Want to dig ore, first understand the cold knowledge of the ore ring
Original title: "people who always shout" mine accident coming "may not understand bitcoin mining"
Source: daily planet
As a journalist who has been following the mining industry for a long time, I have found that many people like to express some opinions and inferences about bitcoin mining when the market is extreme and the industry is in turmoil, which causes investors to spread and panic.
But in fact, quite a bit of this is derived from the wrong concept. Many people who think they understand the principle of mining, or have contact with mining industry, mining some basic concepts are in fact half understanding, or even misunderstanding.
For example, on March 12, the day of the BTC crash, the bitcoin network lasted for an hour without a block. Many people (including me and some friends in the mining circle) thought it was caused by the collapse of mining machinery and computing power, so they worried whether the "mine accident" was on the way.
However, in fact, the network has not been out of the block for a long time before it often happens, which is simply a matter of luck under the coincidence, there is no colliding mining machine within 1 hour (accord with the difficulty) of the hash result.
There are plenty of similar examples, from miners to currency holders, who have misinterpreted a lot of data to the point of misinterpreting it, or even misinterpreting it, which is clearly risky to guide a trade. In the eyes of professionals, this is entirely avoidable.
So the daily planet Odaily, in conjunction with the Poolin coin-print pool, has compiled an important and often misunderstood list of "cold facts" about mining. Check out how many you know.
Is "total net computing difficulty" a real number?
On the morning of March 18th, four days after the bitcoin crash, everyone was dredging up fears of a "mining disaster".
The news that bitcoin's computing power has fallen by about 40 percent this month to below 100 E spooked many people.
The statistician is a well-known data analysis organization and twitter Skew Markets, and the data source is BitinfoCharts, which is a professional data site. But at a glance, the expert knows that the figure is wide of the mark.
Skew 官推
Going back to the data source BitinfoCharts, we subdivided the month's highs (133.29) and lows (95.96) to get a peak monthly decline of 28%, so the 40% figure is a big difference.
If the Skew has not miscalculated to conclude that bitcoin is down 28% this month, does that represent the real story? In other words, is "total net power on a given day" reliable data?
The truth is -- can't believe it, because this "net computing power" is derived from the formula, is a theoretical value, not real-time monitoring data.
The "difficulty formula" is commonly used in the industry as follows:
In fact, there is no record in the network of how many miners are operating, and the miners have no authoritative statistics.
According to the formula, the length of block time determines the theoretical calculation force displayed by block browser. However, we should know that the collision of bitcoin's hash is a matter of probability. The same calculation can be done in three minutes or half an hour. Therefore, the short-term theoretical calculation force, and can not represent the actual calculation force.
For example, a normal day should produce 144 blocks, but the actual number of blocks produced in a day is less than 144, after all, is the result of a rapid decline in the force, which needs to lengthen the time latitude to see. In the long run, if the output of each day is decreasing, we can further determine that the reason is the decline in computational power.
But instant decisions cannot be based on data from a month or even six months ago. Therefore, the mining practitioners generally take the mean value of calculation force of the recent 7 days as the calculation force expression of a certain period, taking into account the accuracy and efficiency.
With that in mind, you'll laugh off headlines like "sudden drop" and "flash crash" on the bitcoin calendar.
Bitcoin has been "pummeled" too many times
Don't difficulty adjustment cycles occur every 14 days? Why extend it?
On the night of March 12, regarding the impact of the bitcoin crash on the mining industry, pan zhibiao, the founder of bitcoin printing, boldly speculated that the next difficulty adjustment is still 11 days away, but if the calculation force drops by 30% during this period, the difficulty adjustment cycle will be reversed by 5 days to 16 days. So the miners must generate at least half a month's cash flow (until the net is low enough to dig).
A lot of people might see this and wonder, everyone knows that bitcoin is adjusted once in 14 days, how can it be delayed?
The reason is simple. The purpose of adjusting the difficulty of the bitcoin network is to adjust the speed of the blocks to keep one block in an average of 10 minutes, and every 2016 block is adjusted as a cycle.
We are familiar with the 14-day one adjustment, is established in the short term on the basis of a relatively stable overall computing power, block time of 10 minutes little change.
As mentioned above, if the mining computational power really drops rapidly and the mining machine's computational power is insufficient to find the target hash value in the average time, the block out time will also be prolonged, thus affecting the difficulty adjustment period.
Has fallen below the price of some mining machinery, why is the calculation force also not decreased?
To understand this problem, we need to know how the price of the coin is calculated.
Shutdown price refers to the point at which the currency price falls to the point where the revenue = the cost (that is, the net revenue is 0) of a certain mining machine.
Currency price is lower than the point, the mining machine with the mining will not be profitable. So, from an economic point of view, most miners should temporarily shut down and wait for the market.
The big crash on March 12-13 quickly broke the shutdown prices of many old miners, while the new generation of high-performance 45-65w /T miners were also operating at a profit of a few cents to a few dollars.
But we have observed that bitcoin's computational power has not declined significantly in the last few days. Several industry veterans estimate that 50E will be on the 15TH/s class by the end of 2019, and apparently not all of them have been removed.
Are the miners digging at a loss?
According to the calculation formula of shutdown price, when "revenue - cost of mining machine (mainly electricity) =0", mining should be stopped. At the same time under the same currency price, different electricity costs will affect the high or low shutdown price. The lower the cost of electricity, the more able miners are to withstand a drop in the value of the currency, or the lower the shutdown price.
So when we say below the shutdown price, we're using the industry-wide rate of electricity, but we don't rule out that miners with cheap power can still run their old machines.
With the electricity price of 0.24 yuan/kWh and the currency price of 5,000 us dollars, today ant S9 still has a few cents of income.
Even if the miners wanted to shut down, it would not be so easy. For example, many mines have already declared their electricity consumption to the authorities, so it is inconvenient to shut down suddenly. For customers unable to support their electricity bills, both sides are likely to choose to temporarily lease the machines to the mine to keep them running. For mine owners, whose electricity costs are much cheaper than those of their customers, running older mines does not necessarily lose money.
At the same time, many people in the circle of friends like to publish "BTC price fell to XXXX, S9 will be squeezed out", this is a very weak argument. As mentioned above, the old S9 mining machines still account for nearly half of the total power of the network. If these mining machines are shut down, the so-called "shutdown price" will also drop significantly, so that no one will shut down easily, which has become a prisoner's dilemma. In practice, the old miners are not so easy to stop all the mining.
Moreover, many miners are now choosing to use financial instruments to survive the downturn. Short - term below the "shutdown price" really does not necessarily affect the power.
Like playing games and grabbing red envelopes, mining can also open plug-in, many mining machines are open
At the end of 2018, a mining optimization algorithm called Asicboost was hotly discussed in the mine circles. Optimization algorithm, as the name implies, is to improve the efficiency of mining.
According to the calculation data of Rawpool mining pool, the mining machine with this algorithm added in the firmware can achieve over 12.5% reduction in consumption. The logic of reducing consumption is that, by taking advantage of the characteristics of block data format, the number of times the miner receives data is reduced and the operating power is reduced.
According to public information, Asicboost was first patented in 2015 by two researchers, Timo Hanke and Sergio Lerner. Perhaps because of patents, the technology was not widely used early on.
Until October 2018, when the currency was on the decline and several mining machines were on the verge of shutting down, bitland was the first to announce the addition of Asicboost to its ant S9 and T9 + models.
As soon as the announcement was made, the pools followed suit, announcing that they were "compatible with AsicBoost mining".
& have spent Data from: Asicboost. Dance & have spent
According to the latest data from asicboot.dance, Asicboost usage has climbed since then, from less than 5% penetration to nearly 70% now, or nearly three-quarters of the network's mines are "plugged in."
Trading congestion, mining pool can be directed to accelerate a transaction?
The big drop on March 12th and 13th left many contract users with no time to cover their positions, and it was another big test of the speed of bitcoin online trading. Data show that the total number of unconfirmed transactions in bitcoin soared between the 12th and 14th.
& have spent Image from: Johoe's Bitcoin Mempool statistics&sp; & have spent
Basically, this situation will come once in a while.
At this point, if they do not want their transaction to be blocked for too long, users only have to raise the fee, to increase the probability of being miners priority packaging. Of course, speed is not guaranteed.
Tipping directly to the pool can also speed up the process.
At present, including the printing of a number of mining pools have launched "transaction acceleration" services. For users who buy the service, the pool will be the first to queue up for the next block package. If the following blocks are successfully released from the mining pool, the transaction can be immediately accounted for. If the next block is not successfully discovered by the mining pool, the transaction fee will be added to the transaction, making other mining pools pack the transaction preferentially, thus accelerating the transaction.
It is understood that the average transaction receipt time for users who buy the service is 25 minutes, which is similar to the time required for normal transactions when there is no congestion on the chain. The service also offers an alternative when traffic surges and networks become congested.
The original link: https://www.odaily.com/post/5147724
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