Category: Crypto Pro

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A Review on Bitmain’s H1 2020

The year 2020 has seen strong turbulence in global markets and industries. In such a time of uncertainty, Bitmain continues to deepen its strengths with industry-leading chip R&D advantage, launch superior products that reset the industry standards. Meanwhile, through its leading experience and expertise, Bitmain keeps on completing its business ecosystem deployment centered on “hash rate” by launching new businesses and services in the hope to drive the development and upgrade of the entire market.

New Product to Drive Industry Standards: Breaking Record Highs Again with the Antminer 19 Series

Antminer 19 Series (Antminer S19 Pro, S19, T19)

In the past few months, Bitmain has once again proved its strong R&D capability through the launch of its record-breaking Antminer 19 Series, which delivers an impressive performance in the global market.

Antminer S19 Pro, S19

On 27 February, Bitmain officially announced the Antminer S19 and S19 Pro. Equipped with a custom-built 7nm chip from Bitmain and enhanced circuit architecture, the Antminer S19 series reset the industry standards with record-breaking power efficiency. The Antminer S19 Pro features a hash rate of 110 TH/s, and an impressive power efficiency of 29.5±%5 J/TH. The Antminer S19 is equipped with a hash rate of 95 TH/s, and power efficiency of 34.5±%5 J/TH. S19 Pro and S19 strongly proved Bitmain’s outstanding innovation capability and position as a leader in the market.

Antminer T19

On June 1st, Bitmain launched the Antminer T19, which is housed with the same generation of custom-built chips found in the Antminer S19 and S19 Pro. Utilizing the new APW12 power supply and upgraded firmware, the T19 offers faster start-up speeds for an optimized mining experience. The T19 is equipped with a hash rate of 84 TH/s ± 3% and has a power efficiency of 37.5 J/TH ± 5%. Comparing with the previous Antminer T17, the T19 greatly improves performance, allowing miners to achieve better efficiency and earnings.

Antminer Z15

Antminer Z15

On May 7th, Bitmain launched the Antminer Z15, featuring a hash rate of 420 KSol/s, and 1510 W power consumption. This is the 3rd generation of Bitmain’s Equihash algorithm miner, which is used for mining ZEC (Zcash) and other cryptocurrencies under Equihash mining. Antminer Z11 was the model with the highest hash rate in the market before Z15, which has made significant improvement on both hash rate and power efficiency.

New Deals to Support Growth Globally: Avoid Potential Shortage through Long-Term Deals

In the past few months, Bitmain has announced multiple purchase deals of millions of USD. Through these long-term deals, Bitmain has built strategic relations with customers while ensuring a stable supply cycle.

On June 27th, the leading blockchain hosting provider Core Scientific announced that it has again partnered with Bitmain to facilitate the purchase of 17,595 units of the Antminer 19 Series. Before that, Core Scientific cooperated with Bitmain to bring the very first Antminer Training Academy to North America last year.

The Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency mining company Marathon Patent Group announced on August 14th that it has entered into a Long-Term Purchase Contract with Bitmain for the purchase of 10,500 next-generation Antminer S19 Pro ASIC Miners. It is expected that the total 13,520 Antminers will be generating 1.55 Exahash upon full installation.

On August 18th, Riot Blockchain announced a new milestone purchase of 8,000 Antminer S19 Pros from Bitmain with delivery starting January 2021 and continuing through April 2021 until the order is complete. Until then, Riot Blockchain has purchased over 20,140 Antminers from Bitmain within a year.

New Services to Raise Industry Standards: Comprehensively Improved Customer Experiences

Since the beginning of the year, Bitmain launched a series of new offerings, aiming to advance customer experience from all perspectives.

Bitmain Supercomputing Center Research Institute (BSCI)

Bitmain Supercomputing Center Research Institute

Bitmain announced the establishment of the Bitmain Supercomputing Center Research Institute (BSCI) in April. BSCI aims to provide customers with one-stop services on supercomputing centers, from introductory consulting, investment construction, and quality upgrades. It will provide a “turnkey” service for supercomputing centers, which includes standardized design and evaluation of the center, engineering management and consulting, and operation of the supercomputing center.

Hash Guard

Bitmain’s Hash Guard Capabilities

Earlier this year, Bitmain launched the service “Hash Guard”, to provide high-standard maintenance and repair services that set standards for the market. Originally, Hash Guard was a miner operation and repair team established by Bitmain Group in 2014. After five years of growth and development, it has formed a professional team covering miners’ operation, repair, electrical, network, and system development. With a good reputation and excellent professional ability in the industry, our service scope is now spread all over the world. In China, North America, Europe, Central Asia, and other regions, Hash Guard is operating more than 50 data centers and has managed 600,000 miners.

R2-D2

R2-D2 Miner Development

Early in 2020, Bitmain made the decision to channel efforts into the creation of the new R2-D2 branch, the brainchild of the strategic business unit at Bitmain, built to cater for the next generation of mining technology. R2-D2 is an initiative that facilitates investors in having exclusive rights to build their own Antminers. As part of the program, customers will have exclusive usage rights for one year. It works as a long-term solution aimed at growing the mining industry while evolving into the usage of multiple cryptocurrencies. This initiative has more than 40 core design team members working on it, with more than 10 years of professional experience. This development is huge for Bitmain who have been championing mining innovator since 2013.

Upgrade on Training Courses to Attract more Participants: Standardized Training System to Nurture Talents Ready for the Future

Ant Training Academy is a training service project (hereinafter referred to as “Ant Academy” or “ATA”), which was launched by Bitmain based on years of knowledge dissemination and technology inheritance and accumulation. It is the sole training institution and certification authority officially certified by Antminer.

In August, ATA announced the upgrade on its course plan, to attract more talents with more course setting options, in the hope to prepare more qualified professional staff for the industry. 

Currently, the core course of ATA is maintenance training, with the upgrade presently including the 19 Series training program. Also, it now has two options in terms of training periods –a long-term training program lasting two weeks, and a short-term training program lasting five days only – each class now scaled down to eight participants, with the option of elective courses to match the needs of different groups. Successful course participants will qualify for a “Certificate of Accomplishment”, which will include an assessment of their skill level.

Only those who sit through the night could embrace the first ray of sunshine. Bitmain will keep on the Hashrate-centered strategy to advance the evolution of the entire industry and keep on forging ahead to explore more possibilities.

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The Rise of the Crypto Ponzis and How to Identify Them

Introduction

Bitcoin has often been hailed as bringing financial freedom by removing the need of governments, banks and middle men to store and remit money anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes with minimal fees. Its decentralization and the fact that Bitcoin addresses cannot be easily tied to a real life identity has stymied legislators who have sought to combat illicit use and money laundering.

Most current forms of legislation aimed at digital currency focus primarily on regulating exchanges where people convert Bitcoin or digital currencies into fiat and vice versa (such as the New York BitLicense) and taxation. One area which has seen little oversight has been the rise of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency based ‘investment’ programs where the vast majority are Ponzi, pyramid, HYIP scams. These schemes promise extremely high returns and many have gained significant traction among people who don’t completely understand how cryptocurrencies work. This is especially when regulators and the judiciary still can’t make up their minds on whether Bitcoin is a commodity or money with conflicting rulings even within the US.

Ponzi schemes, also known as pyramid schemes, have been around since the 1920s and basically work by promising big returns to ‘investors’, with a strong focus on recruitment of new ‘investors’. They generate such returns from the influx of new money coming in from the new investors rather than from profit of legitimate sources. In short, they pay your ‘returns’ by using other people’s money. when  new investors aren’t sufficient to give payments promised to previous ones, the Ponzi scheme falls apart. Not only do people not get their promised returns but they then realize the money they thought they had is no longer there because it was used to pay off earlier investors’ returns.  So the idea of Ponzis isn’t new but the use of cryptocurrency ponzis introduces new challenges.

Why Ponzis love Cryptocurrencies

Traditionally, to enable a Ponzi scheme, a normal bank account is required and a legal entity such as a limited company is formed to hold deposits from investors. However, most countries have strict controls requiring licensing from the government or the central banks to accept deposits or promote investment funds to the public. To mask the Ponzi scheme, they often use a physical product which can be anything from health supplements to mobile phone top-up vouchers or services such as educational packages to pass themselves off as legitimate businesses that use multi-level marketing.

Accepting Bitcoin effectively sidesteps these issues especially in countries where Bitcoin’s status as a currency has not been conclusively determined yet since no bank account is required, and in many cases, the product or service is delivered purely digitally. No legal entity needs to be formed when no bank account is required, adding further anonymity to the people who start the Ponzi.

Cryptocurrency ponzis also capitalize on the fact that although Bitcoin is starting to be known in the mainstream, the extent of understanding is usually limited to it being associated with overnight millionaires, it’s use in the drug trade and the MtGox hacks. It’s the promise of overnight riches that makes crypto Ponzis so alluring, much like how the huge gold price increase from 2000-2012 also birthed many gold-based Ponzi schemes.

Crypto Ponzis come in three main forms

  • Cloud Mining programs
  • Cryptocurrency investment programs’ Ponzi that accepts Bitcoins/cryptocurrencies as deposits
  • Posing as an altcoin with almost guaranteed capital appreciation

Ponzi disguised as a Cloud Mining program

For crypto ponzis, the most common ‘products’ are cloud mining programs whereby people think they’re buying hashing power or renting mining machines to get returns. Such programs often promise extremely high returns that claim to make your money back in a matter of 2-3 months or even weeks.

Legitimate cloud mining operations would generally yield a small profit if any at all in the ordinary course of mining where they leverage economies of scale and low power costs. They prefer to lock in longer term contracts and often receive funds upfront for better cash flow and certainty while giving their cloud mining customers a chance to make a small profit.

For Bitcoin even large mining farms that buy equipment in bulk are generally looking at close to a year to break even. Any ‘Bitcoin cloud mining’ scheme that claims you can break even in 2-3 months is most likely a scam. Some Ponzi operators are smarter and claim to mine a variety of altcoins instead making it harder to verify but the general rule is that if mining is extremely profitable, the cloud mining operators would be better off mining for themselves instead of renting their hash out, especially if they can break even in 2-3 months.

There are legitimate uses of cloud mining such as renting hashrate to mine a new coin but such uses are temporary in nature and involve risk as well. For example, if there’s a newly launched coin that you believe is promising and not many people have started mining it, renting hashing power to mine it while not many others are doing it can be very profitable if the coin subsequently becomes successful. But you are taking the huge risk that the coin will not take off. Once people recognize the mining opportunity and more people mine the coin, the returns will quickly decline and normalize and as such, such mining opportunities are very ‘event’ based and cannot be relied on to generate consistent returns. Such opportunities rely on the fact that they are unknown for long enough for people to successfully mine it and therefore there is little incentive for people to share this knowledge until they have already made their profits.

Cryptocurrency Investment Programs

Other crypto ponzis tell you they have a secret and proprietary trading or arbitrage arrangement and will trade/arbitrage using your money giving you a share of the returns. Again very high returns are promised such as 1% or even 3% daily interest. Some even use automatic ‘investment bots’ that claim to do all the trading on your behalf and give you a huge return.

Again, even the best traders cannot make money all the time and there is no such thing as a sure win trading strategy. Successful trading is not just about identifying opportunities and periods of volatility and making an educated guess as to what direction the market will take. It is also about managing risk by taking profits in stages and managing losses by setting stop-losses. Successful traders don’t really have any need to utilize other people’s funds to make money unless they are charging a fee for their trading services and even they will have periods of unprofitability.

Scamcoin posing as an altcoin

Many are drawn to Bitcoin purely for the allure of making instant riches only to realize that they may have missed the boat already.This is where the scamcoin comes in, claiming to be an improved version of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency where it’s full potential has yet to be realized and that this is the new Bitcoin rocket to get on while it’s still cheap and relatively unknown.

These fake altcoins often come with shoddy whitepapers that will fool those that do not understand cryptocurrencies and demonstrate a roadmap that’s more about how much the value of this coin will increase via “IPOs” and “coin splits” rather than a genuine development plan. The more professional ones will often take advantage of cryptocurrency-related publications and blogs that often do not do investigative journalism and pay for press releases in such publications to give an image of legitimacy.

The ‘developers’ of such Ponzi altcoins also tend to be unknown with no history of having been involved with cryptocurrencies and the code for such coins tend to be closed source making it impossible for outsiders to verify the veracity of their claims.

Most of these scamcoins do not have public blockchains and aren’t even genuine crypto currencies which allow the creators of such scamcoins to manipulate prices and balances at will thus creating the impression that the coin’s price is almost always rising. These coins also tend to only to be traded internally within the ponzi’s own network of sites.

How to Identify these Ponzi Schemes

Identifying these Ponzis is not easy for the lay person and this is why even highly suspicious programs can operate until they collapse and expose their Ponzi nature. These can be believable enough that even those that have a cursory understanding of how cryptocurrencies work can be fooled. However there are certain distinctive hallmarks of these types of crypto Ponzis and although such a scheme may not tick all of them, the more suspicious traits it has, the more likely it is a Ponzi scheme.

  • Huge and consistent returns If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t. This is in general the biggest telltale sign of a Ponzi scheme. In general, the greater the rate of probable returns, the higher the risk. Whether cloud mining, investment programs or altcoins, no investment can consistently generate high returns with no risk or guaranteed returns. Remember all Ponzi schemes always begin with paying out or else they will not attract new recruits.
  • Returns highly dependent on referrals: If the primary way of earning is through referrals or commissions, your alarm bells should be ringing since it means that the business model on its own is unprofitable. This is one of the primary differences between genuine multi level marketing programs and Ponzi schemes.
  • Unclear Ownership: Are their founders anonymous or their company undisclosed on their webpages? Usually a quick Google search of their founders’ names can uncover any dodgy history.
  • Need to join to get more information: To go under the radar of authorities, many websites of such schemes pose as legitimate businesses such as a coin wallet service, marketplace, cloud mining but the investment and referral portions are hidden until you sign up or go to their seminars. As such the website’s material and focus appears to be different from what their main focus which is recruitment and ‘investment’.
  • Closed source and non public blockchain: For scamcoins, almost all of them are closed source meaning their code is not up for public review. Similarly their blockchain is private though more advanced ponzis have a simulation of a blockchain within their own internal websites. You can do a quick check to see if they are listed on coinmarketcap.com (although many scam coins are listed there so it’s only a very cursory check) which requires coins to be a genuine cryptocurrency, traded on a public exchange with an API available and must have a public URL that shows the coin’s total supply.
  • Only internal exchanges: One of the biggest telltale signs of a Ponzi altcoin are ones that can only be traded within exchanges that are run by the company itself which allows them to manipulate prices and put up fake bid orders. Genuine coins will tend to be traded on the more reputable altcoin exchanges such as Poloniex and Bittrex though some new coins do take some time to be added there.
  • Check if they’re listed on the BadBitcoin website: An easy rule of thumb is to check on this amazing resource at badbitcoin.org which identifies Ponzi schemes that utilize cryptocurrencies. The list is not exhaustive but the major ones are listed there.

Summary

A combination of high potential of profits, technical nature and lack of regulation make cryptocurrencies a ripe place for Ponzis to flourish until regulators catch up with tackling them. Treat crypto investments promising amazing profits for very little risk with a healthy amount of skepticism and remember that Ponzis not only hurt you but also the friends and family you recruit.

 

 

About the Author

Reuben YapReuben Yap is a strong online privacy advocate and cryptocurrency enthusiast and is the co-founder of  BolehVPN which was the first online merchant in Malaysia to accept Bitcoin. He is also a practicing corporate lawyer and the community manager of the Zcoin project, the first cryptocurrency implementing Zerocoin technology allowing users to make private transactions utilizing zero-knowledge proofs.---------------------
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Mimblewimble: How a Stripped-Down Version of Bitcoin Could Improve Privacy, Fungibility and Scalability All at Once

All (full) Bitcoin nodes verify all transactions on the network. This allows the system to be entirely trustless and decentralized, but also presents significant drawbacks. Privacy and fungibility are at odds, because public transactions allow anyone to trace the flow of bitcoins over the blockchain. Meanwhile, verifying a growing number of transactions adds to the cost of running a node, which could be a centralizing force.

But perhaps these drawbacks can be tackled. Last week, a new white paper was somewhat mysteriously dropped on a Bitcoin research channel, written by the pseudonymous author “Tom Elvis Jedusor” (Voldemort’s real name in the French edition of the Harry Potter novels). His proposal “Mimblewimble” — a reference to a Harry Potter spell — presents a radical slimming-down of the Bitcoin protocol that could not only dramatically increase privacy and fungibility, but also present significantly more scalability than Bitcoin’s current blockchain architecture.

Mimblewimble may just hit two giant birds with one stone. Here’s how.

Hiding Amounts

Mimblewimble is based on some of Bitcoin’s familiar privacy features. One of these is Confidential Transactions, which was mostly developed by Bitcoin Core and Blockstream developer Gregory Maxwell and is currently deployed on Blockstream’s Elements Alpha sidechain.

Confidential Transactions lets senders encrypt the bitcoin amounts in transactions with random strings of numbers called “blinding factors.” This process works because transactions also include information with which (only) receivers can decrypt the amounts. And, by utilizing a cryptographic trick called the Pedersen Commitment, anyone else can still perform math on the encrypted amounts. Specifically, Bitcoin nodes can subtract the encrypted amounts on the sending side of transactions (“inputs”) from the encrypted amounts on the receiving side of transactions (“outputs”). If the two sides cancel out to zero, it means the combined inputs and the combined outputs are equal, and no bitcoins were created out of thin air.

Mimblewimble sort of turns this trick on its head as the receiver of a transaction generates the blinding factor. This is important because as one of the main deviations from the current Bitcoin protocol, this blinding factor is effectively used to prove ownership of the (blinded) bitcoins — private keys are no longer in play at all. (Nor are public keys or addresses.)

Proving ownership of the blinding factor itself revolves around a series of cryptographic tricks that are Mimblewimble’s closest equivalent to Bitcoin’s cryptographic signatures, though the full extent of these tricks is beyond the scope of this article.

It is important to note, however, that part of these mathematical maneuvers includes the introduction of a sort of “dummy output.” Where transaction outputs normally indicate under what conditions the receiver of a transaction may later spend the bitcoins, these dummy outputs are really just random numbers to ensure that only the person who generated the blinding factor can spend the bitcoins in the real outputs.

Combining Transactions

Another familiar Bitcoin trick that inspired Mimblewimble is CoinJoin, first proposed by (again) Maxwell.

CoinJoin allows users to bundle their transactions into one bigger transaction, scrambling all inputs (the “from” part of a transaction), as well as all outputs (the “to” part). This potentially obfuscates which bitcoins were sent from which address to which address, and breaks the assumption that all inputs belong to the same user.

Mimblewimble (and a fix by Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra) takes this concept a bit further and completely gets rid of transactions once a new block is created. Instead of transactions, Mimblewimble blocks mainly consist of three lists: a list of new inputs (referring to old outputs), a list of new outputs and a list of cryptographic signatures created with the aforementioned dummy outputs.

Utilizing the Pedersen Commitment scheme, all nodes can use the input list and the output list, and verify that no bitcoins were created out of thin air. The dummy output signatures, meanwhile, prove that all individual transactions must have been valid. Acting rather like “stamps of approval,” these dummy output signatures only add up mathematically if the whole transaction itself does.

And since it is never revealed which inputs spent bitcoins to which outputs exactly, nor how many bitcoins were actually spent, no trace of funds can be established at all. As such, Mimblewimble presents a tremendous boon for privacy and fungibility.

Scalability

And then there’s the scalability improvement.

Currently, many transactions on the Bitcoin network are linked. Spending a bitcoin really takes an output from a previous transaction and turns it into an input of a new transaction. This means that if an older transaction is invalid, a newer transaction that relies on the older transaction is invalid, too. So to be able to validate all transactions on the Bitcoin network, nodes must know all transactions that ever took place; the entire blockchain. (That’s currently some 80 gigabytes worth.)

But with Mimblewimble there is no longer really such a thing as a transaction history per coin. Each coin does have a specific block in which it was first created. But from then on, its value simply becomes part of the combined Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) set, which defines all outputs that store coins and could potentially be spent at any time.

This means that in order to verify new transactions, nodes no longer need to care about previous transactions. All they need to care about is that the specific outputs used are valid.

With even more clever math, nodes can establish the validity of outputs relatively easily. They just need the block headers of all blocks (a sort of index of blocks without all transaction data) and the aforementioned dummy output signatures: both relatively compact data-sets. All other transaction data — almost the entire blockchain — can be safely discarded.

The benefit compared to other anonymizing techniques is substantial. If Confidential Transactions and CoinJoin had been used in Bitcoin from day one, nodes would currently require more than a terabyte of data to operate. With Mimblewimble, they would need closer to 120 gigabytes. And perhaps even more interesting: where the blockchain necessarily has to grow over time, the required Mimblewimble dataset does not, and can actually shrink if more bitcoins are stored in fewer outputs.

Compatibility

Now for the bad news. Mimblewimble, in its current form, is not very compatible with the Bitcoin protocol. This is mainly because for Mimblewimble to work, script must be purged from transactions. As such, there would no longer be room for a whole set of Bitcoin features, like time-locked transactions (used for the Lightning Network among other things), atomic swaps (for cross-blockchain interoperability), and more.

But that doesn’t make Mimblewimble useless. Mimblewimble may, for instance, be the perfect fit for a privacy-focused sidechain. Bitcoin users could lock their bitcoins into a specific output on the Bitcoin blockchain and “move” their coins to the Mimblewimble chain. On this sidechain, users could transact freely and privately for as long as they want, until the new owner decides to “move” the funds back to the Bitcoin blockchain by unlocking the original output.

Due to the efficiency offered by Mimblewimble’s sidechain, the added burden of maintaining it would be very manageable. Moreover, it could potentially unload much data from the Bitcoin blockchain, increasing scalability even for those who don’t use Mimblewimble at all. Where sidechains are typically not considered a scaling solution, Mimblewimble offers one.

For a full technical explanation of Mimblewimble, including the mathematical details, see the white paper.

 

Written by  Aaron van Wirdum for the Bitcoin Magazine | Original article: https://bitcoinmagazine.co…---------------------
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