Looking forward to the “second half” of mining pools

It has been a full decade since the first genesis block was created in 2009. In the past decade, the blockchain industry has truly witnessed a roller coaster of ups and downs: it has written countless myths of wealth creation, but also woven a hotbed of anxiety and despair; it has experienced the moment of supremacy when everyone was the center of attention, but it has also witnessed the capital retreat and hasty exit after the bubble burst.

To this day, practitioners who stick to their original intentions are still looking forward to the future with faith. When people outside the industry who have only a limited understanding of the industry explore the trends of blockchain with great interest, their primary concern is probably a long-standing conceptual topic:

What exactly are we talking about when we talk about blockchain?

To answer this question, we will have to go back to the beginning: Bitcoin.

Putting aside the technical issues, we can learn a little about Bitcoin and blockchain from the history of electricity:

Around 600 BC, Greek philosopher Thales discovered that amber rubbed with silk had the ability to attract light and small objects. He called this incomprehensible force "electricity." This was also the first record of "electricity" in human history.

For thousands of years, mankind's exploration of electricity continued, finally reaching its peak in 1831. That year, British physicist Faraday made the greatest discovery of his career - electromagnetic induction, and invented the world's first generator capable of generating continuous current.

This is undoubtedly a great invention. Since then, human society has truly realized that "electricity" can be used by humans. However, it is not easy for a technology to move from its birth to the application level .

Soon after the birth of the generator, people's curiosity gradually faded and doubts followed one after another; for a time, doubts about whether electricity could really be used by humans and what it would be used for were rampant and endless.

It was not until 1879 that Edison invented the world's first practical incandescent light bulb, which brought electricity into thousands of households and made electricity truly available to the general public. It can be said that without the advent of electric lights, electricity would be nothing more than a "trick of entertainment" for people to pass the time and would only remain in the laboratory forever.

The same is true for blockchain. It was born out of Bitcoin, but its application value is far from that . Without the birth of "light bulb"-level applications, blockchain technology will eventually stagnate and is destined to become a tool for a few people to "entertain themselves".

Many emerging technologies have faced similar doubts as “newborn babies” at the beginning of their birth, and blockchain, which has only been around for ten years, is no exception. It is too young and obviously not mature enough, but it is also full of infinite possibilities.

In fact, as the first application of blockchain technology, Bitcoin based on the PoW consensus mechanism is far from perfect. Along with the development of Bitcoin, its increasingly apparent technical defects have come along. For example, a common Bitcoin transfer transaction also requires 10 minutes of block confirmation to be completed. Although fairness and efficiency have never been achieved at the same time, from the perspective of ordinary users, compared with Alipay, which has long been widely popularized and can be transferred to the account in just a few seconds, blockchain-based applications are far from mature Internet applications in terms of product ease of use and user experience .

Blockchain has also been seeking breakthroughs. There have been endless attempts to improve Bitcoin. Some solutions have emerged to address the weakening of its decentralization and the long payment confirmation time. Block processing time, expected total output of coins, and proof of work algorithms have also been improved to a certain extent.

At the same time, the continuous evolution of the consensus mechanism is also one of the major explorations to greatly enhance user experience and promote the implementation of blockchain technology.

In contrast, consensus mechanisms such as PoS and DPoS do not need to process complex calculations for proof of work, and do not need to worry about energy consumption, which greatly reduces the threshold for mining and is more conducive to the implementation of blockchain technology. Although both of them inevitably have defects such as complex implementation and relative centralization, as Ethereum, the second largest blockchain by market value, is about to adopt the Casper protocol to switch from PoW to PoS, it is believed that the consensus mechanism will inevitably become mainstream.

The evolution of consensus mechanisms is bound to trigger a reshuffle of the mining pool industry. When PoW is no longer the only consensus mechanism, and when blockchain technology gradually develops towards the application level to accommodate more ordinary users with zero technical foundation, the development of mining pools will no longer be limited to miners and mining machines themselves.

Lowering the threshold for mining and providing more ordinary users with opportunities to participate in mining may become one of the best ways to promote the implementation of blockchain and help the mining pool industry break out of the bear market.

From this point of view, the HashQuark mining pool is the conceptual product of zero-threshold mining: it focuses on PoS, DPoS and other consensus mechanism public chains, and is also open to ordinary users; depositing coins is mining, there is no need to buy professional mining machines, and no other investment is required. As long as the coins are deposited into the platform account, depositing coins can be used for mining, and incentives can be obtained through mining technology services, and regular income and candy distribution can be obtained.

Promoting the participation and witnessing rights of ordinary users and promoting the rapid implementation of blockchain technology is the original intention of the HashQuark mining pool.

Author of this article:

Li Chen

CEO of HashQuark