Day: January 17, 2018

Halong Mining and MyRig are working together to bring the new DragonMint miner from Halong to market.

First announced in November 2017, the new Halong Mining DragonMint 16T miner is the result of 12 months of R&D and a $30 million investment in development. It has a hashrate of 16th/s with a power consumption of 1440–1480 watts optimized for 240v operation. The DM8575 ASIC runs at 85 GH per chip with a power efficiency of 0.075 J/GH. No special modifications are needed in a data center to use the DragonMint if it is already configured to support a typical Chinese-manufactured ASIC miner.

MyRig (formerly BitmainWarranty) has been providing hosting and retail sales of miners and accessories, PCB design and manufacturing, software engineering and factory approved warranty and repair services since 2013. The partnership with Halong means that MyRig will take care of retail-side distribution, support and warranty services for the DragonMint 16T.

Halong will be manufacturing the DragonMint and continue to sell direct, albeit with a five-unit minimum. Halong told Bitcoin Magazine that the five-unit minimum per order on their site will remain when ordering direct from Halong, but when ordering from MyRig, customers will be able to order single units. They indicated that lead time for shipping at the moment is April 15–30, 2018, and they expect the first batch to go out in March 2018.

According to a MyRig representative, they will ship to any country that either UPS or DHL can deliver to, provided it is not on a sanctions list.

Brian Behlendorf is confident that 2018 will be a peak year, not only for Hyperledger — the international consortium of companies and organizations developing open source, permissioned blockchain technology — but also for blockchain technology in general as businesses and governments recognize the potential power of distributed ledgers and smart contracts.

“2018 will be the year that Hyperledger and blockchain come into their own. Projects demonstrating real world solutions, like Change Healthcare, that will enable healthcare systems to better and more efficiently process claims and payments, will launch this year.”

Hyperledger, founded in 2015, incubates and promotes blockchain technologies for business, including distributed ledgers, client libraries, graphical interfaces and smart contract engines.

Their 200 members include leading companies in finance, banking, Internet of Things, supply chains, manufacturing and technology development.  

“2017 was a milestone year for Hyperledger both for new members and for new technical breakthroughs. In 2017 we doubled our membership, gaining companies like American Express, Cisco, Daimler and Baidu, and we’re expecting more companies and organizations to join in 2018,” said Behlendorf.

“On the technical side, 30 companies and more than 100 developers contributed to the launch of the first production ready Hyperledger blockchain framework called Hyperledger Fabric,” he added.

According to Behlendorf, an important part of Hyperledger’s mandate is to also help educate and train the workforce for the many new blockchain opportunities coming in 2018.

“We’re happy to have launched our new Resource Center, and our online blockchain course is a great success with more than 45,000 enrolled and an average of 2,500 new enrollments per week.”

Hyperledger Blockchain Frameworks

In 2018, Hyperledger will start launching a number of frameworks and platforms that are currently in incubation.

“Interoperability in a multi-blockchain world will be the major focus in 2018. A number of Hyperledger projects are exploring integrations among one another including Hyperledger Sawtooth and Burrow and Indy, Composer and Quilt.”

Behlendorf expects that 2018 will also see some experimentation with different levels of permissioned access to blockchain networks.

He noted that permissioned and permissionless is more of a spectrum than a binary notion, and an important question is what the cost to join a node to a network is in any blockchain platform.

By reducing the cost of joining a networked ledger, Hyperledger hopes to enable new use cases and ways to solve problems.

“Hyperledger was started by a set of developers very focused on modest-sized permissioned ledgers, so that’s where the initial work has been, but there’s no hard limit to that. So we’re happy to look at options that make it easier, perhaps even to full permissionless frameworks,” said Behlendorf.

“I should note that our projects including Hyperledger Indy (for identity), Hyperledger Burrow (for smart contracts), Hyperledger Quilt (for interoperability) and Hyperledger Composer and Cello (developer tools) are agnostic about consensus mechanisms and would work fine with permissionless approaches,” he added.

Expect to see the following Hyperledger launches in 2018:

Quilt will offer interoperability between ledger systems by implementing ILP, which is a payments protocol designed to transfer value across distributed and non-distributed ledgers.

Sawtooth is a blockchain platform for creating and managing distributed ledgers. Sawtooth includes Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) and a new consensus algorithm that is maintained without a central authority. It was originally proposed by Intel.

Iroha is a business blockchain framework for infrastructure projects that require the use of distributed ledger technology. It includes a chain-based Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus algorithm. Soramitsu, Hitachi, NTT DATA and Colu originally proposed this framework.

Burrow is a smart-contract creator with a permissioned smart-contract interpreter included.

Indy is a distributed ledger with a decentralized identity designed to create independent digital identities between blockchains.

Composer is an open development tool set designed to make it easier to integrate existing business systems with the blockchain.

The cryptocurrency sky fell yesterday as 49 of the top 50 coins (by Market Cap) were down with only Tether (USDT) posting a gain. In fact, only two coins, KuCoin Shares and VeChain, showed losses less than 10 percent and only 12 of the top 50 have lost less than 20 percent of their value.

The effects of the market-wide shock are clear, but explanations vary based on where you get your news. In an effort to make sense of the situation, here are the stories and rationales explaining the systemic drop.

South Korea

Korean leadership this week has been fragmented on the subject of cryptocurrencies, causing a public backlash in a country that has enthusiastically embraced the new asset class.

On January 16, 2018, Yonhap News reported that the Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon stated, “What the justice ministry is going to do is not immediately shut down (exchanges) … As this is a legislative issue, it is not possible to shut them down without going through the National Assembly.”

This seemingly contradicts a radio interview given earlier in the day by Korea’s finance minister, Kim Dong-yeon, who stated in a radio interview with TBS Radio, “The government stance is that it needs to regulate cryptocurrency investment as it is a largely speculative investment … The shutdown of virtual currency exchanges is still one of the options (that the government has).”

The perceived discord from top Korean officials is a carry over from January 11, 2018, reports where Justice Minister Park Sang-ki stated regulators were preparing legislation to halt cryptocurrency trading. Those statements were walked back by the presidential office (The Blue House) later in the day, when a spokesperson relayed that the government has not yet decided on shutting down cryptocurrency exchanges. This statement came a mere seven hours after the Justice Minister’s statements and after a petition to the presidential office gained viral support. This communicative disharmony doesn’t even address the raids on Korean exchanges Coinone and Bithump last week.

Bloomberg (which also cites China as a causal factor), New York Post, MarketWatch, and others have cited the latest actions today by South Korea as an inciting reason for the digital currency market-wide bloodbath.

China Threatens More Bans

Korean Leadership may not be the only source of consternation for the cryptocurrency market. Some media outlets, such as Quartz have pointed towards Korea’s much larger neighbor to the West, China.

China has had a tumultuous history with cryptocurrencies. In the past few months alone, the Central Bank of China banned ICOs in September 2017, followed by a January 2, 2018, leaked memo where the leading internet-finance regulator in the country, the Leading Group of Internet Financial Risks Remediation, called for an orderly exit of crypto-mining operations. The forced exodus of crypto-mining operations, according to TechCrunch, will slowly extinguish a group that is estimated to produce three-quarters of the world’s supply of bitcoin.

The final straw for the China thesis were reports on Monday, January 15, 2018, that the Chinese government is escalating its crackdown to include domestic cryptocurrency trading by planning to block access to online platforms, exchanges, market-makers and mobile application platforms that cater to Chinese citizens.

While Chinese citizens have in the past used VPNs to work around similar blocks to sites such as Google and Facebook, China has been determined to stem capital outflows from the country (and the government has ordered a crackdown of VPN usage starting next month).

Cryptocurrencies have provided the potential for unregulated outflows of capital from the mainland, so it seems that the cryptocurrency facilitators in China may face a different fate than their internet counterparts.

The U.S., Brazilian, Indian, French, German Regulator Effect

Regulation is the name of 2018. If the regulatory issues out of South Korea and China were standalone examples, that may be enough to explain the sell-off. But other regulatory fears may have been increased by a flurry of announcements over the past week:

On January 12, 2018, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin mentioned a working group comprised of multiple federal agencies had been formed to look into how to regulate cryptocurrencies.

That same day, Brazilian regulator CVM banned funds from buying cryptocurrencies.

On January 14, 2018, The Hindustan Times reported the Indian government has formed a committee to fast-track the country toward regulating the domestic cryptocurrency marketplace. In line with previous efforts by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to demonetize lower denominated rupees last year, the committee was formed, according to The Financial Express, based on Indian authorities’ apprehension of illicit money being used to trade cryptocurrencies (colloquially referred to as “black money”).

On January 15, 2018, French Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire announced the creation of a working group with the purpose of regulating cryptocurrencies and appointed Jean-Pierre Landau, the former deputy governor of the Banque de France, to lead the group. Landau wrote an editorial piece for the Financial Times in 2014 titled “Beware the mania for Bitcoin, the tulip of the 21st century.”

Also on January 15, 2018, a board member for Germany’s Central Bank (Bundesbank), Joachim Wuermeling, called for effective regulation of virtual currencies on a global scale.

The Post-FOMO FUD Factor

The cause for the market wide plummet yesterday in cryptocurrencies could simply be a case of FUD (“Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt”) among new investors panic selling in the face of all of these regulatory actions or initiations by major world economies. Or perhaps it is entrenched investors taking regulatory actions as their signal to sell before regulations negatively impact their unrealized profits.

It may be a combination of events and speculation. The news reports differ on what events are emphasized depending on what coverage you look at (and if you look to John McAfee for causation, you’ll note the market drop was all because of J.P. Morgan spiking fears about potential government bans).

Regardless of the cause, the effects are clear. It now remains to be seen whether there will be a rebound or whether the sell-off will gain momentum as we look ahead to a future where regulatory impacts potentially curtail the bull-run the industry blossomed under in 2017.

Qtum is on the move with the announcement of a partnership with Baofeng to begin running 50,000 full Qtum nodes and an upcoming x86 VM to support multiple languages for smart contracts.

Qtum is a hybrid of Bitcoin and Ethereum that is based on proof-of-stake consensus instead of proof of work, and is compatible with existing Ethereum contracts as well as Bitcoin gateways. Supporting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) wasn’t enough for Qtum co-founder Jordan Earls, who has been working on an x86 Virtual Machine for the Qtum system.

Earls comments that a great reason to build a x86 VM is to add more programming language support for smart contracts, his favorite being Rust. The overall list of objectives is much bigger though:

• Programming Language Support
• Standard Library
• Optimized Gas Model
• Unlock the full power of the Account Abstraction Layer (AAL)
• New possibilities for smart contracts
• First-Class Oracles
• Blockchain Analysis
• Alternative Data Storage
• Explicit Dependency Trees

Bitcoin Magazine spoke with Earls with some more in depth questions about some of those items:

Bitcoin Magazine: What proof of concept or scalability testing have you done for the VM?

Jordan Earls: We have a very rough proof of concept we completed a few months ago where we integrated a prototype x86 VM into the Qtum network. This success is what led us to pursue this plan. We are confident that the x86 VM will be more scalable than the EVM, but we are thus far unsure how much. We are designing the VM and all of its APIs and other aspects to be scalable. We are making a big shift in the smart contract world where we actually reward smart-contract developers (in the form of cheaper gas costs) for limiting the features their smart contract has access to, and we are confident it will be faster than current EVM technology.  

Bitcoin Magazine: What are you doing to address the problem with x86 programming in general, where they assume near infinite memory and CPU time being available?

Jordan Earls: We think smart contract development crossed with this x86 paradigm will resemble something similar to real-time or embedded programming, where there are various constraints that developers must always be optimizing for.  

We foresee the same kind of design optimizations happening in the smart contract world as happen in the embedded world, and, for the first time, Qtum’s blockchain will allow for these small optimizations to be directly rewarded for all users of the smart contract.

We know these optimizations are not cheap for smart contract developers to spend their time on, so we need to reward developers for taking such steps to keep the Qtum blockchain running smoothly and efficiently.

Bitcoin Magazine: What are some of the advantages with the Standard Library that will help keep smart contract code tight?

Jordan Earls: Currently in Ethereum, if you want to do a simple operation, like testing if two pieces of text are equal, you need to write your own code to do it.

This is a problem for a number of reasons: Developers in a secure context should rely on existing code that’s been tested and verified, if possible. A naive implementation of this function will be slow, but a more complex and optimized implementation could have security problems. Deploying this code with your contract means another 100 bytes or so of wasted code that every node in the ecosystem now has to worry about.

Qtum will provide a standard library of functions that contract developers can rely on to have reasonable gas costs, secure and validated implementation and an easy to use interface. This means less bloat on the blockchain, easier to write and understand smart contracts and even a faster blockchain (since these functions can be optimized with native code).

Bitcoin Magazine: What about executable size? These x86 programs tend to be quite large.

Jordan Earls: This is true but also misleading. If I write a C program that just prints “hello world,” about 8kB of that is going to just be the number “0.” This is because x86 processors (as well as many others including ARM) benefit from a thing called “alignment.” The important thing for Qtum is that the wasted bytes doing alignment can be discarded without performance impact. This immediately brings down that C program build to ~1-2kB.

We can reduce even more because we don’t need all the baggage required by a standard program for Windows: We have our own “operating system” for smart contracts, so only a dozen or so bytes of actual setup code is wasted.

We have done some actual physical tests with these configurations to compare what an x86 smart contract might look like compared to an EVM smart contract. Our findings indicate that x86 programs are around 10–20 percent smaller than their EVM equivalent and, in many cases, significantly more so. And this was done without the standard library concept that was discussed above. We are not worried about getting usable executable sizes from x86 programs.

Bitcoin Magazine: So the language compiler has to be modified to support the VM? What kinds of modifications?

Jordan Earls: Only minor modifications need to be made. The language compilers do support our x86 VM already, but the Qtum smart contract environment is different from a traditional operating system like Windows or Linux. So, basically, the only big modification we have to make is to tell the language how to communicate with our smart-contract operating system.

Bitcoin Magazine: Is QTUM going to provide language packages or libraries to support the VM so people can just use those?

Jordan Earls: C and C++ will be the first languages we support “out of the box” because they tend to be the easiest due to the way they are designed. We also plan to support Rust. Go should easily be possible. For interpreted languages like Python and Perl, it becomes more complex and we must do research to ensure that they can be supported in an efficient and secure manner.

Bitcoin Magazine: Is this going to impact the development of your eSML smart contract language?

Jordan Earls: We are continuing to research the eSML approach and will decide at a later point if it is still a requirement to achieve our goals. We prefer to not do more work if it won’t have a tangible benefit to our ecosystem.

Helping to support all this growth is the partnership announced on January 4, 2018, with Chinese video portal giant, Baofeng. With the help of Baofeng, the Qtum network will be boosted to 50,000 full network nodes, making it the most decentralized blockchain platform with the largest number of nodes with more than Bitcoin and Ethereum combined. The increased size of the Qtum system should provide for improved security, stability and speed, all of which will provide a solid base for the upcoming x86 VM later this year.

Earls projects that the x86 will be integrated into the Qtum main network in Q3 of 2018 but hopes to have a prototype to test with before Q2.