When Bitcoin was 100 dollars each, Buffett, who was asked about his opinion, said: "Bitcoin is rat poison."
When there was a Bitcoin of 9,000 dollars, Buffett, who was asked about his opinion, said: "Bitcoin is the square of rat poison."
After experiencing a 300% increase in 2020 and a 30% increase from New Year’s Day to the present, the current price is about 38,500 U.S. dollars, which once exceeded 40,000 U.S. dollars a "rat poison", and its market value has long surpassed Berkshire. Hathaway.
Seeing that Bitcoin rose from 24,000 to 32,000 and then to 37,000, the story of Bitcoin speculation has already been told: "Can Bitcoin still rise? ! I was the first to dissatisfied with Marego, and "Bitcoin is 24,000, but its "nobles" are in prison", today we will talk about the story of mining Bitcoin.
Although several old-brand encrypted digital currencies represented by Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin need to be mined, most of the small-market encrypted digital currencies do not rely on "mining" for additional issuance.
The logic of "mining" such as Bitcoin and Ethereum is not the same, so we will only talk about Bitcoin for now.
Mining: Bitcoin Cup Global Olympiad Competition
The decentralization advertised by blockchain technology means that all transactions that occur will be recorded and broadcast to the entire network.
Suppose A uses his bank account to transfer 100 yuan to B. When only A, B, and the bank know the transaction, B says that it has not received it, but the bank says that B has received it, then B has received it.
In other words, all transactions occur around the credibility of the bank.
Blockchain technology solves this problem. When A transfers 100 bitcoins to B, the system will select a "miner" across the entire network to record the transaction and broadcast it to the entire network.
It can be simply understood that when a transaction occurs, a person will be responsible for sending a text message to everyone's mobile phone in the world, saying that A has transferred 100 bitcoins to B.
In this way, the two parties in the transaction cannot tamper with the information that everyone knows, and can't rely on their accounts.
Everyone is a witness, and it provides "credibility" in the true sense.
Of course, bookkeeping is not for nothing.
The reason why everyone is scrambling to be "miners" and want to help others keep accounts is because being this "bookkeeper" can charge two fees.
One is a certain amount of bitcoins rewarded by the system after the transaction is successfully recorded; the second is a commission of any proportion of the transaction amount that both parties need to pay.
In other words, even if all bitcoins are mined, "miners" can still benefit from commissions for recording transactions.
Moreover, since miners must prefer to record transactions with more commissions, if the transaction is recorded as "account", there will be users who will give a higher commission to achieve "quick arrival".
Therefore, after all Bitcoins are mined, the "miners" will not lose their jobs, and the commissions for "mining" may also increase.
So the question is, there are so many benefits to keeping an account, how does the system determine who this "son of the heaven" is?
Although it is called "mining", this process is completely different from the picture below.
It looks like the picture below.
Yes, exam.
The system will generate a non-transactional data based on each block in the often intricate math problems, who should come out solution, who qualified for this accounting, which is "dug mine."
Therefore, whether you can "mine" and how many bitcoins you can "mine" depends on the computing power.
Graphics card-Mining card-Mining machine
Theoretically speaking, any computer, calculator, or small genius phone watch can be a mining machine.
Only with the computing power of an ordinary computer, the possibility of being No. 1 in the world is infinitely close to zero.
As a result, "mining machines" with computing power tens to hundreds of times higher than ordinary computers came into being.
There are two mainstream mining machines, one is an ASIC mining machine with an ASIC chip specially designed for problem solving; the other is a graphics mining machine that increases the computing power by superimposing the number of graphics cards (GPU) on ordinary computers , Is also the most primitive mining machine.
As for why the "core" of the computer, the central processing unit (CPU), is not as good as the graphics processing unit (GPU) when it comes to mathematics, it is because the CPU can handle many tasks, and many transistors are actually idle during the mining process. status.
The graphics card cuts off many unnecessary components and specializes in screen processing. Coincidentally, the process of processing the screen is very similar to that required for mining, so mining with a graphics card is far more efficient than using a CPU.
Not long after the demand for mining with graphics cards emerged, the "dual heroes" of graphics cards-NVIDIA and AMD have introduced dedicated graphics cards for mining without output ports, commonly known as "mining cards".
The picture below shows the H370 Mining Master, a dedicated mining motherboard displayed by Asustek at the Taipei Computer Show last year, and the supporting mining machine consisting of 20 mining cards (12 AMD mining cards and 8 NVIDIA mining cards).
At the beginning of 2017, Bitcoin slowly started the first big bull market.
Although NVIDIA graphics cards are far ahead in game display, AMD graphics cards that are specifically used for mining more efficient are out of stock.
After AMD's mining cards and graphics cards were all sold out, part of the demand was introduced to Nvidia.
In order to retain this part of the demand (and of course it is also the need for iteration), NVIDIA also quickly launched a "more digging" high computing power product.
But no matter whose card it is, it is their common feature that they cannot be bought.
Nvidia’s GTX1060 3G graphics card, which was launched in the second half of 2016, had an official price on JD.com from early 1,000 to 1,899 yuan in the first half of 2017, and it will always be out of stock.
And there are ways to buy a piece from private channels, at least 3,000 yuan.
At the same time, the ant mining machine with a shipment price of more than 10,000 has also been fired to more than 30,000 among the people.
At the end of 2017, the white card mining machine with a shipment price of more than 30,000, once sold to 130,000.
And because of the world's three major mining machine manufacturers-Bitmain (Ant Mining Machine), which hit IPO three times; Yibang International (Yibit Mining Machine), a US stock listed company; and Jianan Zhizhi (Avalon) Mining machines) are all Chinese manufacturers. It can be said that China has always controlled the absolute pricing power of Bitcoin mining machines.
This also constitutes a reason for the lower mining costs in China. Another reason is that without considering government subsidies, China's electricity prices are also the lowest among all countries.
Escape from Huaqiangbei
It was also at that time that the 4th floor of Huaqiangbei SEG Plaza, which "supplied the whole universe", began to be filled with new mining machine shops or mining machine shops that were “transformed” from shops selling assembled computers.
However, the booming mining machine business in Huaqiangbei did not even last a year.
After the Chinese government tightened the supervision of virtual currencies in September 2017, governments of various countries have also strengthened their supervision and vigilance on Bitcoin. Many British and American banks, including JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup, have begun to prohibit users from buying bitcoins with credit cards.
On Christmas Eve in 2017, Bitcoin began to decline.
In January 2018, Bitcoin began to fall at a rate of $50 per hour. At the same time, mining machines have also begun to reduce their prices at a rate of 1,2,000 yuan per day.
In just 3 months, the profit of the mining machine fell by 90%.
Although the ASIC chip mining machine is more powerful than the graphics card mining machine (almost half of the bitcoins are mined by the ant mining machine, which has caused controversy and resistance), but its shortcomings are also exposed at this time- Since the built-in chip is specially designed to solve a certain function, a chip mining machine can only mine a specific coin, and once it cannot be used for mining, the mining machine is a piece of scrap iron from a civilian perspective.
The "civilian mining machine" graphics card is more compatible and can mine more currencies. If it is not a specially bought mining card but a high-performance graphics card, it can be used to play games or sold to gamers. .
After the Bitcoin dive, the price of chip mining machines returned to a small problem, and customers paid 30% of the deposit but did not come to pick up the goods.
Although many mining machine shopkeepers also dig themselves, mining with the mining machine in their hands is of little help except for expanding losses.
Therefore, the only thing that the mining machine shop can do is to cut prices more drastically and go to the online Bitcoin forums to sell them to avoid so many machines in their hands.
After the Spring Festival in 18 years, many of the mining machine shop owners in Huaqiangbei never came back.
Crazy "Shutdown Coin Price"
So if you don't resell the mining machine and graphics card, just hard "mining", will it make more money than buying Bitcoin?
If you have been digging since 12, of course you will. But if you are going to dig now, you probably won't.
The break-even point of mining, commonly known as "shutdown currency price", means that when the currency value is lower than this price, you can shut down.
The shutdown currency price is a very rough indication price calculated based on the average electricity price of the entire network and the difficulty of mining. Because the price of the mining machine and the maintenance cost of the mining machine vary from person to person, there is also the possibility that the shutdown currency price can still be profitable .
In terms of mining difficulty, from graphics cards to mining machines to dedicated chips, the computing power has doubled. Of course, the question is not allowed to sit still-as the "miners" increase and decrease, the difficulty of the question will be adjusted every once in a while .
Around 2013, the entire network's computing power was only about 10G (but 30 AMD HD5850 graphics cards are required to keep up with this computing power).
At present, the computing power of the entire network has entered the E era (1E=1024P, 1P=1024T, 1T=1024G), which is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 hashes (function operations) per second.
Taking the S19 95T version of the Antminer with 95TH/s as an example, according to the output per T-day in the above figure, 0.0006422 bitcoins can be mined a day. According to the real-time price and exchange rate, it is worth more than 140 yuan. .
The official price is more than 20,000 yuan, and a miner with a net profit of 140 yuan a day will be able to dig back the money of a miner if the bitcoin price remains at 35,000 US dollars.
However, the net profit of 140 yuan per day can already be ranked in the top 5 of the profitability of mainstream mining machines. Among the 111 popular mining machines listed by Bi Yinluo, 91 have a daily net profit of less than 100 yuan.
At the same time, the shutdown currency price of the Antminer S19 is around 37,500 yuan, and the corresponding Bitcoin ratio is about 5,800 US dollars. And this shut-down currency price is also ranked in the top 5 of the lowest shut-down currency price.
The median price of 111 popular mining machines is RMB 70,000. In other words, if Bitcoin falls below US$10,000, most of the mining machines on the market will start to lose money.
Even if the current Bitcoin market is so crazy, there are still two ant mining machines losing money, and the daily net profit of five other brand mining machines is less than 5 yuan (mainly because of electricity consumption).
It can be seen that the electricity bills generated in the process of "mining" are more troublesome than the cost of mining machines. This is why some governments encourage mining by subsidizing electricity prices.
30 graphics cards in 13 years require at least 6 kWh of electricity per hour, and without stopping for 24 hours, 144 kWh per day is required.
In 2017, the year of "mining by the whole people", the annual power consumption of the Bitcoin network increased by 413.37%, and the annual power consumption of the entire network was close to 2.55 gigawatts, which was 1.023 times the annual power consumption of the Czech Republic.
It was recently reported that a foreign private mine owner bought 78 RTX 3080 graphics cards worth close to US$1,200 (the original price was only US$700, and it was recently fired up). Assuming that each graphics card consumes 300W, run this mine The machine also needs at least 23.4 kilowatts.
It will take about 9-10 months for this mine owner to pay back.
At the same time, the maintenance cost of the graphics card mining machine is also very high. The Nvidia GTX1060 mining card only provides a 3-month warranty, which shows the serious damage to the graphics card by mining.
When it comes back to the cost, even if Bitcoin is still at such a high price, it won’t be beautiful for long, and it’s time to change the graphics card.
From this perspective, due to the relatively long cycle of mining, the risk is much greater than buying coins.
However, under the crazy Bitcoin market, the current mainstream mining machines are all out of stock, and even futures are sold-place an order now and get the goods in August.
But take a look at the current Bitcoin market. If you say that the bull was crazy in 17/18, then people are probably crazy now.
And 8 months later, it is unknown whether Bitcoin is 40,000, 100,000, or 10,000.