One of the largest Ethereum blocks was mined today, at a value of a 112 ETH.

[Video Beagle]

4 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

a block is simply a transaction, there's block reward (coins created when it's solved, or 'mined', this is finite and will be 0 one day)

but there's also transaction fee that people pay when they're transferring their coin, and higher volume = higher fee

 

ok..I suspect the secret to my understanding is somewhere in this..

[mariushm]

1 hour ago, Video Beagle said:

See, I don't understand this. Who made the virtual mines? Someone programed it and put the stuff there...how is it found?  Real mines are a limited resource.  Why can't I go '@create mine_etherum name="My Mine"'

and be rich?

 

In a very simplified way.... 

 

The blockchain keeps a log of all the transactions every made between people using Ethereum. The whole blockchain is then stored around the world on multiple computers, if any computer fails, you can recover the whole blockchain from the other computers keeping the chain. 

Each chain link has a finite amount of storage space, let's say around 80 KB of data can be stored with the chain link.  In this amount of storage, information about multiple transactions and contracts can be stored for eternity 

 

In order to add a link to the chain, you need to know a sort of password, which can't be easily guessed, it depends on the previous chain link... there's complicated mathematics used to calculate and try to determine the password based on previous chain link's password.

 

The miner (person or organization) that discovers the password for the next chain link gets the right to attach this chain link to the chain, and include in this chain list a number of transactions, as many as can be fit inside the storage space. For their effort, they're rewarded with a fixed amount of currency, plus some percentage (transfer fee) for every transaction that's included in the chain link discovered.  

 

So for example, you can imagine that a new chain link is discovered every 10 seconds, and let's say there's 1000 transactions pending every minute but the chain link can only hold 500 transactions - the miner that discovered the chain link will quickly pick the most profitable 500 transactions or as many as can be squeezed inside that amount of storage and attaches the chain link to the chain. 

If your transaction isn't included, it will be included in the next chain link, or the one after that ... or may be ignored for hours if you chose to pay a very low transaction fee - you can pay slightly higher transaction fee than the minimum. 

 

In the case of this block that was worth 112 ETH, you can see -  https://etherscan.io/block/11907340 -   that there were " 106 transactions and 342 contract internal transactions in this block"  and for this, the miner got the fixed 2 ETH reward, plus 110 ETH from transaction fees. 

If you look at the blocks mined -  https://etherscan.io/blocks - the actual reward is typically much less, at around 3.5-4 ETH for each block.

 

Everything is calculated mathematically, and everyone can validate the math and check the transactions included in the chain, and within minutes multiple servers around the world validate the link and it's locked and the transfer is complete...

 

The maths used to determine the password for the new chain links is designed in such a way that by design, the difficulty is adjusted so that a new chain link will be discovered every so many seconds.  If one is discovered by luck faster, difficulty increases... if it takes too long, difficulty may decrease... if more miners start mining, the chain link is discovered faster so the difficulty increases for the next chain link... and so on. 

 

The people that did the ETH blockchain are considering moving to a different method of validating transactions which doesn't involve using so much energy to discover the password, but may be less profitable. 

 

If I understand correctly,  the new concept is that you pay a certain amount of ETH or pool together an amount with some friends... I think it was 12 ETH last time I heard, and this amount is locked and you can't use it for a period of time.  You become a validator which analyzes transactions by doing some maths on each transaction to determine if the transaction is fraudulent or not  and you get a part of the transaction fee for your effort.  At the same time, multiple other validators check the same transaction and if there's a consensus, that transaction is validated and becomes permanent.  However, if you cheat and don't do the work and just say transaction is valid, but other validators figure out transaction is bad, you get fined and you may even lose the ETH amount you "staked". 

 With this new scheme, you could basically get together with a group of people (to pool that minimum staking amount) and run a low power dedicated server in your closet (or maybe even as a program inside your wireless router) and validate transactions as they happen and get rewarded with maybe pennies for every transaction you validate. 

 

 

[tikker]

5 hours ago, mariushm said:

If I understand correctly,  the new concept is that you pay a certain amount of ETH or pool together an amount with some friends... I think it was 12 ETH last time I heard, and this amount is locked and you can't use it for a period of time.  You become a validator which analyzes transactions by doing some maths on each transaction to determine if the transaction is fraudulent or not  and you get a part of the transaction fee for your effort.  At the same time, multiple other validators check the same transaction and if there's a consensus, that transaction is validated and becomes permanent.  However, if you cheat and don't do the work and just say transaction is valid, but other validators figure out transaction is bad, you get fined and you may even lose the ETH amount you "staked". 

 With this new scheme, you could basically get together with a group of people (to pool that minimum staking amount) and run a low power dedicated server in your closet (or maybe even as a program inside your wireless router) and validate transactions as they happen and get rewarded with maybe pennies for every transaction you validate.

Just to add to this nice explanation, the main point, as far as I understand it, why this completely eliminates mining (the power hungry and difficult part) because you are randomly chosen to validate based on how much you stake. Therefore instead of fighting over the right to validate with more compute power, you do so by staking more ETH.

[Video Beagle]

22 hours ago, mariushm said:

the miner that discovered the chain link will quickly pick the most profitable 500 transactions or as many as can be squeezed inside that amount of storage and attaches the chain link to the chain. 

ok...your explanation helped a lot for me to get my head around it...but the transactions...what are they?

I bought $20 worth of bitcoin tru paypal last week (just to kind of try it and release preasure from me wanting to jump into a get rich quick investing thing based on the media blitz)...was that one of the transactions?  (I know etherium and bitcoin are different, but theoreticly)...or is it something else (like that had a 50¢us transaction fee, i can't see that being a priority in the way you describe)

[Video Beagle]

And to be clear..this "power consumption" thing lots talk about...this is because of running big computer rigs to do the math, right?  So this ties into things like TDP and the difference in Watt/performance between x86 vs ARM (m1) I've been slowly learning about? (literaly, a lot of this is concepts and concerns that I've never concidered before).

[leadeater]

46 minutes ago, Video Beagle said:

I bought $20 worth of bitcoin tru paypal last week (just to kind of try it and release preasure from me wanting to jump into a get rich quick investing thing based on the media blitz)...was that one of the transactions?

Yes that is correct, your transaction (purchase) would have been in the bitcoin blockchain.

 

42 minutes ago, Video Beagle said:

And to be clear..this "power consumption" thing lots talk about...this is because of running big computer rigs to do the math, right?  So this ties into things like TDP and the difference in Watt/performance between x86 vs ARM (m1) I've been slowly learning about?

Yep although with cryptocurrency mining it's all about the GPU/ASIC power efficiency, not that having a very power efficient CPU hurts. But since in this use case the CPU does nothing other than provide PCIe lanes and to run the OS a very power efficient ARM CPU with a good amount of PCIe lanes, with good flexibility to assign them to slots, is very much ideal for mining.

 

Optimizing a GPU for mining typically involves lowering the power target, the core clocks and increasing the memory clocks to get the best hash rate per watt.

 

Also if you are running quite a lot of GPUs then you need to take in to consideration the power draw on the circuit as you don't want to be tripping those, heat too is another factor. In my not very well insulated room with a lot of windows with around 2kw of power draw in winter the room temperate gets to low to mid 30's C. Though I could just open a Window but I kind of like walking in there to warm up 

 

(Not GPU mining though, BOINC and F@H and only CPUs)

[mariushm]

10 minutes ago, Video Beagle said:

ok...your explanation helped a lot for me to get my head around it...but the transactions...what are they?

I bought $20 worth of bitcoin tru paypal last week (just to kind of try it and release preasure from me wanting to jump into a get rich quick investing thing based on the media blitz)...was that one of the transactions?  (I know etherium and bitcoin are different, but theoreticly)...or is it something else (like that had a 50¢us transaction fee, i can't see that being a priority in the way you describe)

 

ETH cryptocoin allows transaction and "smart contracts" on the network... transaction can be something as basic as transfer of some value between two wallets. Smart contracts... it's complicated and I personally didn't do much research to fully understand it  and it's outside this explanation scope... basically think of it like being able to put mini programs on the block chain through which "smart things" can be done with the crypto coin (like for example, release the reserved amount only when some conditions are met, or split the amount to multiple addresses, or release only when multiple persons confirm or agree to something)

 

Let's say I want to send you some amount of ETH .. I use the software wallet to bundle the amount I want to give you with your wallet address and agree to some tiny amount of transfer fee and this packet of data is sent to the ETH network (distributed to lots of computers) and it's pending to be added into the blockchain... depending on how much transfer fee I agree to, can stay there pending anything between less than a second and up to hours... new blocks are found every 5 or 10 seconds, but if the transfer fee is too low or there's too may pending transactions, my transaction may wait for a future block to be found until it's recorded.

 

When a new block is found and about to be added to the block chain, and the transaction is chosen to be included in the block and therefore chain, the transaction is validated, checks are made to make sure that both wallet addresses exist, there's checks to see if the source wallet actually has the amount of ETH in it and if everything is right, all the good stuff.

Once the transaction and the block is added to the chain, you see the amount of crypto coin is substracted from my wallet address and added to your wallet and you can use this coin for whatever you want. 

 

The transaction is validated, and within 5-10 minutes or so, once several blocks are added to the chain, it's pretty much not reversible...  (there are really rare cases when a block can be added to the chain and turns out to be invalid, or two people add a block at the same time and eventually only one block is kept and the other is invalidated) ... so you could say it's safer than paying through banks and wire transfers where  bank could get money back, person could ask for refunds etc...

It's also pretty much instant, you see the coin as soon as it's added to chain, instead of waiting sometimes until 8-9 AM the next business day to see the money on your card / account  or waiting 7-30 days for a check to clear.   (it's almost instant but like i said, if you want to be absolutely sure the transfer is permanent it's best to way around 5-15 minutes after a payment to be sure it's not reversible)

 

Right now, every payment processor take their cut, you got minimum fee + some percentage of every card processed, stores like Amazon take 10-25% of the amount when you list something in their store, Paypal takes a fee from sellers,  ebay also takes a fee on top of what paypal takes. 

You also have payment processors and companies like Paypal banning you or refusing to work with you if you do business with stuff they don't agree with, like for example payment processors not accepting erotic content due to higher fraud, or companies like Paypal not accepting vaping or pot related stuff even if your business is in a location where pot is legalized or decriminalized

 

So there can be good uses for crypto, it can make it possible to take out these middle men in a way, and could make it easier to do microtransactions or small payments without middle men taking chunks of it. 

 

Bitcoin ... i personally don't like it, because it was designed from the start in a way that makes it hard to be used for lots of transactions like credit cards can be used, or other crypto coins... blocks are generated every 5-8 minutes instead of seconds, so you pack few transactions in each chain and therefore the transaction fee of each transaction becomes high if the network becomes popular. Don't see the point of it, if it can not be used on a daily basis. 

 

[EL02]

On 2/23/2021 at 1:14 AM, arnavvr said:

The future of the Ethereum network is really at stake here with high transaction fees. 
Climate Change is also an issue here.
Electricity usage could start to become a real problem. 

On the other hand there's NANO with 0 transaction fees, nearly instant transaction and low power usage.

[DeScruff]

On 2/24/2021 at 1:01 AM, Vitamanic said:

What?

 

If you think the energy consumption of over 5 million people “really isn’t big”, that’s unfortunate. That’s also just Bitcoin... what’s the consumption equivalent for all of them combined? Is the emission footprint for 15 million people not big enough to notice too? 
 

It’s senseless pollution in a time when we need to do everything we can to reverse course.

 

A small state also isn’t 5 million people, lol. I guess you don’t live here. 28 out of the 50 states are under 5 million in population.

I'd like of offer you a piece of advice.
When the topic of cryptocurrency comes up, mentally block posts from certain folks on this site (You will quickly learn who). You ain't gonna convince them mining Crypto has any sorta negatives.

Spoiler

_{You could be trapped on a deserted island with them, with a generator and limited fuel, and they will come up with some excuse to why mining crypto is more valuable use of the fuel. - something something "My Pc is acting like a space heater keeping us warm at night, while generating money". If anything they have convinced me Cyrpto totally is a cult / MLM, just from the way they speak.}

 

[Moonzy]

14 minutes ago, DeScruff said:

When the topic of cryptocurrency comes up, mentally block posts from certain folks on this site

Bonjour, happy to oblige

 

15 minutes ago, DeScruff said:

You could be trapped on a deserted island with them, with a generator and limited fuel, and they will come up with some excuse to why mining crypto is more valuable use of the fuel. - something something "My Pc is acting like a space heater keeping us warm at night, while generating money".

I mean I wouldn't mine because I wouldn't have a PC

 

But what would you do with the generator? Best I can think of is generate fire with the fuel (assuming it's petrol, diesel won't burn easily afaik) when a ship is close by

[mariushm]

Anyone complaining about the power consumption should ask himself or herself how much power countries using 110v AC are losing  due to conversion inefficiencies.

All those tiny transformers underground or on poles are not super efficient, you know.

 

You'd probably save WAY MORE power than what's currently used by mining, by simply switching to 230v AC in homes ... and you'd save huge amounts of power if you'd use ultra high DC voltage transmission lines, instead of what's currently used... but they require huge investments and upgrades.

 

Dave from eevBlog did a video recently about losses in transmission lines ... there's a project about making a solar array in Australia and sending power to Singapore through a 3800km ocean cable ...

See at around 12:30, they estimate 3.5-5% losses using high voltage dc transmission lines compared to up to 10% of AC transmission lines.

 

 

[Moonzy]

12 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Anyone complaining about the power consumption should ask himself or herself how much power countries using 110v AC are losing  due to conversion inefficiencies.

It's pot calling a kettle black, mining does indeed consume huge amount of energy to operate, and pointing out another thing that's wasting energy to justify your own energy usage is like saying "he killed 5 man, so I'm fine if I only kill 1"

 

But mining isn't the most inefficient way to generate income, as I've mentioned before somewhere -digs, will edit this post later-

 

Edit: oh it's just first page of this thread

 

[tikker]

37 minutes ago, DeScruff said:

When the topic of cryptocurrency comes up, mentally block posts from certain folks on this site (You will quickly learn who). You ain't gonna convince them mining Crypto has any sorta negatives.

Nobody is denying the power consumption of mining is a problem though. Not even the miners, who generally try to keep power consumption as low as possible for both increased longevity and more profit. Yes the energy consumption is a big problem (especially if it comes from gray energy) and needs alternatives. No it is not the driver behind climate change, for which many other factors have already driven us towards an almost imminent point of no return. There are multiple coins that are or are working towards (Ethereum among them) proof of stake to avoid the cost of mining.