Right on time, the Japanese company GMO revealed their consumer grade miner. The miner has been dubbed “B2” and according to GMO:
We will mass-produce the world’s first mining machine equipped with ASIC mining chips using a cutting-edge 7 nm… GMO miner B2s sold in June will be shipped starting at the end of October 2018.
Decentralizing mining doesn’t always take the form of an algorithm change.
Matt Corallo linked the following Bitcoin Improvement Protocol called BetterHash.
We propose two new mining protocols to rethink the way in which work is generated in the Bitcoin network, potentially drastically increasing effective mining decentralization.
Many early purchasers of the Halong Miners have finally received their products. Following the initial wave of shipments, many miners have posted reviews. Halong’s first SHA256 miner is the Dragon Mint T1. The miner is advertised to perform at 16TH (tera-hashes per second). Many reviews are claiming the hashrate is slightly above 16TH. Compared to the competition, the T1 is slightly superior in hashing to the Bitmain S9, which only performs 14TH.
The DragonMint miners have been well received by the Bitcoin community, who have been hoping for increased mining competition for years. The DragonMint Twitter is saturated with customers posting videos, pictures, and reviews of the computers.
An interesting thread was started by Neiman via bitcoin-dev regarding the accuracy of Bitcoin block timestamps.
I’m doing a research project about blockchain timestamping. There are many such projects, including the fantastic OpenTimestamps.
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I didn’t find any discussion or research regarding Bitcoin timestamp accuracy (also not in the history of this mailing list). I share here a simple analysis of timestamp accuracy, and a suggestion how to improve it.
Nathan Parker made a proposal aimed to solve block transaction spam problem. His idea is based on the premise that some miners might want to fill their blocks with placeholder high fee transactions at no cost.
The proposed solution would reward the fees of the current block to the miner of next block or some block in the future:
A new consensus protocol was suggested on /r/BitcoinDiscussion this week as an alternative to pure Proof Of Work. Proof of Time-Ownership protocol is a Proof of Work and Proof of Stake hybrid that sets a time-based race for PoS blocks, PoTO releases X indices of coins each second, giving the active owner of one of these indices a chance to mine a new block, this supposedly increases decentralization as it gives the chance for anyone running a full node to find a new block, it also increases the incentive to run a full node further increasing decentralization.
The benefits of this are that miners are basically chosen randomly without (economical) ability to grind for more rewards. More people would be able to mine because there would be basically no additional cost over a normal full node for mining. Because so many people could do it, it could basically eliminate miner centralization.
The Tokyo based tech company GMO released the following statement concerning their progress towards developing high performance mining processors:
[GMO] is currently developing cutting-edge 7 nm process technologies for chips to be used in the mining process. We are currently jointly working on research and development with our alliance partner who possesses semiconductor design technology to realize next-generation mining board, a high-performance computer for mining.