Is ASIC-resistant mining definitely right?

Author | Five Fireballs Master

Source | Vernacular Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)

"Master, many small mining coins are very popular recently. What do you think about me going to Zhongguancun to assemble a machine for mining?" The symbol of gold coins flickered in the soldier's eyes.

"If it is an early mining coin, it is safe to speculate in the short term. But in the long run, individual mining is meaningless."

"Why? Isn't it true 'decentralization' only when mining is done by individuals?" the soldier was puzzled.

"Let me ask you, is it more advanced, the United States where 2% of the agricultural population feeds the country, or India where 70% of the agricultural population feeds the country? In your eyes, India's agricultural model is fully 'decentralized'." I looked at him with a hint of sarcasm.

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Recently, many small PoW mining coins have suddenly emerged. They have increased several times or even dozens of times in the past few months. At first glance, the hype seems very hot, but there may be hidden risks.
These small mining coins usually have the following characteristics:

1. ASIC and even GPU resistant

2. anonymous

3. High TPS

4. Smart Contract + DApp Platform

The ultimate goal of these small mining coins is to become the next Dogecoin or the next Raven. The former is an accidental creation, a work that even the creator himself jokingly calls a joke, and is publicly stated by many blockchain "bigwigs" to be "worthless", but it has been ranked in the top 50 of the cryptocurrency market value for many years by relying on the power of grassroots . The latter is favored by big capital and is listed on the Binance platform with 0 listing fee .

Almost all popular small mining coins have the essential feature of being ASIC-resistant , and some are even GPU-resistant. This is achieved through the following methods:

1. Consensus algorithm. Common ones include X11, X22i, X16R, and Cryptonight Lite. It resists ASIC mining machines by interrupting the serial order of hash algorithms.
2. Memory joint mining. Use memory + CPU instead of CPU alone to mine, because ASIC mining machines have no advantage over ordinary PCs in terms of memory.
3. Mining with idle hard disk space. This is easy to understand. The current ASIC mining machine has the least advantage in hard disk space compared to PC.

Today, I will try to talk about the possible future development trends of PoW from the perspective of a network engineer, combined with two recent events in the company.

01

Is ASIC resistance necessarily right?

Let me start with the first thing. In the recent weekly meeting, everyone talked about a phenomenon: some customers' devices were implanted with Trojans, which did not cause any major harm, because the only function of these Trojans was to use the processors and memory of these devices to mine cryptocurrencies .

What coins are being mined? Of course not Bitcoin or Ethereum, because the computing power of these devices is too small compared to the computing power of the entire Bitcoin or Ethereum network, and they cannot mine at all.

This leads to a question. If a currency with a PoW consensus algorithm is as popular as Bitcoin and achieves the so-called ideal "decentralization", how many "home miners" do you think will run their computers and mine 24 hours a day? 1 million or more?

How many "zombie hosts" (hosts or network devices controlled by hackers due to network viruses) are there in the hands of hackers around the world? According to relevant statistics, the number was 6.7 million in 2016. With the popularization of electronic devices such as smartphones, 5G networks, and the Internet of Things, it should not be surprising that this number will reach tens of millions or even hundreds of millions in the next few years .

If Bitcoin is a network of 1 million home miners, it is very likely that several large hacker groups can easily launch a 51% attack on Bitcoin by joining forces.

Why haven’t the current small mining coins been attacked by hackers? Maybe the market value is too small to be noticed by hackers, maybe the profit from the attack is not high enough, or there may be other reasons. But in any case, any so-called "anti-ASIC" PoW mining coin actually exposes itself to the "watchful eyes" of millions of zombie hosts . There is always the risk of being attacked by hackers using numerous zombie hosts.

On the other hand, for ASIC, whether it is BTC, BCH or BSV , although most of their computing power is controlled by the top mining pools, it seems that they are highly centralized; but the computing power of an ASIC mining machine is equivalent to hundreds of thousands of CPUs. In other words, an inconspicuous ASIC mining machine can match the computing power of hundreds of thousands of zombie hosts , and a mining farm with tens of thousands of ASIC mining machines cannot be matched even if hackers unite and mobilize all zombie hosts, let alone use this computing power to fight against the computing power of the entire Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash network.

For PoW, security is the most important .

Furthermore, from another perspective, if a currency with a PoW consensus algorithm is as popular as Bitcoin, then:

1. If the algorithm is ASIC-resistant, perhaps ASIC mining machines targeting this algorithm will be developed over time.

2. If you use memory or hard disk, a large disk array, or a dedicated large memory host, it will definitely beat the home computer in terms of efficiency.

3. Even if we simply ignore factors 1 and 2, concentrating machines in data centers where electricity is cheap will always be much more cost-effective than home PCs. In the long run, computing power (whether it is CPU, memory, or hard disk) will always tend to be centralized, just like the three BTC brothers now.

After all, PoW, Proof of Work, represents free capitalism. The essence of the competition of computing power is the competition of capital. Family workshops are always so powerless when facing industrial assembly lines .

If you agree that PoW is free capitalism, then PoS (Proof of Stake) is a competition within a closed system like a hereditary aristocracy, and it is clear at a glance which one is better.

02

Internet protocol upgrade and beneficial block expansion?

Now let's talk about the second thing. The IPv4 address pool that the company can allocate to users is almost exhausted. The current address pool reserve may only last for about 2 to 3 years.

The above sentence sounds quite hardcore, so I will try to translate it into plain language.

Simply put, on the Internet, communication between devices is based on something called an IP address. The current version number is v4, so it is also called IPv4. What does it look like? For example, "192.168.1.1".

What does an IP represent? It's very simple, just like the house number on the Internet . When we buy things on Taobao, we need to fill in the home or company address. Computers also need these "Internet house numbers" to send messages to each other. For example, if your home IP is 21.33.13.5, it is similar to "No. 18, Sanlitun, Beijing, China".

IPv4 has less than 4 billion available addresses in total. It was originally estimated that they would be used up before 2010, after all, the number of network devices in the world has long exceeded this number. However, with the support of various technologies, it has survived to this day. The most common one is NAT, also known as address translation . What does this thing do? It is equivalent to an old man in the message room . When the express is delivered to "No. 18, Sanlitun, Beijing, China", it will be handed over to this old man, who will then deliver the item to a specific person, because there may be N units and many buildings in No. 18, and different people live in each building.

A company, a family, or an Internet cafe basically only shares one real public IP address , which is placed on the exit router. The devices inside all use private, or internal IP addresses, such as "Unit 3, Building 5, 401, Five Fireballs Master". The router is like the old man in the message room. Almost every entrance to the network has such an old man to help pass the message to the specific person, thus saving a lot of IP addresses.

However, no matter how much we save, we finally run out of IPv6. The IPv6 protocol, which was developed 20 years ago, has finally come into use. Last year, the company had its first and second commercial users since its founding, who asked for IPv6 addresses and support. I believe that in the next two years, there will be more and more such customers. It is expected that in three years, our company will face the embarrassing situation of either forcing customers to use IPv6 or purchasing the few remaining IPv4 addresses on the market at a high price.

What is IPv6? It is the next generation protocol of IPv4 and looks like this: “2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334”.

This thing looks very anti-human, but it can provide addresses of 2 to the power of 128, which is more than enough to assign an IPv6 address to every grain of sand on the earth .

With IPv6, the "mailroom uncle" will be laid off ! The address of each device on the Internet is in a similar format as "No. 18, Unit 3, Building 5, 401, Sanlitun, Beijing, China". Express delivery can be delivered directly to individuals, and there is no need to go through the mailroom anymore.

Having said so much, what does this have to do with blockchain, or PoW, or even Bitcoin?

There are at least two points :

First, at this stage, hackers randomly scan an IPv4 network segment, such as tens of thousands of addresses, which may take several hours to complete. Then, based on the scan results, they can see which machines have vulnerabilities and can be attacked, and install viruses or Trojans. The first step in implementing an attack is usually scanning .

But the IPv6 network is too large! At the current scanning speed, it takes much longer to scan a network segment, which may contain hundreds of millions or even billions of addresses, than IPv4. As a result, the time and cost of finding new zombie hosts will be greatly increased, which is a big benefit to network security .

Second, when CSW (domestic users jokingly call him Fake Satoshi) introduced BSV's Metanet, he mentioned the issue of IPv6 separately. He said that IPv6 can be directly integrated into BTC or BSV. This has the following benefits:

1. IPv6 addresses can be allocated directly through Bitcoin payments. In this case, network attackers must deposit a deposit in advance, and they can only get the money back if they follow the rules; if they violate the rules in any way, the money will be lost. In short, if a device wants to access the Internet smoothly, it must first get an IPv6 address, and getting the address requires automatically paying a little Bitcoin as a deposit. If it doesn't behave, the deposit will be gone .

Therefore, even if hackers want to launch a simple attack like DDOS (using a large number of botnets to launch a distributed denial of service attack on the target), they must first recharge enough money before launching it, which will greatly increase the difficulty for hackers to launch network attacks .

2. IPv6 supports jumbo frames of up to 4GB, so after capacity expansion (this really has nothing to do with BTC with 1M small blocks), IPv6 can be integrated into Bitcoin transactions, allowing data to flow through payment channels.

The original IPv4 protocol does not support the transmission of giant files as a whole. If you need to transmit a large file, you need to split the file into many data packets and transmit them one by one. It is impossible to package a slightly larger file into one transaction. IPv6 supports jumbo frames up to 4GB in size, so that the file can be transmitted as a whole, which can solve this problem well .

So in what cases is it necessary to transmit such a large amount of data through the blockchain network? For example, when the identity of the other party needs to be confirmed. The identity of the other party can be confirmed by using the information signed with the private key . Obviously, the private key signature is more secure than general social software such as QQ and WeChat.

For example, Alice sends an important document to Bob. This file can be directly transmitted through the Bitcoin transaction channel (provided that the Bitcoin block size is large enough), and what is actually uploaded to the chain is only the hash value of the file, which is verified by miners as a transaction.

In short, IPv6 will gradually become mainstream in the next 3-5 years , and by then, it will have a significant impact on many protocols, designs, and security on the Internet. The blockchain layer attached to the Internet, especially the PoW consensus algorithm, will also undergo corresponding changes. At present, it will develop in a good direction , and the integration of IPv6 and Bitcoin mentioned by CSW is even more exciting. Let's wait and see what changes IPv6 will bring to the blockchain!

What do you think are the pros and cons of anti-ASIC mining? Feel free to leave your opinions in the comment section.