The "Thrilling" August for Crypto Miners
Editor's Note: This article comes fromBlock beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats), reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)
Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)
For crypto miners, 2020 has been both a year of innovation and magic.
Although they are both miners, the situation gap between different miners is a bit big. While the Ethereum miners were still immersed in the joy of the soaring mining revenue some time ago, the Bitcoin miners far away in the mountains of Sichuan were extremely anxious.
In August of this year, Sichuan suffered a once-in-a-century flood. The raging floods quickly submerged the streets, followed by mudslides and landslides that quickly covered roads and houses, and the hidden bitcoin mines in the mountains were not spared. in difficulty.
This sudden flood also made the mine owners who have deployed mines in the upper and lower reaches of the Qingyi River in Sichuan experience the most tormented half a month: the network is not smooth, the operation and maintenance are trapped, and the factory buildings are destroyed. In stark contrast, Ethereum miners have reaped decent profits recently.
"There have been 4 mudslides this year"
"People are fine, it's fine." In the past few days, whenever someone posted news that their mine was seriously damaged due to mudslides in Moments, the old miner Lu would always see similar messages below, cheering each other up and hugging each other to keep warm became the most common scenario.
Since August 10 this year, Sichuan has experienced torrential rain, and many counties have been affected to varying degrees. Especially in the early morning of August 18, the Qingyi River flooded once in a century. Since the mine is located in Leshan, where the three rivers converge, the bitcoin miners have been in fear for as many days as the rainstorm has lasted.
When he saw the video of the Leshan Giant Buddha being submerged up to his toes on social media, Lao Lu was terrified. The day before, he had just received a synchronous message from the local staff: a mudslide occurred at the gate of the power plant, which almost affected the factory. From the video sent by the other party, it can be seen that the sudden mudslide took only 5 seconds from triggering to submerging the small truck on the road. "Fortunately, the power plant is fine."
Some miners said they have encountered multiple mudslides this year
Since the beginning of this year, some mine owners have encountered mudslides several times, but he has nothing to do about such natural disasters. He can only exclaim in the circle of friends, "Four or five mudslides a year are almost enough!" Compared with previous years, this year There were more mudslide disasters in the Ya'an area of Sichuan than in previous years. "Overall, there are a lot more disasters, but there are also regions. For example, Aba and other places are still a little less than last year."
Another person in charge of the mine is in Sichuan, but because landslides and mudslides blocked the road, he couldn’t go to the mine at all. Other small mines have no access until now, and there is no net or water for people inside, but fortunately they are safe.”
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On August 18th, the computing power ranking information of Bitcoin mining pools, the computing power of multiple mining pools dropped by more than 15%
Some miners said that due to the raging flood, some mines have arranged for local staff to evacuate. However, when the currency price is high, most miners will take hedging methods and sell the currency corresponding to the production capacity in the next 1-6 months in advance to ensure stable income even when the currency price drops sharply.
"The last time it was like this was IC0 in 2017"
Source of screenshot: Weibo
In the past few months, liquidity mining has become popular, and many crypto players have "transformed" into DeFi trend farmers. From sweet potatoes to various fruits and vegetables, some players have made a lot of money, while some investors, because of the high transfer fees on the chain For mining income, return without success.
Source of screenshot: Weibo
Image credit: The Block
Since May of this year, the daily gas fees generated by Ethereum have continued to rise. Miners clearly felt this change in July. At the peak, the fee income once exceeded the system block reward. On August 13, due to the wealth effect of DeFi liquidity mining and Uniswap, the user's single transfer fee once exceeded 20 US dollars. Under this background, the mining income of miners after excluding electricity costs was as high as 92%.
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Image credit: The Block
In addition to mining, Brother T, a miner who also participated in liquidity mining, can intuitively feel the changes during the period. "In fact, the income has increased since "312", but the changes may not be so significant." He said that when YFI After the emergence of products such as Uniswap and Uniswap, Gas began to take off rapidly. "The peak is the emergence of YAM."
DeFi is indeed the driving force behind all this. On August 23, the fee payment ratio data displayed by the Ethereum browser showed that within 24 hours, the Ethereum Gas generated by Uniswap accounted for more than 16%, and the stable currency USDT Gas accounted for nearly 11%.
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Excessive gas fees have attracted Vitalik's attention. He tweeted to call for an end to raising gas fees, and also posted an angry post to push up gas fees, but it is actually a Ponzi scheme Forsage. But until now, there is still no good solution to the problem of Ethereum congestion. Some community members even put forward a proposal to "reduce the block reward to 0.5ETH". However, it has not been recognized by many people.
The congested Ethereum network not only affects investors participating in on-market transactions, but also affects the smoothness of investment projects in the primary market. On August 18, the SKALE Dutch auction was postponed. According to the official statement, the reason was that the website was down due to too many participants.
Of course, this is not the first fundraising initiative recently. Projects such as Avalanche, Near, and Justswap have all had downtime and delays due to users' "enthusiasm". The server problem may still be resolved, and the postponed SKALE entire Dutch auction process has also added an on-chain transfer link. It can be predicted that if there is no good solution, in addition to hand speed and luck, participating users are doomed to pay an expensive "ticket" for successful participation.
Another project called Barter Trade, which opened its fundraising on August 14, played out a similar scene. According to the players who participated in the fundraising of this project, due to the popularity of the project, although Gas gave a fee of up to 1 Ethereum, it was still "naive". Some people were even willing to pay 4.4 Ethereum (worth more than 1900 US dollars) )cost of.
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Source: Crypto Community
In order to reduce gas costs and increase transaction speed, some players even came up with an "on-chain proxy investment" model similar to the 2017 Shengjiyi Times Investment. The specific method is: multiple people agree on an acceptable Gas fee, and then map Ethereum to Solana through RenVM, Solana and other protocols that support cross-chain, and then transfer Ethereum to the party participating in the investment (that is, proxy investment) , since the Gas of crowdfunding is always higher than that of a single player, it means that the probability of successful participation is greatly improved. After the participation in the investment is successful, the proxy investment will distribute the tokens to everyone.
Of course, there are still some problems in this method. For example, it does not solve the old problem of proxy investment and donations running away. At the same time, the opening of crowdfunding means that the Gas "bid" of this small group will be known to others, and there is a risk of being "bid" by others. use" possibility. But no matter what, as more projects start liquid mining, because the high gas problem of Ethereum cannot be solved in the short term, this will greatly limit the user penetration rate of DeFi.
The DeFi boom has indeed brought real benefits to miners. One of the most intuitive feelings is that the coins in hand have increased. As the price of Ethereum rose simultaneously, the coins in the hands of Ethereum miners "increased by 60-70% compared to the previous two months, and the price of the graphics card in their hands also increased by 50%." Miner T brother recalled, "Now the rate of return Personally, I think it is very similar to the Fomo wave in June 2017, they stopped making money after the computing power rose rapidly.”
He said that some miners had quietly deployed a few months ago, and the overall computing power has risen by 20% in the past two months, and now the ultra-high income has fallen back. In Brother T’s view, this DeFi craze is only a phased frenzy. Even if it is increased, “only old miners are increasing their investment... (but generally speaking) after this year’s halving, eth’s income is significantly better than that of btc mining. of."
