A detailed analysis of potential public chains that undertake Ethereum’s massive computing power
From the recent information provided by the Ethereum developer team and Vitalik, as well as the successful merger of the Ethereum test chain, it can be seen that the transfer of Ethereum to PoS has almost become an established fact. Ethereum miners are eagerly looking for the next PoW public chain as the undertaker of huge computing power.
First of all, this article believes that the following four public chains cannot take on this important task:
Recently released PoW chain
PoW chain with ASIC as the core
Chains not distributed by pure PoW tokens
PoW original chain after Ethereum fork
Secondly, it is believed that the chain that may be used as a computing power has six characteristics:
A PoW public chain that has been verified for a long enough time
No pre-mining to maintain a pure PoW public chain
It is best to have a PoW public chain that has not been hyped by the market
It is best to join later and dig more PoW public chains
PoW public chain without 51% attack risk
A PoW public chain with a more ambitious vision and higher value goals, and a preliminary realization path
This article will conduct a comprehensive analysis from the above 10 points, and give the potential public chain that is most likely to undertake computing power.
4 PoW chains cannot take on this important task
In the bear market, the issue of taking over computing power after the conversion of Ethereum to PoS is obviously a hot spot for capital and retail investors. There are many teams that create public chains for this hot spot. These teams may have very good GPU mine resources.
However, the intention of such a hastily launched project is very obvious, and it is almost impossible to have long-term value. After everyone rushes to it, there is a high probability that they will end up smashing the market. Therefore, a stable PoW chain that has been verified for a long time to carry the computing power of Ethereum is a wiser long-term choice for most Ethereum miners.
At the same time, the PoW chain with ASIC mining machines occupying the core of computing power cannot undertake the computing power of Ethereum. Ethereum miners will naturally choose the PoW chain with GPU as the core.
There is also a type of non-pure PoW token distribution chain whose technology has been verified by time in the market, such as the main PoW+PoS public chain. And a pure PoW public chain means that all the benefits of mining will flow to the miners who take the risk to mine for it. However, for public chains like PoW+PoS, most of the purpose of PoS is to allow teams and capital-related parties to take advantage of low-cost or even no-cost chips. Obviously, rational Ethereum miners will not pay for this.
In addition, after ETH officially merges and forks, two forked chains will appear. For ease of understanding, we can divide it into ETH1 (original chain) that maintains the PoW mining mechanism and ETH2 (new chain) that switches to the PoS consensus mechanism.
It can be said that ETH1 will not appear, or it will appear for a very short time, because the huge amount of contract assets on Ethereum cannot maintain double copies at the same time. For example, WBTC has a fatal run-on problem due to two-way exchange, which has to force exchanges and wallets to only choose to support a certain chain, and it is impossible to support two at the same time. Moreover, Vitalik, the soul of Ethereum, has made a clear choice in public speeches many times, only supporting ETH2, so ETH1 will have no legitimacy at all.
More importantly, Ethereum miners do not have the same influence in the Ethereum system as Bitcoin miners have in the Bitcoin system. The core reason why BCH was able to fork successfully back then is that Bitcoin has no project party and is completely decentralized. Miners who grasp the interests naturally occupy the main influence. However, there is a de facto project party in Ethereum, and all influence will be gathered on the project team represented by Vitalik. Therefore, it will be difficult for Ethereum miners to get ETH1 to gain market acceptance.
The new PoW public chain, the PoW chain with ASIC as the core, the original PoW chain of ETH after the fork, and the non-pure PoW public chain will not be the best choice to undertake the computing power of Ethereum.
There are 6 characteristics of the potential computing power undertaking public chain
A PoW public chain with GPU computing power as the core is the most basic condition for undertaking Ethereum's follow-up computing power for a long enough time, and Ethereum Classic-ETC, which everyone has high hopes for, meets some basic conditions. After The DAO incident in 2016, ETC, which was hard forked, has existed for a full 6 years, and the native portability of the Ethereum ecosystem is an important reason why the market is optimistic about ETC to undertake ETH's computing power.
ETC is another version of the ancient Ethereum, which maintains the procedural justice and moral orthodoxy of Ethereum, which is the reason why it can attract some believers, but ETC does not have any lofty goals beyond Ethereum, and because The DAO The incident has become a thing of the past, and all projects issued on Ethereum followed Vitalik's choice. The huge gap in the ecological scale makes it difficult to attract outstanding mature projects to enter the ETC system to build from scratch.
The market must look for a public chain that has greater value than ETC, and has not been hyped by capital, and at the same time satisfies no pre-mining, maintains a pure PoW mechanism, and has been verified for a long enough time by GPU.
Speaking of a more ambitious vision and higher-value goals, this article believes that currency, payment and financial derivative needs based on this are the largest and most important goals of the encryption industry. Some people think that Bitcoin is good enough to realize this "currency" vision, but Wei Dai, one of the important pioneers of cypherpunk and the inventor of B-money, has a different view [1]:
“In my opinion, Bitcoin has failed on monetary policy (because it would lead to wild price swings that would overwhelm its users, who would either have to take terrible risks or have to resort to expensive hedging tool),” he wrote on the LessWrong forum, “One effect of Bitcoin is that it cannot be used on a large scale because of its monetary policy flaws and price volatility; There is no longer a cryptocurrency that grows to mass acceptance.”
He added, "This may be partly my fault. Because Satoshi Nakamoto wrote to me asking for my opinion on his draft paper, and I never got back to him. Otherwise, maybe I could get him (or They) dropped the idea of a 'fixed money supply'."
Hacash, a pure PoW public chain that has been developing silently for nearly 4 years and maintains absolute decentralization, is currently the encryption project that best meets Dai Wei's currency vision.
In addition to inheriting all the advantages of Bitcoin, the biggest improvement or historical breakthrough of Hacash is to realize a more sound currency stabilization mechanism through the guidance of a complete "monetary" theory. In general, its monetary policy is not a "fixed supply" like Bitcoin, but what Dai Wei hopes: to maintain an elastic and stable mechanism.
Hacash was first written by an anonymous person in 2018 with a white paper of 4,000 words, titled "A Cryptocurrency System for Real-time Settlement of Large-Scale Payments" [2], the white paper describes the bottom layer of Hacash in detail Mechanisms, monetary policy, and how to achieve mass payments and real-time settlement.
Later, developers who read the white paper and joined the community developed and realized the first version of the main network, and successfully launched the main network on February 16, 2019, digging out the first block. Until today, it has been iteratively improved, and it has been running safely and stably, and has been verified for nearly 4 years.
Relying on the slow development of word-of-mouth communication in the community, Hacash has been recognized by miners around the world. The token price and computing power continue to hit new highs, and the ecology is gradually growing. Originally, like Bitcoin, from a home computer, the computing power now requires efficient CPU clusters and GPUs for mining.
Hacash uses an innovative mining algorithm: X16RS. Due to the strong randomness of this algorithm, it is almost impossible to develop an efficient Hacash ASIC mining machine, which is very suitable for the migration of Ethereum GPU computing power and maintains long-term sustainability.
At present, the Hacash community is still in a niche state, and tokens have not experienced capital pursuit. Compared with ETC and other highly hyped husband chains, everyone prefers to choose a high-quality public chain that has not been discovered by the market, because it has the greatest value capture opportunities.
Why such a high-quality public chain has not received large-scale attention from the market after 4 years, this has to go back to Hacash's sound currency goal. The first condition to achieve this ambitious goal is to achieve true decentralization and fair enough currency distribution.
Unlike Bitcoin, which is continuously halved from 50 coins in a block, Hacash adopts the Fibonacci principle (golden section) of increasing first and then decreasing in the fairness of currency distribution. Starting from 2019, Hacash will reward 1 HAC for about two years, increase to 2 HAC two years later, then increase to 3, 5, and increase to 8, and the block reward is 8 It will last for 10 years, and then start to decrease by 5, 3, and 2 until the final continuous reward is 1 HAC.
The time after the merger of Ethereum happened to be the time when HAC increased to 3 rewards in a block, and there will be a large cycle of rewards of 5 and 8 in the future. Even though it has been mined for 4 years, it is still very fair to the later participating miners. This is a special mechanism that does not exist in all PoW public chains.
There is no leader, no official team, only relying on word of mouth in the community, and the extreme fairness has led to the slow development of Hacash.
Then the seemingly constant inflation of HAC may discourage miners, but HAC is not always inflated, but can also deflate. This is just in line with Dai Wei's questioning and criticism of the Bitcoin fixed currency issuance model.
Part of the interest generated by mortgage loans on the chain will be destroyed. In the Hacash system, there is another mining difficulty that only rises but does not decrease. The acquisition of HACD, the first PoW NFT in history, also requires computing power mining, and It is necessary to use HAC for bidding. For each successful bidding, 90% of HAC will be destroyed, and 10% of HAC will be rewarded to miners. The demand of HACD balances the inflation of HAC. At present, for nearly four years, the main network has destroyed more than 300,000 HACs, accounting for 52% of the total output [3].
At the same time, it is worth mentioning that at the moment when Layer 2 is in full swing, an anonymous person has detailed a two-layer network solution with no custody, no upper limit, and second-level payment in the 2018 Hacash white paper. Several community developers and related teams have tested and successfully realized instant payment in less than 1 second according to the white paper's scheme. Moreover, the ecological projects on Hacash have realized functions such as decentralized exchanges through Hacash's risk-free semi-smart contracts, and all this has just begun.
Another issue worth considering is the 51% attack problem. At present, the computing power of any leading miner entering ETC may immediately cause a 51% concentration of computing power. 4] Can effectively prevent 51% attack.
References
References
[2] https://github.com/hacash/paper/blob/master/whitepaper.cn.md
[3] https://explorer.hacash.org/
[4]https://github.com/hacash/paper/blob/master/HIP/protocol/PoW_of_avoid_51_percent_attack.cn.md
