Ethereum's Transformational Breakout Battle

In the blockchain industry, when we talk about mining, many people’s first impression is Bitcoin mining. In fact, in addition to Bitcoin, Ethereum, the second child in the digital currency world, is also the main target of the mining industry.

But different from Bitcoin mining, the mining machines used for Ethereum mining do not completely rely on ASIC mining machines like Bitcoin. mainstream configuration.

Recently, there was an article about Ethereum mining "Ethereum miners life and death situation: 4G graphics card mining machines may be wiped out in the fourth quarter!" , reveals some little-known facts about Ethereum mining.

The biggest difference between Ethereum mining and Bitcoin mining is that the mining algorithm of Ethereum is resistant to ASIC mining machines, which is also a threshold specially set by Ethereum developers when developing Ethereum.

The reason why developers set this threshold is to prevent Ethereum mining from being monopolized by ASIC mining machines like Bitcoin mining.This is also an effort by the Ethereum community to do its best to decentralize mining.

So how does Ethereum resist ASIC mining machines? Embedded in its algorithm is a step of generating a directed acyclic graph. In order to complete this step, a large amount of graphics card will be consumed.

As the saying goes, "Success is Xiao He, and failure is Xiao He"----this step of generating a directed acyclic graph has resisted the monopoly of ASIC mining machines on Ethereum for a long time on the one hand, but on the other hand it has also caused A problem that seemed to be no problem at first but is now becoming more and more serious:The graphics card performance required by the Ethereum mining algorithm has gradually reached the upper limit of the graphics cards used by many current mining machines.

According to the forecast of this article, by around December 25th of this year, the mining machines that account for 60% of the current mining power of Ethereum may no longer be able to continue mining.

If you want these graphics card mining machines to continue mining, you must continue to add graphics cards to these mining machines, and adding graphics cards will inevitably bring about an increase in the cost of the mining machines. On the one hand, it will bring cost-benefit considerations to the miners. On the one hand, even if it is necessary to upgrade the graphics card for each mining machine, the workload is huge.

So in this case, will a large number of miners withdraw and cause the Ethereum computing power to weaken and be attacked?

In my opinion it may not be a big deal,After all, mining is regulated by the market. When miners quit and the computing power of the entire network decreases, it means that the income of the remaining miners will increase, so the market will definitely reach a balance in a certain situation.

This situation reminds me of another problem: the transformation of the consensus mechanism that Ethereum has been striving for.

In the view of V God, the founder of Ethereum, no matter how the consensus mechanism "proof of work" adopted by Ethereum is changed, no matter how it can resist ASIC mining machines, it is still not the most suitable consensus mechanism for Ethereum.

Because even if the monopoly of ASIC mining machines is temporarily resisted, the loss of power is still a big problem, and any resistance to ASIC mining machines is only temporary, not permanent.

Because as long as there is a potential threat of ASIC mining machines, it is difficult to completely eliminate the risk of centralization in mining.

So a few years ago,Vitalik proposed that the consensus mechanism of Ethereum should be completely changed from POW to POS. And this big step will be fully realized in Ethereum 2.0.

The so-called POS is based on the meaning of proof of rights and interests. Under this consensus mechanism, node mining does not require strong computing power. Nodes only need to mortgage tokens and have basic computing power to participate in mining.

This is currently the most promising way to solve the problems of POW mining energy consumption and centralization.

And this big change in the Ethereum consensus mechanism will go online this year. This is the phase 0 task of Ethereum 2.0: the launch of the beacon chain.

According to the planning of Ethereum 2.0, the beacon chain will be launched around the first quarter of this year. Now the beacon chain has been tested on a small scale on the test network.

This transformation of Ethereum will be the first large-scale public chain in the existing well-known public chains to switch from POW to POS in terms of consensus mechanism. The effect of this experiment will not only have a profound impact on Ethereum itself, but also on other digital currencies. Difficulties encountered in the development process can also bring hope.