Talking about the industrial scale, trends and problems of PoW mining
Since the birth of Bitcoin in 2009, the cryptocurrency industry based on Bitcoin has become more and more prosperous. In the past decade or so, tens of thousands of new currencies have been produced, most of which are short-lived and havetily exited. But there are also many new currencies that contain rational thinking and amazing wisdom, which have brought countless inspirations and vitality to the cryptocurrency industry and even the entire blockchain field.
Among them, the PoW consensus derived from the Bitcoin-based consensus mechanism has been one of the mainstream development directions in the cryptocurrency field for a long time. Based on the PoW consensus currency, there are many participants and a broad and solid community foundation, which has formed a mining industry that has begun to take shape.
The blogger has summarized the information of the top 50 PoW currencies with annual output value and found some interesting phenomena, which will be shared with readers and friends in this article.
The basic data in this article comes from F2Pool, one of the largest comprehensive mining pools in the world, and CRYPTOSLATE, a blockchain vertical media and data analysis website. Currency price, market value and other data come from CoinMarketCap, a well-known cryptocurrency market website. The blogger also proofreads the relevant data by combining the official information of each currency and the block browser, but the manpower is limited, and the price of the currency has fluctuated sharply recently, so it cannot guarantee that the data provided is completely accurate, sosecondary title。
01 The PoW mining industry has begun to take shape and will gradually mature
Since the birth of Bitcoin in 2009, thousands of PoW projects have been produced. Every year, some projects disappear due to various problems, and new PoW projects are born. As of now, there are still more than 300 blockchains that are still running and using PoW consensus.
However, more than half of these PoW projects are small in scale, with few participants, and the status of the community is sluggish. The market value and annual output value of Top50 projects account for more than 99% of the total market value and annual output value of PoW projects.
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Note:
Note:
1. The above data is calculated based on the currency price at 8 am on July 26, 2020. The currency price fluctuates greatly, and the impact on the lower-ranked currencies in terms of market value and daily output value is particularly obvious. The data in the above table are for reference only. (The same applies to all data below this article)
2. The currency market value ranking is the market value ranking of all PoW projects.
At present, the total market value of all PoW currencies is about$230 billion, the annual gross output value is about$5.2 billion. They support the already formednearly $5 billionLarge-scale global PoW mining industry (including nearly 5 million BTC mining machines, nearly 10 million graphics cards, server and PC mining machines, and hundreds of thousands of ZEC, DCR, Dash and other currency exclusive mining machines, and all over the world mines and other infrastructure), supporting hundreds of thousands of people around the world who rely on PoW mining for a living.
PThe oW mining industry has begun to take shape, the industrial chain has basically taken shape, and industry standards have gradually been standardizedsecondary title
02 PoW currencies have a head effect, and currencies with high annual output value get more attention
above.90%above.
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Figure 3 The proportion of the annual output value of the top 20 currencies in the annual output value
From Figure 2 and Figure 3, we can see that the total market value of the top 20 coins by market value accounts for99.33%, the annual output value of the total annual output value of Top20 currencies98.42%. This means that thenearly 90%In fact, the PoW project does not have sufficient market and participants, and may even be just a "self-promotion product" of developers, which does not have scale effect and the ecology is very fragile.
In addition, it can also be foundThe annual output value of some PoW currencies with the highest market capitalization is not high, this is because there are some PoW currencies such as XVG, BTG, SC, etc., which were born earlier and have produced a large number of tokens, and their current total is much higher than some new currencies born in the past two years. These currencies may have experienced multiple production reductions, and the actual annual output value is lower than some new currencies, such as CKB, GRIN, BEAM, HNS, etc.
For mining,Miners are more willing to gather on coins with higher annual output valuesecondary title
03 Part of the PoW currency transformation PoW/PoS hybrid consensus or other consensus
In the process of summarizing the data, we also found an interesting phenomenon, the current annual output valueTop20Among the PoW currencies are1Currency (DCR) adopts PoW/PoS hybrid consensus,Top50Currency has8MoreMoreThe currency converts the consensus from PoW to hybrid consensus (such as CLO, VEIL, etc.). There are also some PoW currencies that directly abandon the PoW consensus and completely switch to PoS or DPoS consensus (such as CRW, XDNA, etc.).Why is this?
Why is this?
The higher the annual output value of the PoW currency, the easier it is to bring profits to its miners, thereby gathering more participants, its community foundation will be more solid, it will be easier to form a scale effect, and it will bring certain benefits to the project itself. Positive motivation. At the same time, the more miners there are in the PoW currency, the greater the computing power, the higher the cost for attackers to maliciously damage the currency network, and the safer the project itself.
The currency with a lower annual output value is just the opposite. It is difficult for miners to profit from this currency, and the number of participants will decrease. If the currency itself does not have a good community foundation and operation plan, it will be difficult to form a scale effect. To maintain its own value, its currency price may also continue to fall, resulting in a further decline in output value, making the project fall into a vicious circle. At the same time, when there are fewer and fewer miners participating in network maintenance, these coins that have lost their computing power protection will inevitably fall intosecurity crisisAmong them:Attackers may only need a small price to tamper with the data of the currency network and destroy the entire project。
We found that most of the currencies with relatively low output value may face an embarrassing situation:Either expand the project, increase the currency price, and attract more miners to maintain the network; or wait quietly for the network to become more and more vulnerable until it collapses。
Although some projects are developed by the initiators with the mentality of experiments or even games, the developers don't care about the final direction and operation of the project. But there are still developers and operators of some projects who hope to break the curse.
modify the consensus, becoming one of the methods for some PoW projects to survive. The more common modification scheme is to modify the PoW consensus to a PoW/PoS hybrid consensus, and some currencies directly abandon the PoW consensus and adopt PoS or DPoS or other consensus schemes. Although there have been debates about the security of PoW, PoS and hybrid consensus, many studies have shown that hybrid consensus or PoS consensus is not more secure than PoW.But it is undeniable that without a large number of miners participating in the PoW currency, its security and attack prevention capabilities are indeed not as good as mixed consensus or PoS consensus currencies。
Of course, not all currencies have undergone consensus transformation due to the low annual output value and too few miners participating in network maintenance. Attacks, etc.) cause the value to collapse and eventually decline. For details, the blogger will introduce it in a new article. Welcome to pay attention to the WeChat official account of "Xiaohua Mining" to discuss mining-related issues with us. The latest articles of Xiaohua will also be pushed on the official account as soon as possible.
