It turns out to be the savior of graphics card mining machines! Why are Grin and Beam so popular?

【Deep Chain Original】

Text丨Buliang

Graphics card mining is activated

"Looking to rent 500 graphics card mining machines, N card P104, 1070, 1080!"

“Buying a lot of Beams off-site, 10.5 each, buy 5,000 at most”

Because of Grin and Beam, the quiet circle of friends in the bear market has become lively.

On January 3, the mainnet of the new encrypted privacy currency Beam was launched. The long-awaited miners swarmed in with their hoes. More than a dozen over-the-counter trading markets with QQ groups as the main base appeared within a day, and the over-the-counter trading price rose from 6 yuan to 11 yuan within 2 days.

On January 8, Hotbit, MXC, QBTC and other exchanges took the initiative to launch Beam, which surged 500% at the opening, reaching a high of 55 yuan. The price then quickly fell back to the over-the-counter market price of around 10 yuan. As of January 10, the 24-hour on-site trading volume alone reached 10.5 million yuan, exceeding the trading volume of many of the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market value.

On January 15, the much-anticipated Grin will launch its mainnet. The arrival of Beam and Grin has brought new vitality to the graphics card mining market that has been dormant in the bear market.

Li Yuan has been looking for a graphics card mining machine for rent recently. Although he was not a miner before, he is ready to take a gamble on Beam and Grin. He confidently told Deepchain Finance that mining Grin will definitely make money. "The market is hot enough now. There are bonuses for early entry, and you can make a quick buck." What worries him now is that he has not found enough and suitable mining machines.

Mr. Wu, who is engaged in the computing power leasing business, also said that recently people have been coming to inquire about the leasing of graphics card mining machines every day, basically they are here for Beam and Grin, and the leasing period is mostly within four months.

While Li Yuan was still worrying about the mining machines, Du Tan's 200 graphics card mining machines were already roaring, and every second of heat dissipation was increasing the wealth.

Du Tan introduced that he has currently deployed a batch of P106 mining machines to mine Beam. The mining cost of each coin is about 5 yuan, and the over-the-counter transaction price is currently around 10 yuan, with a profit margin of 50%. This is still when electricity is relatively expensive. If the electricity price is cheap, the profit will be even more amazing.

"Mining machines will be damaged if they are not turned on for a long time. The market has been bearish for so long. This is the first time that the MW protocol has been implemented, and there is a strong community consensus, so it is worth a try."

In addition to domestic small and medium-sized miners, foreign miners are also ready to move.

In the Discord community, a community member said that he has prepared 2,000 N-series graphics cards and is waiting for Grin to go online.

Layer1, a crypto hedge fund invested by Silicon Valley investment godfather and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, also said it is "deeply involved" in the more privacy-focused cryptocurrency "Grin."

In the past few years, digital currency has created too much wealth expansion and destruction. The aura of decentralized idealism is ultimately unable to resist the desires of human nature. Behind those who get rich overnight, there are people who are penniless. However, there are always people who are unwilling to cry out, "Why wasn't I the one who got rich early?"

Whether it is investment or speculation, most people have missed the most glorious bonus period of cryptocurrency and can only watch the backs of the big guys leaving after becoming financially free.

Grin and Beam described to everyone an opportunity where everyone seems to be able to start over again, forgetting about the big guys cutting leeks, forgetting about the ICO breaking even, forgetting about the 90% plunge in the coin price, as if nothing in the past had happened, and everyone is standing at the same starting line and starting over.

A smile comes from a curse

Both Grin and Beam originated from an idealistic experiment.

In July 2016, on the Bitcoin Research Channel, a developer anonymously named Tom Elvis Jedusor (the name of Voldemort in the French version of the Harry Potter series) released a white paper called Mimblewimble.

In Harry Potter, Mimblewimble is a curse that makes someone speechless or mute, preventing him from fighting back.

In the white paper, Bitcoin seems to have become an object of curse. The white paper believes that Bitcoin scripts should be abandoned and recommends the use of a new underlying protocol - MimbleWimble, which has higher privacy, scalability and substitutability.

At the end of 2016, MimbleWimble gained its first supporter. An anonymous user named Ignotus Peverell (the original owner of the invisibility cloak in Harry Potter) developed a Github project called "Grin (Smile)" and began to turn MimbleWimble from theory into reality.

In January 2017, Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra introduced Grin at the "Blockchain Underlying Protocol Research" conference at Stanford University, and Ignotus released a technical introduction to MimbleWimble and Grin in early 2017.

Grin is a cryptocurrency that competes with Bitcoin and is also primarily used for payment. The difference is that it has no censorship or restrictions and has better privacy, scalability, and openness.

The address and amount of each transaction can be observed and tracked by the whole world, which is a fundamental flaw of Bitcoin. In Grin's transactions, all data is completely obscured, there is no identifiable address, and to the outside world, each transaction looks the same.

Secondly, like Bitcoin, Grin uses proof of work (PoW), but is configured with an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) resistant mining algorithm called Cuckoo Cycle. In the early days, only GPU mining can be used, but ASIC resistance will gradually weaken, and it will gradually transition from GPU mining to ASIC mining within two years.

The difference is that Grin mining speed is 1 minute to mine one block, and the reward for one block is 60 Grin, which is more efficient and there is no upper limit on the total amount.

In the Bitcointalk Genesis Post, the initiator summarized the characteristics of Grin with four “NOs”:

Pre-mine: No (no pre-mining); Founders Reward: No (no founder reward); ICO: No (no ICO); Masternodes: No (no masternode reward, that is, no investment)

This is also the charm of Grin's current popularity. There is no cutting of leeks, and it is completely driven by community consensus. Just like Satoshi Nakamoto's ideal, it aims to create a "decentralized and fairer world", but the side effect is that it causes developers to be too poor and can only survive on donations.

Mutual contempt

Compared with the popular Grin, Beam is a little deserted in the cryptocurrency circle.

There is such a story: Beam went looking for investment, and the investor discovered Grin during the research process. At that time, Beam was not open source but Grin was. The investor found that the code quality of Grin was particularly good, so he refused to invest in Beam and instead became a supporter of Grin.

The Beam team was actually inspired by Grin and started research and development in April 2018, becoming the second believer of MimbleWimble.

It is also positioned as a crypto privacy currency, pure PoW mining. The difference from Grin is that the total amount of Beam is limited, with a total of 262.8 million. The block reward in the first year is 80, and it will be halved every 4 years thereafter until the 133rd year, when Beam is mined out.

Secondly, Beam is operated and maintained by the Beam Foundation, and 20% of the mining rewards will go into the development pool (Treasury) to incentivize the development and promotion of Beam.

Every month, the team will distribute the rewards, with 35% going to investors, 45% to the core team and advisors, and 20% to the Beam Foundation.

Beam is not averse to financing. So far, it has received investment from 16 funds, including Chinese funds such as Node Capital and Ceyuan Ventures.

The most notable difference between the two cryptocurrencies is their different approaches to governance.

Beam is a commercial project, similar to the cryptocurrency zcash, which adopts a corporate structure and pools part of the block rewards to the foundation to support the development of the blockchain.

“Beam is working hard to create a brand new privacy cryptocurrency with incentives in block mining so that the project doesn’t die,” Beam CTO Romanov explained.

Grin takes a different approach, relying entirely on a community funding model, similar to Monero.

While this is a less reliable source of income, Grin sees this as an advantage that will ultimately increase the security of the project.

“We are firmly committed to not participating in any ICO, premine, founder’s reward, or similar activities,” Grin developer Yeastplume stressed in a statement, adding: “We are not driven by profit or corporate interests, and everything is designed to be open source and community driven.”

Although both are believers in MimbleWimble, die-hard fans of Beam and Grin despise each other and engage in verbal battles from time to time.

Beam’s fans believe that Grin’s development progress is too slow, and that the lack of a total limit will lead to infinite dilution of its value. Grin’s fans focus on attacking Beam’s 20% mining pool commission, and even found out that one of Beam’s consultants, Yonatan Ben Shimon, was suspected of being involved in a $1.7 million cryptocurrency scam.

While fans are constantly bickering with each other, the Grin and Beam teams have always maintained a "friendly" competitive and cooperative relationship. Because Grin is so "poor", Beam even funded Grin's security audit.

"Our projects take different approaches, but we collaborate and exchange ideas every day. Mimblewimble technology can only get stronger." Grin developer Yeastplume tweeted in the second half of last year to clarify to the outside world that there is no vicious competition between the two.

But in terms of market popularity, Grin is far better than Beam. At the same time, Grin has also become the "ideal choice" for miners. Li Qing, who is mining Beam, admits that he is mining Beam just to test the waters, and will gradually shift the computing power to Grin after the 16th.

As Stefan Zweig said in his book The Queen of the Brontë: "She was too young at the time to know that all the gifts given by fate had already been secretly marked with a price."

Beam chose to take investments from 16 funds and receive 20% of the mining pool share, so it is bound to be questioned by public opinion as "scamming" and "centralization."

What people are looking forward to is the next BTC, not another ICO.