Since Satoshi Nakamoto pushed Bitcoin to the forefront in a shocking manner, the decentralized and anonymously traded digital cryptocurrency, which we commonly call "mining" business, has not been encountered in the development of the DIY industry for decades. The "big change".
How exactly does "mining" affect the ecological development of the DIY industry, and how does it cause "big changes" in the industry? The core is hardware computing power. Talking about hardware computing power, we need to understand the so-called "mining" first or take Bitcoin as an example. The principle of Bitcoin mining is based on the mathematical problem of the SHA256 algorithm. After confirming the network transaction, The Bitcoin network will give equal Bitcoin rewards based on the amount of computing power contributed by the miners.
Bitcoin principle and algorithm
According to the basic Bitcoin algorithm, the total number of Bitcoins is 21 million, and Bitcoin generates 1 block every 10 minutes. There are N Bitcoins in each block as a reward. This reward will be based on mining The number of participants and the total number of bitcoins fluctuate. This block contains all bitcoin transaction information in the last 10 minutes.
In fact, anyone can run software on specialized hardware to become a Bitcoin miner, listen to the transaction broadcast through the P2P network, and perform appropriate tasks to process and confirm these transactions.
However, these new transactions need to be included in a block with a mathematical proof of work to be confirmed, and this proof needs to be generated by trying billions of calculations per second, and miners need to be accepted in these blocks. And run these calculations before getting the reward.
Therefore, in order to complete billions of SHA256 calculations faster, contribute more computing power, and catch up with other miners to get bitcoin rewards in advance, miners need more hardware and provide more and stronger computing power. So GPU has become the wealth code in the eyes of miners.
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| SHA256 encryption is the core |
This is one of the important reasons why a large number of graphics cards are out of stock in the recent period. In fact, not only Bitcoin but also digital currencies such as Ethereum are based on GPU computing power to parse and calculate SHA256 encrypted information. Obtain corresponding currency rewards.
Bitcoin gains
Some people may ask, what happens after getting currency rewards? What is the meaning of digital currency? Trading, realizing, cashing out digital currency into real currency. The ultimate driving force of the above mining behaviors is that these currencies can circulate in the online world, and can even be exchanged for real currencies at amazing exchange rates.
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| Bitcoin exchange rate chart today |
Just before the author’s post, the exchange rate of a large number of digital currencies, led by Bitcoin, continued to skyrocket. The unit Bitcoin was an exaggerated $63,134.17, or RMB 412,300, which ranked proudly in the industry. At the same time, the author also intercepted today’s top ten market capitalizations. From the list of digital currency rankings, it is not difficult to find that today's mining has become a big success, forming a strict and regular currency circle system similar to the real-time buying and selling of the stock market.
Whether it is the unit price, total market value, or transaction volume, it is not difficult to see the current mining boom and the vast market.
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| The top ten currencies of the industry market value on the day |
If it is said that the GPU graphics card industry was broken and occupied by miners because of its supercomputing power, it would be excusable; then the arrival of the Chiacoin, which uses hard disks as a computing tool, which has just emerged recently, has caused an embarrassing scene of hard disk shortages in the storage industry. , It seems very unreasonable.
Principles of Chia Coin and Hard Disk Mining
Chiacoin, similar to Bitcoin, is also a digital currency based on decentralization and anonymous transactions. Chia (奇亚) was incorporated in August 2017, aiming to develop an improved blockchain and intelligent trading platform. In terms of algorithm, it was born out of Satoshi Nakamoto’s algorithm and innovated. Unlike traditional BTC and ETH, which adopts the proof of work (POW), Chia adopts "Proof of Space and Time". The remaining storage space in the storage device (computer, server, NAS, etc.) is used for mining.
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| Chia coin chia interface |
The principle of mining is that ordinary users install software to plot the unused space on the hard disk. The software generates and stores a collection of password numbers on the disk as plots. These users are called farmers. When a new block is broadcast on the Chia Network blockchain, farmers will scan their plots to see if they have a number close to the new challenge number derived from the previous block. This process is called For mining.
The simple understanding is that before starting to mine, users need to seed or plot (plots) in the idle hard disk space, and then the farmer searches for the optimal solution on the plots files that have been seeded.
The essence of Chiacoin's hard disk mining is to first write encrypted data to the hard disk (plots process), and then the mining program searches for the best answer in the drawn P disk file (farmer process), in other words, P The higher the total disk file capacity relative to the entire network capacity, the faster the search for the optimal solution, and the higher the corresponding mining revenue.
Chiacoin's operations and earnings
As for the reward distribution of Chia coins, it basically refers to the operation model of Bitcoin, that is, in the first three years after the main network is launched, one coin will be generated every ten minutes and 64 Chia will be rewarded; during the 4-6 years of the main network launch, The reward is halved, that is, 32 Chia. Going forward, it will be halved for 3 years and 4 Chia every 10 minutes from the thirteenth year.
From the perspective of the entire mining process and the establishment of rewards, it is not difficult to see that Chiacoin and Bitcoin are almost the same in mode and method. They both use idle hardware resources to verify the corresponding block results based on a certain algorithm proof and finally obtain System rewards.
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| Select disk page for seeding and drawing |
It is only differentiated in terms of hardware requirements. Traditional mining, led by Bitcoin, uses workload as proof, emphasizing computing power and performance, while Chiacoin uses idle storage space as proof of space and time. Drawing and verification mean that Qiacoin emphasizes the use of idle space and does not need to store the product's own performance. The larger the capacity, the wider the area drawn and seeded in the Chia blockchain, the verification and search will be the most The greater the probability and speed of a good answer.
Disturbances and challenges brought by Chiacoin to the storage market
From this, we can imagine that with the influx of Chia coins, enterprise-grade mechanical hard drives with stable operation, large capacity, and relatively low cost will be out of stock like graphics cards; at the same time, based on During the seeding process, a large amount of cache space needs to be stored, and high-performance and large-capacity SSD products will inevitably become auxiliary tools for mining, and face the risk of out of stock.
In fact, just less than 2 months after the launch of the Chia Coin main net, the domestic mainstream e-commerce platform, the large-capacity enterprise-level mechanical hard disk has been out of stock on a large scale, from 8T to 18T capacity, no one is spared, Almost all of them were bought out by large mining factories; as, for offline distribution channels, it is even more shocking. There has been an uncommon rush for mechanical hard disks for many years, and the models and capacity are not recognized. As long as there are large-capacity mechanical hard disks, they have just arrived. It was robbed.
As for the SSD field, as an auxiliary tool for Chia coin mining, in view of its relatively high purchase price and non-essential role, there has been no rush to grab goods for the time being; but with the scarcity of Chia coin and the continuous stacking of mining crowds, A large-capacity high-performance solid-state drive may appear, as if the graphics card is monopolized by the miners.
The arrival of Chiacoin will not only trigger a shortage of storage products, but also touch the originally fragile upstream supply chain system, breaking the long-held fixed supply that has been slowly increasing, and triggering the entire consumer-level, enterprise-level, and other storage markets. The chaos of supply puts individuals and companies in urgent need of storage products facing the potential threat of disklessness or high-priced purchases, which is extremely dangerous for the entire storage industry.
Under the chasing of profits, a large number of storage products are used for mining, causing market supply chaos; after the Chia coin trend, a large number of idle storage products will be used as junk second-hand hardware and returned to the primary market, triggering market products again. Control the crisis.
This kind of thing comes and goes. Except for the miners who make a lot of money in mining, what is left to the society and the industry is only a pile of chicken feathers. The so-called drumming to pass flowers is probably not the case.
It's just a lovely person who is in the turmoil of the Chia coin, always convinced that he will not be the last picker, but who knows?
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