At the end of March this year, Bit Continental launched an ASIC-based ant miner X3, which is mainly aimed at the Monroe (XMR) and cryptocurrency relying on the CryptoNight algorithm. Monroe immediately issued a counterclaim and will change the core algorithm to counter it. ASIC computing power invasion.
In April, Ethereum developer Piper Merriam released an Ethereum Improvement Protocol coded as '958'. The major 'improvements' of the improved protocol were allegedly directed at the forthcoming Ethereum mining machine on Bitland.
This is not the first time that a bit continent has collided with an encrypted digital currency community due to its control over computing power.
According to ICWise, Bittern’s sales are expected to reach a staggering RMB 14.3 billion in 2017, surpassing domestic mobile phone chip designer, Spreadtrum, and ranking second among China’s top ten IC design companies in 2017. Second only to Huawei Hass.
The Bitland founder, Wu Jihan, also said in an interview with the media that Bitland already has more than 70% of the bitcoin network's computing power. This monopoly has also led to the bifurcation between BTC and BCH.
With the further expansion of the borders of the mining machine in Bitland, how to deal with the monopoly of bit-continental power has become a problem that every 'distributed currency' will face.
What is a force attack?
Aside from the Chinese mainland, BCH, ETH, and Monroe, let's talk about what power is, what monopoly power is, what a force attack is, and what it means for encrypted digital currency.
First, we're going to talk about what PoW is. Most of the explanations you've seen about PoW elsewhere are like this:
Proof of Work, by guessing a number (nonce) by calculation, solves the prescribed hash problem. It is guaranteed that only a few legal proposals will appear in the system over a period of time. These small amount of legitimate proposals will be broadcast on the network and received. The user's verification will be based on what it considers to be the longest chain continuation problem. Therefore, the chain may be forked in the system, but eventually a chain becomes the longest chain. Participate in the POW calculation People need to pay a certain economic cost, such as hardware, electricity, etc. When they are not the first person to figure out the answer, these costs are consumed, which also guarantees the safety of the entire blockchain. If anyone wants malicious destruction, he Need to pay a lot of economic costs.
Can't read it? No matter, we use the most common metaphor in bitcoin science articles to translate.
First, we compare the digital cryptocurrency represented by Bitcoin to a village.
In this village, everyone has a paper book at home. The village stipulates that every time you do business in this village, you must use the village horn to broadcast.
Whether it is Zhang San’s one dollar for Wang Er, or Wang Bing’s two for Li Er, tomorrow, the whole villagers will always read their own books in a consistent manner.
In this metaphor that makes one of the easiest to understand what is a distributed ledger, there is actually a problem that has no explanation - how do you know if you hear the broadcast is really broadcast? If Wang Er bought a horn today, 岂Isn't it free to transfer a lot of money to your account?
The village radio station has a group of people. The work of this group of people is to help each trader read the broadcast. After reading each transaction information, they will also attach a password to the back.
This code is not random, but is the answer to a 'mathematics problem' stipulated by the whole village. Although ordinary mathematicians are very troublesome, as long as they get the answer, the result will be pushed back very quickly. The formula is established to verify that this answer is a true 'answer'. And you can understand that this 'mathematics problem' is a multivariate multiple equation that we have studied. It has countless solutions, so each transaction is different. You can't fake it.
In the village radio station, the people who read the broadcasts were miners. The process of counting them was to mine, and the machine used to count the number... is a video card or a mining machine. In practice, we often equate miners with miners as districts. The power node on the blockchain network, but in this article, the miner refers to the natural person engaged in the mining of encrypted digital currency, and the miner is the power node.
Since the birth of Bitcoin in 2009, the mining machine has gone through several stages:
It can be seen that the replacement of miners in just a few years is comparable to the evolution of integrated circuits in the past decades. Driven by capital, technology can develop rapidly.
In addition, the deployment of mining machines is mainly concentrated in mainland China and Europe and the United States, thanks to China's advantages in low-voltage, low-power IC design and China's regional low electricity prices, encrypted digital currency in mainland China. Mining industry and mining machine industry have been booming.
Is there any problem with this?
Theoretically, there are no problems. More and more nodes are involved in mining, which means that the more people waiting for the number of propaganda at the village entrance, the more the entire system should be more stable.
However, if the miners used to count the machines are from the same vendor? The problem is big.
On October 25, 2017, Apple had a piece of news. The iOS 11 calculator showed a bug: When the user quickly entered 1+2+3, the result given on the screen was 24.
If this appears in the world of digital cryptocurrency, what would be the result? That is, the wrong calculation result may be brought into the entire network without anyone discovering it.
And more crucially, if a 'calculator factory' monopolizes the calculator market, it can also intentionally produce such a faulty calculator to change the mathematical rules.
After all, the 'calculation' in the field of encrypted digital currency is not as simple as 1+2+3. You can't make notes on Bitcoin for manual verification.
The Practical Significance of Monopoly on Bit Continental Power
With regard to attacks based on 51% computing power, we have learned about them in various articles.
But the reality is that although about 78% of the world's computing power was previously in mainland China, fortunately they were scattered in different pools and were controlled by different people.
Although all PoW-based encrypted digital currencies are at risk of being attacked by 51%, due to the dispersion of computing power, few people can really launch an attack.
But if the miners themselves do not want to launch attacks, but mining machine manufacturers launch attacks?
Still using the metaphor just mentioned, that is, although each miner wants to do his own subjective calculations subjectively, the calculators in his hands have been given a consistent and wrong answer. This may cause digital cryptocurrencies to Great threat.
On the other hand, Bit Continental, the manufacturer that has the absolute right to speak for the miner, once again had such problems.
In April 2017, the Bitland Miner had an Antbleed backdoor. Although it was described as a 'loophole' in the Chinese language, Antbleed was more of an implementation-designed function.
Anonymous personnel discovered that after an ant miner produced on a bit continental network was connected to the network, it would periodically communicate with a domain name held by Bitland, passing the serial number, MAC address, and IP address of the miner back to the server on Bitland. And if Bitland's server gives a negative signal, the miner will stop operating.
Although Bit Continental responded that they could not close any miners that did not belong to them, the Bitcoin Core team proved in the experiment that there is no verification of this feature and anyone can turn off the miner by forging the DNS - but at the same time It also means that Bit Continental is capable of shutting down any sold mining machine.
Later, Bitland has repaired this 'loophole', but it has triggered intense discussion in the community. This also lays the groundwork for almost all PoW blockchain communities to have a prejudice against bit-continents.
A few months later, under the leadership of BitContinent, ViaBTC dug out the first block and hard-forked the Bitcoin blockchain. Since then, BitcoinCash has been used in the world.
Does mining machine monopoly destroy distributed systems?
In the face of this problem, we should now have a clear answer. That is, the monopoly of mining machines will definitely affect the safe operation of PoW digital cryptocurrencies.
The question does not lie in whether Bitland and its founder, Wu Jihan, are worthy of trust. Rather, it is that the value of any blockchain system should be safe to operate without the trust of any individual company or individual.
Even if the ASIC mining machine has not been monopolized by Bitland, the ASIC mining machine itself will also increase the concentration of computing power.
The ASIC used for mining has great requirements on ventilation, electricity, and space. It has no use other than mining, and it has been difficult to calculate because of its powerful computing power.
This caused external players to hardly start mining on or off the computer as they did five years ago. The recent centralization of exchanges has resulted in frequent black incidents. It also proves that concentration in this unregulated market will definitely lead to failure. Safety.
Assuming that the Bitcoin network operates on one million miners, no one can shut it down. If the Bitcoin network were to run on 20 large mines, it would be much easier to close it.
By the end of 2017, 78% of the computing power has been concentrated in mainland China, which has led to the fact that China's regulatory authorities have in fact launched a fatal attack on Bitcoin.
Moreover, the use scenarios of most digital cryptocurrencies are related to 'decentralization'. Once centralized, this means that these use scenarios no longer exist. This leads to an otherwise potentially valuable project becoming a pure wasted air coin. .
So, what kind of measures should we take in this situation?
The first is that as a project party, it may be time to abandon the pure PoW mechanism. In fact, in many projects that issue encrypted digital currency, especially in asset securitization projects, the PoS itself is similar to the stock concept of the real world itself. Better than PoW.
In the media that do not understand the blockchain, we often hear that 'bitcoin has wasted a lot of computing power is worthless', which is to some extent justified. PoW-based blockchain is difficult to project The value itself is tied to the digital cryptocurrency that is being issued—because the real value behind the currency's price does not come from the project, but from the cost of maintaining it.
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, there is no need for developers to interfere excessively. The block chain will be softly bifurcated to the latest state, and there will hardly be a situation in which miners or miners resist it.
Second, as a retail miner, if you are still digging a pure PoW currency, you should unconditionally support the community-sponsored bifurcation activities to resist ASIC mining machines, even if this will cause your mining machine to fail.
This sounds somewhat self-contradictory, but considering long-term interests in deciding to fish out in a currency controlled by monopoly power, it is better to promote community reforms to gain more income. Because in many past clashes with communities, The end result is that the master will force the old algorithm to hard-fork the blockchain.
As with ETH and ETC, the classical Ethereum (ETC), which belongs to the mastermind of power, has lost its developer's support and has become inactive, making it impossible to develop an applied air coin.
As a retail leek, you should be cautious about trading non-mainstream digital currencies (except Bitcoin) supported by BitMiner's mining machine and avoid falling into a blockchain that is completely controlled by BitContinent.
Finally, if you are a bit continent, what should you do?
Bitland’s goal is to become Intel, AMD, and Nvidia, to make greater contributions to the entire computer industry, to become a great company, not just to the immediate interests of mining.
Wall Street financiers have long seen the violence caused by the mining of Nvidia graphics cards. The stock price of this company has risen and fallen in line with the price of Bitcoin, and even said that it is affected by the digital currency market. Recently, Nvidia has been short-selling, arguing that the company has devoted too much effort to providing services for digital currency miners, rather than focusing on artificial intelligence, games and driverless business.
The mission of chip manufacturers is to provide more powerful chips to drive smarter services, and ultimately to contribute to the real world, rather than becoming a monopoly of the virtual world. When people no longer walk into the virtual world, the rest is only An untouched wasteland.
In an interview with the US media last year, Wu Jihan has revealed that he will conduct IPOs with a market value of several billion US dollars. As an upcoming company, Bitland will not only be responsible to investors, but also accept investors' business-to-business capabilities. Continuing questioning, 'If your miner is listed for a split, what should you do?'
And the question that needs to be asked after the listing has already emerged: The price of the current fork of the bifurcated XMO after the fork of the Monroe team is $7.5, and the price of the real Monroe XMR is currently $194. The fork was completely abandoned by the Monroe community.
Before Bitstar became the stigmatized name of all blockchain communities, it was entirely possible to rely on the huge capital accumulated in recent years to make a transition to an AI chip company along the previous plan, instead of continuing to develop a variety of digital currency mining machines. Scrape the last drop of oil before the ecological collapse.