Is mobile phone blockchain "mining" a scientific and technological progress or a Bai Piao scam?
In real life, when we pay by credit card or Alipay, the bank or Alipay keeps an account for us in the background, and this account book is managed by a centralized institution.
In the blockchain network, the transfer information is kept by miners. Miners collect user-initiated transactions, then package them into blocks and splice them into blockchain.
The process of mining is the process of maintaining the operation of the blockchain network. In order to reward miners for their contribution to maintaining the operation of blockchain network, blockchain system uses Token to reward miners.
Therefore, all the mainstream currencies circulating in the market, such as BTC, ETH, LTC, ZCASH, DASH, XMR, are all generated by mining except for some special contracts.
In other words, miners become producers in digital currency by maintaining the blockchain network. The excavated mine is digital currency, and the mining machine is digital currency’s printing machine. Compared with the sharp rise and fall of digital currency trading market, mining is a relatively safe investment method.
With digital currency’s mining becoming more and more familiar to the public, some projects using "mobile phone mining" activities have gradually begun to attract the attention of all parties.
Compared with the traditional mining machine, mobile phone mining only needs to download an App or DApp, and you can get the "computing power" by signing in or authorizing, so as to get the designated digital currency for mining.
Is this way an advance in science and technology? We can draw a clear conclusion by understanding the basic logic and development history of mining in digital currency.
First, the basic logic of mining
We all know that the incentive mechanism of Bitcoin is POW,Proof Of Work). Under this mechanism, the more workload, the greater the income.
Whoever can guess this random and unique number fastest can be the publicist of information.
The work referred to here is bookkeeping and problem solving. Bookkeeping is to synchronize the data of the whole network and cannot be tampered with. The solution is to "grab" the bookkeeping right through calculation. The algorithm ensures the uniqueness of the calculation results.
The calculation process will consume a lot of calculation power, and the correct result solved by miners every time will be used as the initial condition for the next calculation.
Whoever gets the answer first can use it to generate a new block and broadcast it to the whole network.
Miners who receive the data of this new block will immediately stop the current calculation and re-calculate the next problem with the data in the new block. This process is "mining".
Once the blocks generated by miners are accepted by the whole network, miners can get a certain amount of bitcoin as a reward.
The more people dig mines on a blockchain network, the greater the computing power of the whole network, which also means that the operation of the whole blockchain network has been strongly guaranteed by miners.
II. Brief Introduction to Mining History
On January 3rd, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of Bitcoin, dug up the first Block#0 of Bitcoin on a small server and won 50 bitcoin prizes.
For a long time afterwards, mining was just a self-entertainment in a small circle. Between the height of Block 1 and Block 40,000, most of the BTC obtained from mining was never used.
In that "happy" period, everyone could dig up bitcoin by using a home computer. The price of bitcoin at that time was not even enough to cover the electricity bill required for mining activities.
With the increasing influence of Bitcoin, more and more people are mining, and people are constantly trying to mine in new ways.
Laszlo Hanyecz, a Florida programmer, found that mining with graphics card GPU was 800 times faster than that with ordinary CPU, so he dug up a lot of bitcoin. And 10,000 bitcoins were successfully exchanged for two pizzas, so the history of history was named.
The graphics card GPU mining method adopted by Laszlo Hanyecz also made mining enter the GPU era from the CPU era.
In the process of solving problems in mining, a lot of simple and repeated calculations are needed. The CPU contains many useless structures for mining calculation, and the graphics card GPU is naturally suitable for a lot of violent and brainless simple operations.
Just like holding an addition and subtraction operation competition within 10 minutes, CPU is 5 university professors and GPU is 1000 primary school students. When both sides start to calculate addition and subtraction within 10 at the same time, although university professors have higher education than primary school students, it is obvious that 1,000 primary school students can calculate faster than five university professors.
Since then, the way of mining with graphics cards has become more and more common, and all kinds of graphics cards have been snapped up by miners all over the world, resulting in a rush to buy graphics cards since 2012.
The price of graphics cards is completely inapplicable to Moore’s law under the control of miners’ fanaticism and manufacturers’ intention. GPU, a graphics card, has the characteristics of multi-processor and is naturally suitable for a large number of violent operations, which quickly enters the field of vision of professionals.
On September 18th, 2010, the first graphics card mining software was released. The mining ability of a graphics card is equivalent to dozens of CPUs, and the mining ability has been significantly improved.
Soon after, professional mining equipment was quickly manufactured and was called a mining machine. The era of vigorous mining by mining machine has begun.
Since 2013, a large number of professional mining machines, such as Avalon (Pumpkin Machine) and Baked Cat USB, have been listed in China, and the off-the-shelf Avalon ASIC mining machine has successfully enabled hundreds of ordinary miners to achieve a life counterattack.
At that time, a Avalon mining machine could dig out more than 10 bitcoins every day, and at that time, one bitcoin was worth 400 yuan, so every buyer in Avalon could earn back the investment of the mining machine in three days.
The release of professional mining machines completely subverted the bitcoin mining industry, and CPU and GPU became famous overnight in the bitcoin mining industry. It is meaningless to use personal computer to mine, and the era of personal computer mining is over.
The new mining machine with powerful computing power makes the computing power of the whole network soar. According to Satoshi Nakamoto’s design, the difficulty of bitcoin mining can be dynamically adjusted with the computing power of the whole network. The higher the computing power, the more difficult it is to mine.
The mining income depends on the proportion of each miner’s computing power in the whole network. The more mining machines, the greater the computing power, and the smaller the mining income distributed to each miner with the same computing power, so the mining machine has become the product of the miners’ arms race.
With the rising price of bitcoin, the world mining machine market is booming. More and more people are involved in the research and development of mining machines, and the situation of mining machine futures reservation is becoming more and more common.
Bitcoin enthusiasts, whose net name is "Night Cat", successfully developed a 135-nanometer ASIC chip in half a year, but later found that a team had successfully developed a 400-nanometer chip, and the computing power of the whole network soared much faster than expected, which means that the 135-nanometer mining machine was declared dead before it was born.
"Science and technology are the primary productive forces", the famous saying of the great man is vividly reflected in the research and development of mining machines. For miners, a mining machine with great computing power is equivalent to having a printing machine.
In 2014, the computing power of Bitcoin continued to rise. The performance of the chip is approaching the limit of hardware technology, and the mining machine market is becoming more and more stable.
At the end of the era when the computing power advantage was originally obtained through the performance of mining machines, it became more and more difficult for bitcoin individual miners to mine with mining machines, and miners began to accumulate computing power for themselves by accumulating the number of mining machines.
At this time, the power cost has become an important variable cost of mining, so some people began to say that mining is a huge waste of power resources.
If we compare bitcoin with gold, we will find that human beings try their best to extract gold from gold mines, then refine it with cyanide, a highly toxic substance, and finally make it into gold bars, then put it back in the underground vault and spend a lot of money to guard it. Is this whole process a special waste of resources?
We can think about this problem from another angle. A blockchain network that accounts for 0.25% of the world’s power consumption is enough to prove the value and indestructibility of blockchain technology.
Since then, bitcoin mining has gone through five stages: CPU mining, GPU mining, professional mining machine mining, mine mining and cluster mining. The division of different stages is based on the increase of computing power.
-CPU mining stage, the average CPU computing power is 20mhash/s.
-GPU mining stage, the average GPU computing power is 400 mhash/s.
-in the mining stage of FPGA, the average computing power of FPGA is 25 g hash/s.
-ASIC (application-specified TC integrated circuit) mining stage, the average computing power of ASIC is 3.5 thash/s.
-Large-scale cluster mining, consisting of n ASIC mining institutions, with the calculation force of 3.5THash/s multiplied by n..
Third, the algorithm and mining methods
After the bitcoin mining machine matured, the era of personal mining was over.
Other cryptocurrency designers, some in order to allow more users to participate in "mining" through consumer-grade hardware (such as Litecoin), some in order to achieve extreme anonymity (such as Dashi Coin with 11 encryption methods), designed encryption methods different from Bitcoin.
Different encryption methods mean different mining methods. Different encryption algorithms bring different mining methods. Different mining methods will also require different mining machines.
For example, Bitcoin using SHA256 algorithm needs a special ASIC mining machine for mining; Ethereum ETH with Ethash algorithm can use computer GPU to mine; Monroe coins can be mined by computer CPU.
And the encryption method is not static. For example, the encryption method of Ethereum may become a Proof of Stake mechanism, that is, rewards are given according to the number of ethereum held by miners rather than their computing power.
Switching from POW to POS means that ETH cannot be mined. POS is a kind of "Qian Shengqian" income system, in which the person who holds the most Token announces the final information.
The more the balance of Token, the higher the probability that people will get publicity information, and the publicist will also get a certain Token as a reward.
Therefore, digital currency adopting POS consensus mechanism cannot be produced by mining, but this kind of currency can be put into dividend wallet to earn dividend income.
In addition, there are digital currency where POW and POS are mixed, such as DASH, which can be produced by ASIC mining equipment.
Its master node adopts POS mechanism, and the owner of the master node gets rewards for users to verify transactions, store data and provide various services.
Fourth, cloud mining
Mining needs a series of work, such as purchasing mining machines, assembling machines, setting up mining software, and taking into account the cost of electricity and machine maintenance, so there is a certain threshold for participation.
Faced with more users who are unwilling to mine by themselves, professional mining companies and mining pools have launched cloud mining business.
Cloud mining is a form of mining in which users directly purchase computing power from the mine pool. Users of cloud mining buy computing power instead of mining machines, so they don’t have to undertake a series of configuration and maintenance work after purchasing mining machines.
The revenue of user cloud mining comes from the mining share of purchasing computing power. Users only need to log on to the cloud mining platform to check the mining results, without paying any extra workload.
This mining process is simpler and is welcomed by many new users.
Five, mobile phone mining
Because the computing power of mobile phones is almost negligible, in essence, it is more like a marketing activity than a real "mining" in digital currency.
Because the participation threshold is extremely low, all kinds of mobile phone mining software are quickly downloaded and used by millions of users. For example, Netease Planet and Gongxinbao, which have been clearly identified and sealed up.
Gongxinbao previously publicized that users obtained computing power to mine through data authorization. In Gongxinbao DApp, users can create blockchain identities and authorize and manage personal data.
Authorized personal information includes face recognition data, Alipay/Taobao data, Xuexin.com data, telecom operator data, JD.COM data, email credit card billing data, etc. The more authorized information, the more computing power users get, and the more digital currency they can dig.
According to official website, a former Gongxinbao, the process of user authorization to import data is that the user imports the data into the side chain encrypted by the user’s private key. Organizations and individuals, including Gongxinbao, have no ability to view and call user data.
When merchants or other individuals need to query user data, they will send a mobile phone notification. After the user agrees, the other party can find the data and let the user "be the master of his own data".
These mobile phone mining softwares continue to stand out with the fiery concept of blockchain, and various promotion codes occupy the comment space of many blockchain news. Taking advantage of the lack of public cognition, new concepts are constantly thrown out, such as: consensus determines value, the combination of games and advertisements, the combination of computing power and value, and so on.
The current mobile phone mining App and mining income are more similar to a form of integral reward. Advanced projects even have self-built trading web pages, where users can make specific physical exchanges.
What’s more, some digital currency exchanges collaborate to do evil. They sell "options" on the exchanges, and the essence of "options" is the numbers in the exchanges, in order to forge the illusion that these projects are regular blockchain projects.
This kind of project often uses the psychological promise of users to get rich overnight, and the price will skyrocket after "surfing the main network", and users often have the psychology of cashing out at the first time after "surfing the main network". As everyone knows, there is no so-called "main network". Where does the so-called "token" come from?
For many new users, mobile phone mining is probably the starting point of their "mining" career in digital currency. However, these concepts take advantage of the general public’s strangeness to blockchain technology and cheat in the name of "mining".
Some people think that there is no loss in Bai Piao now, and what many project parties want is for users to think so. When these people have this idea, when the "main network" goes online, will they resist the temptation of "little investment and rich return"?
This paper hopes to make many digital pioneers realize that consensus cannot determine value. The consensus of Bitcoin is valuable because of the technical and maintenance costs behind it.
What is the value of the consensus of the masses?
That’s an old saying. Readers who want to invest in digital currency must learn some basic knowledge of blockchain and basic trading principles. Although it may be boring at first, you must believe in yourself. If you are willing to learn, you will be able to learn.
Only by making money within our knowledge can we be in an invincible position in this wave of science and technology.




































