Analysis of the progress of Ethereum and Filecoin
In my previous articles, I mentioned that the three upcoming hot events in 2020 will become the main line throughout next year. These three major events are: the upcoming launch of Ethereum 2.0 beacons in the first quarter of next year, the launch of Filecoin in March next year, and the halving of Bitcoin in May next year.
Now it is almost the end of the year, 2019 is about to pass away, and the exciting 2020 is coming. It is necessary for us to look forward to the progress of events related to Ethereum, Filecoin and Bitcoin related to the above three things.
1. Bakkt CEO turned senator
In terms of the development of Bitcoin, there is a recent piece of news in the United States that has an important role in the long-term development of Bitcoin.
The U.S. regulators have always held a relatively relaxed attitude towards digital currency transactions. As long as they are regulated, they will not interfere too much with the development of digital currencies. Therefore, a series of licensed exchanges have begun to operate publicly in the United States. And thrive. It is under such circumstances that the United States has been at the forefront of the world in digital currency transactions.
In September this year, the launch of the Bakkt Bitcoin futures exchange in the United States pushed Bitcoin trading to a higher level. Since the Bakkt exchange was launched in September, its trading volume has soared nearly 100 times, which is comparable to some second-tier exchanges. Over time, with the platform effect of the Bakkt Exchange and the size of investors it faces, it is entirely possible that its trading volume will be comparable to that of first-tier exchanges.
At this time, Kelly Loeffler, the CEO of Bakkt, will resign from this position to represent the state of Georgia in the U.S. Senate as a senator.
Loeffler was ICE's director of digital assets before becoming CEO of the Bakkt platform. It can be seen that she has been working in the field of digital assets. And was recognized for building the first compliant physically-settled Bitcoin futures on Bakkt.
This time she won the Senate seat will have a huge effect on the advancement of digital currency in the United States. It can be very optimistically estimated that the United States will progress faster and more smoothly in terms of digital currency policy and supervision in the future.
2. Istanbul Fork of Ethereum
In terms of the development of Ethereum, the biggest recent event is the impending Istanbul hard fork. This hard fork is expected to occur on December 6th, although this hard fork has little to do with the launch of the beacon chain next year technically, and the problems it solves have little to do with the general public , but it will have a huge impact on the sentiment and atmosphere of the Ethereum community and the entire digital currency field.
At present, in the field of public chains, Bitcoin has been in a state of slow or even stagnant technological progress for a long time. Bitcoin has now been sublimated into a symbolic meaning, and the progress and focus of blockchain public chain technology are almost all on Ethereum. Therefore, every move of Ethereum will affect the entire industry and lead the future direction.
Therefore, the problem to be solved by this hard fork is not important, but the focus and core of everyone’s attention is whether it can be successfully completed or whether there are too many problems and deviations to be conservative.
3. Announcement of the latest hardware configuration of Filecoin
On the Filecoin side, the latest news came out on the evening of December 5: Protocol Labs announced the latest mining hardware configuration. In a nutshell, to satisfy mining, the following conditions must be met:
1) The minimum hard disk space is 1T
2) Minimum CPU: A 8 ~ 12 cores
3) The minimum memory is 64G
4) A total of 6 GeForce graphics cards are recommended for the available graphics cards
However, the announcement was officially deleted later, and it was in the process of being updated. If the configuration table is finalized, it can be said that the graphics card is basically determined to be necessary. For general regular large mining machine manufacturers, basically the currently configured mining machines can meet these needs, so the problem is not big; for cloud computing power service providers, these hardware configurations have no effect, because cloud computing power Vendors can flexibly configure hardware.
In addition, the price of the hardware required in this configuration is publicly available on the Internet. Adding up these hardware, the cost of the hardware required for mining alone is around 10,000 to 12,000. If we replace the hard disk from 1T with the 8T hard disk that is usually configured in mining machines, the cost will be around 11,000 to 12,000.
But isn’t that the cost of a mining machine? Certainly not, because the key to Filecoin mining is not hardware but software, so the bulk of the cost is still software.
