The resurgence of Grin miners

Grin is turning believers into miners, or miners into believers.

Due to Grin's low-threshold mining settings and mining model, many new miners have flocked in to share the Grin cake with old miners.

Grin's decentralized spirit is a breath of fresh air in the blockchain world, and also a handful of hot coal in the bear market, making the mining and currency circles a little hot at the end of the year.

Whether Grin's popularity will continue depends on whether its faithful miners continue to support it, or whether its coin price can rise and stabilize.

A grenade

The mining circle hasn’t been this lively for a long time.

Major mining pools such as Bixin and Shuangyou have newly established communication groups about Grin. Every day, a group of chattering new miners pour in. Every day, the group holds irregular Q&A sessions, creating an atmosphere of thirst for knowledge.

All this is because of the emergence of Grin. Grin is the smiley coin. The underlying protocol uses the Mimblewimble protocol. Due to its anonymity of the publisher and its privacy-friendly technical features, it is hailed as a new generation of privacy coin or even Bitcoin 2.0.

Grin has no ICO, no pre-mining, and does not accept investment. More importantly, everyone can only obtain Grin through mining. It adopts an unlimited supply model and linear release, producing 1 block per minute on average.

This means that both institutional and individual retail investors are on the same starting line, and the winner will be determined by the computing power of mining machines.

Grin is like a grenade thrown into the long-silent water, stirring up and even detonating the entire blockchain world.

According to a document called "Grin Mining Tutorial" circulating on the Internet, the hard requirements for mining Grin are Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, and at least 4G video memory is supported. N cards are more efficient than A cards, and A cards-470G are not currently supported.

At 11 pm Beijing time on January 15, the Grin mainnet was launched. Several major mining pools such as F2Pool and Spark Pool have already announced their support for Grin mining, and everything is ready to go.

At this time, Grin miners are already ready, waiting to mine the first block. This scene has been played out many times in the careers of these miners.

Rong Bing, co-founder of Honeycomb Miner, said that he could clearly feel Grin's influence on market sentiment, and that the graphics card miners they hosted had basically notified that they wanted to switch to mining Grin.

In the eyes of graphics card miners, GPU mining machines are divided into two types: A cards (AMD graphics cards) and N cards (NVIDIA graphics cards). The latter have more advantages in computing power and power consumption than the former but are more expensive. A second-hand N card can cost thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan (the market price of a second-hand NVIDIA1080Ti is 8,000 yuan), while the market price of a second-hand A card is around 300 yuan.

According to the rating agency TokenInsight, for the Grin project, it is almost impossible to make back the investment if you buy new mining machines for mining. This has led to the majority of Grin miners being old miners.

The founder of F2Pool, “Shenyu”, once invested 10,000 N cards he owned into Grin mining. These 10,000 graphics cards had previously recovered their investment by mining other currencies, and the current loss was “only the electricity bill”.

Most new miners choose amateur mining or renting computing power.

Wang Shuai, the founder of BlockRhythm, placed an NVIDIA 1080Ti mining machine next to his workstation in the office. He was able to mine an average of 1 Grin per day within a week after the Grin mainnet went online. He had never mined other currencies before, but just enjoyed mining Grin.

The owner of the mine, Shen Weipeng (pseudonym), revealed to Odaily Planet Daily that a customer had been looking for an A-card mining machine for a long time without success, so he had to rent 5,000 A-card mining machines from him to mine Grin, according to the income from mining Ethereum (the price of 10 yuan per machine per day).

The emergence of Grin has excited the entire mining circle and even the cryptocurrency circle, stirring up a wave in the calm bear market. As the price of Grin has fluctuated since the launch of the Grin mainnet, everyone has experienced different and complex situations.

The Grin Effect

“GPU miners are the least loyal. They will mine any coin, and they will mine the highest price.” Captain Yu, the head of the Mining Association, told Odaily Planet Daily that he was not optimistic about Grin. Many people came to him to rent mining machines to mine Grin, but he refused because it was too troublesome.

In Captain Yu’s opinion, Grin is an “old coin” that has been around for a long time, and there are hidden secrets behind the sudden hype.

But the emergence of Grin or Grin does bring hope to graphics card mining machines, especially N card mining machines.

Miner Wu Zhongming (pseudonym) deployed 70 N card mining machines. On average, each mining machine can mine 1.3 Grin per day. When the price of the currency was between 60 and 100, 800 Grin were successively mined, which made a lot of money compared with other currencies.

Wu Zhongming is optimistic about Grin's technology and Bitcoin's fundamentalist spirit. He also revealed that once the price of Grin drops to a point where the returns are not as good as other currencies, he will switch computing power to mine higher-yield currencies.

"Miners are probably the most practical and profit-seeking group of people in the blockchain world." Miner Liu Fang revealed that he entered the mining circle just to make money, not for anything else.

Compared with ICO projects under the guise of technological revolution, these miners are more direct and pragmatic.

The reappearance of Grin proves this point.

At a mining seminar on the afternoon of January 17, Shenyu revealed that the income from mining Grin is 10 times that of Ethereum, causing many N card miners to turn to Grin. At that time, the price of Grin on the exchange was US$14 (Mytoken data).

Shenyu once sold 100,000 Ethereums at a price of 20 yuan in early 2016 and earned more than 2 million yuan. Later, the price of Ethereum reached its highest point of 12,000 yuan. According to theoretical calculations, Shenyu lost more than 2 billion yuan.

On January 18, Shenyu revealed to Odaily Planet Daily that in order to avoid a recurrence of “missing out on Ethereum”, he will hoard Grin and not sell it.

Three days later, Shenyu revealed that it was not suitable to hoard Grin in the early stage and that it was already shipping. At this time, the price of Grin fell back to $3.

According to Feixiaohao data, at 8 am on January 28, the price of Grin rose to $13.37, a 7-day increase of 421.19%. This has stirred up the mood of miners.

Wu Zhongming’s response to this was “(the coin price) was raised too early, how much has been mined so far?” In Ge Fang’s view, Grin still seems to be a project that can be manipulated, just like many previous projects, such as Monero, AE, Zcash, BTM…

On the other hand, as the price of the currency began to rise on January 24, the cumulative difficulty rose sharply, which shows that the computing power is increasing and miners are entering the market one after another.

Therefore, when the price of the currency fluctuates, what tests the miners is not their faith, but whether their profits are sustainable.

Grin, the next Bitcoin?

In the eyes of many people who have come into contact with Grin, Grin is undoubtedly the revival of Bitcoin fundamentalism - there is no ICO, anonymous initiators, the core team does not accept investment, and even the mining options were once referenced to the development of Bitcoin.

It is reported that the Grin core development team initially considered complete ASIC resistance, but as they communicated with ASIC developers, they found that they wanted to shift from ASIC resistance to ASIC - from the initial 90% GPU + 10% ASIC to 100% ASIC.

This process coincides with the development of Bitcoin mining. Before the emergence of Antminer, Bitcoin miners also relied on computer graphics cards to mine.

Before its core essence emerged, everyone's reference standard for Grin was its high returns, but the high early inflation rate caused by its issuance mechanism brought many obstacles to Grin's development.

There are two distinct factions in the mining circle: Grin and anti-Grin.

Wu Gang, founder of Bixin, said on the social platform: "Grin is a currency with a fixed output every day. The best entry point is not now, but when you need it, because Grin is infinitely produced. The unlimited supply model will make Grin a truly decentralized stable currency."

The author of Yanmao Miner, "Absolutely Only", said that according to his observation, the income of any currency, including Grin, will not be too different from other currencies, otherwise other currencies will be "out of business", "so in the end the new coins will basically fall back to a standard similar to other currencies."

BTC.TOP's Jiang Zhuoer told Planet Daily that anonymity has always been the goal pursued by anarchists and hackers, but this is not a rigid demand of the market. Grin's slight advantage over BTC in anonymity is not enough to offset its huge disadvantages in currency size and liquidity.

"The technology can be used as a reference, and (Grin's) fairness is just a return to normal - thousands of POW altcoins were so fair in 2014," he said.

(According to a picture circulating in the miner group, Grin and Beam are still the choices for miners to pursue profits)

In the financial market, there is a term called "value return", which refers to the process in which the stock index or stock price drops to its intrinsic value after it deviates seriously from its intrinsic value.

Grin will "return its value" and fall back to where it should be. At 7 am on January 30, the price of Grin was $8.45, a 24-hour drop of 24%. It is foreseeable that the price of Grin will fluctuate in the future, affecting the mood of miners.

“I think Grin can reach the top 20 of CoinMarketCap within one year.” An industry insider who wishes to remain anonymous said, “Just look at how rubbish the coins in the top 20 are now.”

On the other hand, mining machine manufacturers are closely developing Grin mining machines.

On January 29, mining machine manufacturer Innosilicon said it would launch a Grin mining machine this summer. Previously, mining machine manufacturers Obelisk and Innosilicon also announced the development of Grin ASIC mining machines.

This action indicates that a computing power war over Grin is about to begin. Who will become the next Bitmain? Will it repeat the fate of rapid rise and fall?

(Shen Weipeng, Wu Zhongming, Liu Fang, etc. are pseudonyms in this article)