only realize cross chain asset exchange, but also run cross chain distributed transactions, run on different blockchains, and ensure their consistency<
BPC distribution mechanism
total number of BPCs issued: 42 million
4.2 million (10% of the total number): used to motivate bitcoinpc developers and bitcoinpc board members (pre excavation)
2.1 million (5% of the total number): used to encourage bitcoinpc community construction (output of each mining block)
35.7 million (85% of the total number): used for miners to mine
< br />
block proction time: 10 minutes
initial block size: 100bpc / block
block capacity: 10M
half cycle: 4 years
initial TPS: 70 transactions / second