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Why i’m bullish on Zilliqa (long read)
Edit: TL;DR added in the comments
Hey all, I've been researching coins since 2017 and have gone through 100s of them in the last 3 years. I got introduced to blockchain via Bitcoin of course, analyzed Ethereum thereafter and from that moment I have a keen interest in smart contact platforms. I’m passionate about Ethereum but I find Zilliqa to have a better risk-reward ratio. Especially because Zilliqa has found an elegant balance between being secure, decentralized and scalable in my opinion.
Below I post my analysis of why from all the coins I went through I’m most bullish on Zilliqa (yes I went through Tezos, EOS, NEO, VeChain, Harmony, Algorand, Cardano etc.). Note that this is not investment advice and although it's a thorough analysis there is obviously some bias involved. Looking forward to what you all think!
Fun fact: the name Zilliqa is a play on ‘silica’ silicon dioxide which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”
This post is divided into (i) Technology, (ii) Business & Partnerships, and (iii) Marketing & Community. I’ve tried to make the technology part readable for a broad audience. If you’ve ever tried understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum you should be able to grasp most parts. Otherwise, just skim through and once you are zoning out head to the next part.
Technology and some more:
Introduction
The technology is one of the main reasons why I’m so bullish on Zilliqa. First thing you see on their website is: “Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” These are some bold statements.
Before we deep dive into the technology let’s take a step back in time first as they have quite the history. The initial research paper from which Zilliqa originated dates back to August 2016: Elastico: A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains where Loi Luu (Kyber Network) is one of the co-authors. Other ideas that led to the development of what Zilliqa has become today are: Bitcoin-NG, collective signing CoSi, ByzCoin and Omniledger.
The technical white paper was made public in August 2017 and since then they have achieved everything stated in the white paper and also created their own open source intermediate level smart contract language called Scilla (functional programming language similar to OCaml) too.
Mainnet is live since the end of January 2019 with daily transaction rates growing continuously. About a week ago mainnet reached 5 million transactions, 500.000+ addresses in total along with 2400 nodes keeping the network decentralized and secure. Circulating supply is nearing 11 billion and currently only mining rewards are left. The maximum supply is 21 billion with annual inflation being 7.13% currently and will only decrease with time.
Zilliqa realized early on that the usage of public cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were increasing but decentralized, secure, and scalable alternatives were lacking in the crypto space. They proposed to apply sharding onto a public smart contract blockchain where the transaction rate increases almost linear with the increase in the amount of nodes. More nodes = higher transaction throughput and increased decentralization. Sharding comes in many forms and Zilliqa uses network-, transaction- and computational sharding. Network sharding opens up the possibility of using transaction- and computational sharding on top. Zilliqa does not use state sharding for now. We’ll come back to this later.
Before we continue dissecting how Zilliqa achieves such from a technological standpoint it’s good to keep in mind that a blockchain being decentralised and secure and scalable is still one of the main hurdles in allowing widespread usage of decentralised networks. In my opinion this needs to be solved first before blockchains can get to the point where they can create and add large scale value. So I invite you to read the next section to grasp the underlying fundamentals. Because after all these premises need to be true otherwise there isn’t a fundamental case to be bullish on Zilliqa, right?
Down the rabbit hole
How have they achieved this? Let’s define the basics first: key players on Zilliqa are the users and the miners. A user is anybody who uses the blockchain to transfer funds or run smart contracts. Miners are the (shard) nodes in the network who run the consensus protocol and get rewarded for their service in Zillings (ZIL). The mining network is divided into several smaller networks called shards, which is also referred to as ‘network sharding’. Miners subsequently are randomly assigned to a shard by another set of miners called DS (Directory Service) nodes. The regular shards process transactions and the outputs of these shards are eventually combined by the DS shard as they reach consensus on the final state. More on how these DS shards reach consensus (via pBFT) will be explained later on.
The Zilliqa network produces two types of blocks: DS blocks and Tx blocks. One DS Block consists of 100 Tx Blocks. And as previously mentioned there are two types of nodes concerned with reaching consensus: shard nodes and DS nodes. Becoming a shard node or DS node is being defined by the result of a PoW cycle (Ethash) at the beginning of the DS Block. All candidate mining nodes compete with each other and run the PoW (Proof-of-Work) cycle for 60 seconds and the submissions achieving the highest difficulty will be allowed on the network. And to put it in perspective: the average difficulty for one DS node is ~ 2 Th/s equaling 2.000.000 Mh/s or 55 thousand+ GeForce GTX 1070 / 8 GB GPUs at 35.4 Mh/s. Each DS Block 10 new DS nodes are allowed. And a shard node needs to provide around 8.53 GH/s currently (around 240 GTX 1070s). Dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL is possible and can be done via mining software such as Phoenix and Claymore. There are pools and if you have large amounts of hashing power (Ethash) available you could mine solo.
The PoW cycle of 60 seconds is a peak performance and acts as an entry ticket to the network. The entry ticket is called a sybil resistance mechanism and makes it incredibly hard for adversaries to spawn lots of identities and manipulate the network with these identities. And after every 100 Tx Blocks which corresponds to roughly 1,5 hour this PoW process repeats. In between these 1,5 hour, no PoW needs to be done meaning Zilliqa’s energy consumption to keep the network secure is low. For more detailed information on how mining works click here. Okay, hats off to you. You have made it this far. Before we go any deeper down the rabbit hole we first must understand why Zilliqa goes through all of the above technicalities and understand a bit more what a blockchain on a more fundamental level is. Because the core of Zilliqa’s consensus protocol relies on the usage of pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) we need to know more about state machines and their function. Navigate to Viewblock, a Zilliqa block explorer, and just come back to this article. We will use this site to navigate through a few concepts.
We have established that Zilliqa is a public and distributed blockchain. Meaning that everyone with an internet connection can send ZILs, trigger smart contracts, etc. and there is no central authority who fully controls the network. Zilliqa and other public and distributed blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) can also be defined as state machines.
Taking the liberty of paraphrasing examples and definitions given by Samuel Brooks’ medium article, he describes the definition of a blockchain (like Zilliqa) as: “A peer-to-peer, append-only datastore that uses consensus to synchronize cryptographically-secure data”.
Next, he states that: "blockchains are fundamentally systems for managing valid state transitions”. For some more context, I recommend reading the whole medium article to get a better grasp of the definitions and understanding of state machines. Nevertheless, let’s try to simplify and compile it into a single paragraph. Take traffic lights as an example: all its states (red, amber, and green) are predefined, all possible outcomes are known and it doesn’t matter if you encounter the traffic light today or tomorrow. It will still behave the same. Managing the states of a traffic light can be done by triggering a sensor on the road or pushing a button resulting in one traffic lights’ state going from green to red (via amber) and another light from red to green.
With public blockchains like Zilliqa, this isn’t so straightforward and simple. It started with block #1 almost 1,5 years ago and every 45 seconds or so a new block linked to the previous block is being added. Resulting in a chain of blocks with transactions in it that everyone can verify from block #1 to the current #647.000+ block. The state is ever changing and the states it can find itself in are infinite. And while the traffic light might work together in tandem with various other traffic lights, it’s rather insignificant comparing it to a public blockchain. Because Zilliqa consists of 2400 nodes who need to work together to achieve consensus on what the latest valid state is while some of these nodes may have latency or broadcast issues, drop offline or are deliberately trying to attack the network, etc.
Now go back to the Viewblock page take a look at the amount of transaction, addresses, block and DS height and then hit refresh. Obviously as expected you see new incremented values on one or all parameters. And how did the Zilliqa blockchain manage to transition from a previous valid state to the latest valid state? By using pBFT to reach consensus on the latest valid state.
After having obtained the entry ticket, miners execute pBFT to reach consensus on the ever-changing state of the blockchain. pBFT requires a series of network communication between nodes, and as such there is no GPU involved (but CPU). Resulting in the total energy consumed to keep the blockchain secure, decentralized and scalable being low.
pBFT stands for practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and is an optimization on the Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. To quote Blockonomi: “In the context of distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the ability of a distributed computer network to function as desired and correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious components (nodes) of the system failing or propagating incorrect information to other peers.” Zilliqa is such a distributed computer network and depends on the honesty of the nodes (shard and DS) to reach consensus and to continuously update the state with the latest block. If pBFT is a new term for you I can highly recommend the Blockonomi article.
The idea of pBFT was introduced in 1999 - one of the authors even won a Turing award for it - and it is well researched and applied in various blockchains and distributed systems nowadays. If you want more advanced information than the Blockonomi link provides click here. And if you’re in between Blockonomi and the University of Singapore read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 2 dating from October 2017. Quoting from the Zilliqa tech whitepaper: “pBFT relies upon a correct leader (which is randomly selected) to begin each phase and proceed when the sufficient majority exists. In case the leader is byzantine it can stall the entire consensus protocol. To address this challenge, pBFT offers a view change protocol to replace the byzantine leader with another one.”
pBFT can tolerate ⅓ of the nodes being dishonest (offline counts as Byzantine = dishonest) and the consensus protocol will function without stalling or hiccups. Once there are more than ⅓ of dishonest nodes but no more than ⅔ the network will be stalled and a view change will be triggered to elect a new DS leader. Only when more than ⅔ of the nodes are dishonest (66%) double-spend attacks become possible.
If the network stalls no transactions can be processed and one has to wait until a new honest leader has been elected. When the mainnet was just launched and in its early phases, view changes happened regularly. As of today the last stalling of the network - and view change being triggered - was at the end of October 2019.
Another benefit of using pBFT for consensus besides low energy is the immediate finality it provides. Once your transaction is included in a block and the block is added to the chain it’s done. Lastly, take a look at this article where three types of finality are being defined: probabilistic, absolute and economic finality. Zilliqa falls under the absolute finality (just like Tendermint for example). Although lengthy already we skipped through some of the inner workings from Zilliqa’s consensus: read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 3 and you will be close to having a complete picture on it. Enough about PoW, sybil resistance mechanism, pBFT, etc. Another thing we haven’t looked at yet is the amount of decentralization.
Decentralisation
Currently, there are four shards, each one of them consisting of 600 nodes. 1 shard with 600 so-called DS nodes (Directory Service - they need to achieve a higher difficulty than shard nodes) and 1800 shard nodes of which 250 are shard guards (centralized nodes controlled by the team). The amount of shard guards has been steadily declining from 1200 in January 2019 to 250 as of May 2020. On the Viewblock statistics, you can see that many of the nodes are being located in the US but those are only the (CPU parts of the) shard nodes who perform pBFT. There is no data from where the PoW sources are coming. And when the Zilliqa blockchain starts reaching its transaction capacity limit, a network upgrade needs to be executed to lift the current cap of maximum 2400 nodes to allow more nodes and formation of more shards which will allow to network to keep on scaling according to demand. Besides shard nodes there are also seed nodes. The main role of seed nodes is to serve as direct access points (for end-users and clients) to the core Zilliqa network that validates transactions. Seed nodes consolidate transaction requests and forward these to the lookup nodes (another type of nodes) for distribution to the shards in the network. Seed nodes also maintain the entire transaction history and the global state of the blockchain which is needed to provide services such as block explorers. Seed nodes in the Zilliqa network are comparable to Infura on Ethereum.
The seed nodes were first only operated by Zilliqa themselves, exchanges and Viewblock. Operators of seed nodes like exchanges had no incentive to open them for the greater public. They were centralised at first. Decentralisation at the seed nodes level has been steadily rolled out since March 2020 ( Zilliqa Improvement Proposal 3 ). Currently the amount of seed nodes is being increased, they are public-facing and at the same time PoS is applied to incentivize seed node operators and make it possible for ZIL holders to stake and earn passive yields. Important distinction: seed nodes are not involved with consensus! That is still PoW as entry ticket and pBFT for the actual consensus.
5% of the block rewards are being assigned to seed nodes (from the beginning in 2019) and those are being used to pay out ZIL stakers. The 5% block rewards with an annual yield of 10.03% translate to roughly 610 MM ZILs in total that can be staked. Exchanges use the custodial variant of staking and wallets like Moonlet will use the non-custodial version (starting in Q3 2020). Staking is being done by sending ZILs to a smart contract created by Zilliqa and audited by Quantstamp.
With a high amount of DS; shard nodes and seed nodes becoming more decentralized too, Zilliqa qualifies for the label of decentralized in my opinion.
Smart contracts
Let me start by saying I’m not a developer and my programming skills are quite limited. So I‘m taking the ELI5 route (maybe 12) but if you are familiar with Javascript, Solidity or specifically OCaml please head straight to Scilla - read the docs to get a good initial grasp of how Zilliqa’s smart contract language Scilla works and if you ask yourself “why another programming language?” check this article. And if you want to play around with some sample contracts in an IDE click here. The faucet can be found here. And more information on architecture, dapp development and API can be found on the Developer Portal. If you are more into listening and watching: check this recent webinar explaining Zilliqa and Scilla. Link is time-stamped so you’ll start right away with a platform introduction, roadmap 2020 and afterwards a proper Scilla introduction.
Generalized: programming languages can be divided into being ‘object-oriented’ or ‘functional’. Here is an ELI5 given by software development academy: * “all programs have two basic components, data – what the program knows – and behavior – what the program can do with that data. So object-oriented programming states that combining data and related behaviors in one place, is called “object”, which makes it easier to understand how a particular program works. On the other hand, functional programming argues that data and behavior are different things and should be separated to ensure their clarity.” *
Scilla is on the functional side and shares similarities with OCaml: OCaml is a general-purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. It has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. For all its power, OCaml is also pretty simple, which is one reason it's often used as a teaching language.
Scilla is blockchain agnostic, can be implemented onto other blockchains as well, is recognized by academics and won a so-called Distinguished Artifact Award award at the end of last year.
One of the reasons why the Zilliqa team decided to create their own programming language focused on preventing smart contract vulnerabilities is that adding logic on a blockchain, programming, means that you cannot afford to make mistakes. Otherwise, it could cost you. It’s all great and fun blockchains being immutable but updating your code because you found a bug isn’t the same as with a regular web application for example. And with smart contracts, it inherently involves cryptocurrencies in some form thus value.
Another difference with programming languages on a blockchain is gas. Every transaction you do on a smart contract platform like Zilliqa or Ethereum costs gas. With gas you basically pay for computational costs. Sending a ZIL from address A to address B costs 0.001 ZIL currently. Smart contracts are more complex, often involve various functions and require more gas (if gas is a new concept click here ).
So with Scilla, similar to Solidity, you need to make sure that “every function in your smart contract will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed due to gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems”.Scilla design story part 1
Some examples of smart contract issues you’d want to avoid are: leaking funds, ‘unexpected changes to critical state variables’ (example: someone other than you setting his or her address as the owner of the smart contract after creation) or simply killing a contract.
Scilla also allows for formal verification. Wikipedia to the rescue: In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.
“Scilla is being developed hand-in-hand with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into the Coq proof assistant — a state-of-the art tool for mechanized proofs about properties of programs.”
Simply put, with Scilla and accompanying tooling developers can be mathematically sure and proof that the smart contract they’ve written does what he or she intends it to do.
Smart contract on a sharded environment and state sharding
There is one more topic I’d like to touch on: smart contract execution in a sharded environment (and what is the effect of state sharding). This is a complex topic. I’m not able to explain it any easier than what is posted here. But I will try to compress the post into something easy to digest.
Earlier on we have established that Zilliqa can process transactions in parallel due to network sharding. This is where the linear scalability comes from. We can define simple transactions: a transaction from address A to B (Category 1), a transaction where a user interacts with one smart contract (Category 2) and the most complex ones where triggering a transaction results in multiple smart contracts being involved (Category 3). The shards are able to process transactions on their own without interference of the other shards. With Category 1 transactions that is doable, with Category 2 transactions sometimes if that address is in the same shard as the smart contract but with Category 3 you definitely need communication between the shards. Solving that requires to make a set of communication rules the protocol needs to follow in order to process all transactions in a generalised fashion.
There is no strict defined roadmap but here are topics being worked on. And via the Zilliqa website there is also more information on the projects they are working on.
Business & Partnerships
It’s not only technology in which Zilliqa seems to be excelling as their ecosystem has been expanding and starting to grow rapidly. The project is on a mission to provide OpenFinance (OpFi) to the world and Singapore is the right place to be due to its progressive regulations and futuristic thinking. Singapore has taken a proactive approach towards cryptocurrencies by introducing the Payment Services Act 2019 (PS Act). Among other things, the PS Act will regulate intermediaries dealing with certain cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on consumer protection and anti-money laundering. It will also provide a stable regulatory licensing and operating framework for cryptocurrency entities, effectively covering all crypto businesses and exchanges based in Singapore. According to PWC 82% of the surveyed executives in Singapore reported blockchain initiatives underway and 13% of them have already brought the initiatives live to the market. There is also an increasing list of organizations that are starting to provide digital payment services. Moreover, Singaporean blockchain developers Building Cities Beyond has recently created an innovation $15 million grant to encourage development on its ecosystem. This all suggests that Singapore tries to position itself as (one of) the leading blockchain hubs in the world.
Zilliqa seems to already take advantage of this and recently helped launch Hg Exchange on their platform, together with financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners and Fundnel. Hg Exchange, which is now approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), uses smart contracts to represent digital assets. Through Hg Exchange financial institutions worldwide can use Zilliqa's safe-by-design smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities. For example, think of companies such as Grab, Airbnb, SpaceX that are not available for public trading right now. Hg Exchange will allow investors to buy shares of private companies & unicorns and capture their value before an IPO. Anquan, the main company behind Zilliqa, has also recently announced that they became a partner and shareholder in TEN31 Bank, which is a fully regulated bank allowing for tokenization of assets and is aiming to bridge the gap between conventional banking and the blockchain world. If STOs, the tokenization of assets, and equity trading will continue to increase, then Zilliqa’s public blockchain would be the ideal candidate due to its strategic positioning, partnerships, regulatory compliance and the technology that is being built on top of it.
What is also very encouraging is their focus on banking the un(der)banked. They are launching a stablecoin basket starting with XSGD. As many of you know, stablecoins are currently mostly used for trading. However, Zilliqa is actively trying to broaden the use case of stablecoins. I recommend everybody to read this text that Amrit Kumar wrote (one of the co-founders). These stablecoins will be integrated in the traditional markets and bridge the gap between the crypto world and the traditional world. This could potentially revolutionize and legitimise the crypto space if retailers and companies will for example start to use stablecoins for payments or remittances, instead of it solely being used for trading.
Zilliqa also released their DeFi strategic roadmap (dating November 2019) which seems to be aligning well with their OpFi strategy. A non-custodial DEX is coming to Zilliqa made by Switcheo which allows cross-chain trading (atomic swaps) between ETH, EOS and ZIL based tokens. They also signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a (soon to be announced) USD stablecoin. And as Zilliqa is all about regulations and being compliant, I’m speculating on it to be a regulated USD stablecoin. Furthermore, XSGD is already created and visible on block explorer and XIDR (Indonesian Stablecoin) is also coming soon via StraitsX. Here also an overview of the Tech Stack for Financial Applications from September 2019. Further quoting Amrit Kumar on this:
There are two basic building blocks in DeFi/OpFi though: 1) stablecoins as you need a non-volatile currency to get access to this market and 2) a dex to be able to trade all these financial assets. The rest are built on top of these blocks.
So far, together with our partners and community, we have worked on developing these building blocks with XSGD as a stablecoin. We are working on bringing a USD-backed stablecoin as well. We will soon have a decentralised exchange developed by Switcheo. And with HGX going live, we are also venturing into the tokenization space. More to come in the future.”
Additionally, they also have this ZILHive initiative that injects capital into projects. There have been already 6 waves of various teams working on infrastructure, innovation and research, and they are not from ASEAN or Singapore only but global: see Grantees breakdown by country. Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa's ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, etc. As some of you may know, Unstoppable Domains (UD) blew up when they launched on Zilliqa. UD aims to replace cryptocurrency addresses with a human-readable name and allows for uncensorable websites. Zilliqa will probably be the only one able to handle all these transactions onchain due to ability to scale and its resulting low fees which is why the UD team launched this on Zilliqa in the first place. Furthermore, Zilliqa also has a strong emphasis on security, compliance, and privacy, which is why they partnered with companies like Elliptic, ChainSecurity (part of PwC Switzerland), and Incognito. Their sister company Aqilliz (Zilliqa spelled backwards) focuses on revolutionizing the digital advertising space and is doing interesting things like using Zilliqa to track outdoor digital ads with companies like Foodpanda.
Zilliqa is listed on nearly all major exchanges, having several different fiat-gateways and recently have been added to Binance’s margin trading and futures trading with really good volume. They also have a very impressive team with good credentials and experience. They don't just have “tech people”. They have a mix of tech people, business people, marketeers, scientists, and more. Naturally, it's good to have a mix of people with different skill sets if you work in the crypto space.
Marketing & Community
Zilliqa has a very strong community. If you just follow their Twitter their engagement is much higher for a coin that has approximately 80k followers. They also have been ‘coin of the day’ by LunarCrush many times. LunarCrush tracks real-time cryptocurrency value and social data. According to their data, it seems Zilliqa has a more fundamental and deeper understanding of marketing and community engagement than almost all other coins. While almost all coins have been a bit frozen in the last months, Zilliqa seems to be on its own bull run. It was somewhere in the 100s a few months ago and is currently ranked #46 on CoinGecko. Their official Telegram also has over 20k people and is very active, and their community channel which is over 7k now is more active and larger than many other official channels. Their local communities also seem to be growing.
Moreover, their community started ‘Zillacracy’ together with the Zilliqa core team ( see www.zillacracy.com ). It’s a community-run initiative where people from all over the world are now helping with marketing and development on Zilliqa. Since its launch in February 2020 they have been doing a lot and will also run their own non-custodial seed node for staking. This seed node will also allow them to start generating revenue for them to become a self sustaining entity that could potentially scale up to become a decentralized company working in parallel with the Zilliqa core team. Comparing it to all the other smart contract platforms (e.g. Cardano, EOS, Tezos etc.) they don't seem to have started a similar initiative (correct me if I’m wrong though). This suggests in my opinion that these other smart contract platforms do not fully understand how to utilize the ‘power of the community’. This is something you cannot ‘buy with money’ and gives many projects in the space a disadvantage.
Zilliqa also released two social products called SocialPay and Zeeves. SocialPay allows users to earn ZILs while tweeting with a specific hashtag. They have recently used it in partnership with the Singapore Red Cross for a marketing campaign after their initial pilot program. It seems like a very valuable social product with a good use case. I can see a lot of traditional companies entering the space through this product, which they seem to suggest will happen. Tokenizing hashtags with smart contracts to get network effect is a very smart and innovative idea.
Regarding Zeeves, this is a tipping bot for Telegram. They already have 1000s of signups and they plan to keep upgrading it for more and more people to use it (e.g. they recently have added a quiz features). They also use it during AMAs to reward people in real-time. It’s a very smart approach to grow their communities and get familiar with ZIL. I can see this becoming very big on Telegram. This tool suggests, again, that the Zilliqa team has a deeper understanding of what the crypto space and community needs and is good at finding the right innovative tools to grow and scale.
To be honest, I haven’t covered everything (i’m also reaching the character limited haha). So many updates happening lately that it's hard to keep up, such as the International Monetary Fund mentioning Zilliqa in their report, custodial and non-custodial Staking, Binance Margin, Futures, Widget, entering the Indian market, and more. The Head of Marketing Colin Miles has also released this as an overview of what is coming next. And last but not least, Vitalik Buterin has been mentioning Zilliqa lately acknowledging Zilliqa and mentioning that both projects have a lot of room to grow. There is much more info of course and a good part of it has been served to you on a silver platter. I invite you to continue researching by yourself :-) And if you have any comments or questions please post here!
Hey all, I've been researching coins since 2017 and have gone through 100s of them in the last 3 years. I got introduced to blockchain via Bitcoin of course, analysed Ethereum thereafter and from that moment I have a keen interest in smart contact platforms. I’m passionate about Ethereum but I find Zilliqa to have a better risk reward ratio. Especially because Zilliqa has found an elegant balance between being secure, decentralised and scalable in my opinion.
Below I post my analysis why from all the coins I went through I’m most bullish on Zilliqa (yes I went through Tezos, EOS, NEO, VeChain, Harmony, Algorand, Cardano etc.). Note that this is not investment advice and although it's a thorough analysis there is obviously some bias involved. Looking forward to what you all think!
Fun fact: the name Zilliqa is a play on ‘silica’ silicon dioxide which means “Silicon for the high-throughput consensus computer.”
This post is divided into (i) Technology, (ii) Business & Partnerships, and (iii) Marketing & Community. I’ve tried to make the technology part readable for a broad audience. If you’ve ever tried understanding the inner workings of Bitcoin and Ethereum you should be able to grasp most parts. Otherwise just skim through and once you are zoning out head to the next part.
Technology and some more:
Introduction The technology is one of the main reasons why I’m so bullish on Zilliqa. First thing you see on their website is: “Zilliqa is a high-performance, high-security blockchain platform for enterprises and next-generation applications.” These are some bold statements.
Before we deep dive into the technology let’s take a step back in time first as they have quite the history. The initial research paper from which Zilliqa originated dates back to August 2016: Elastico: A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains where Loi Luu (Kyber Network) is one of the co-authors. Other ideas that led to the development of what Zilliqa has become today are: Bitcoin-NG, collective signing CoSi, ByzCoin and Omniledger.
The technical white paper was made public in August 2017 and since then they have achieved everything stated in the white paper and also created their own open source intermediate level smart contract language called Scilla (functional programming language similar to OCaml) too.
Mainnet is live since end of January 2019 with daily transaction rate growing continuously. About a week ago mainnet reached 5 million transactions, 500.000+ addresses in total along with 2400 nodes keeping the network decentralised and secure. Circulating supply is nearing 11 billion and currently only mining rewards are left. Maximum supply is 21 billion with annual inflation being 7.13% currently and will only decrease with time.
Zilliqa realised early on that the usage of public cryptocurrencies and smart contracts were increasing but decentralised, secure and scalable alternatives were lacking in the crypto space. They proposed to apply sharding onto a public smart contract blockchain where the transaction rate increases almost linear with the increase in amount of nodes. More nodes = higher transaction throughput and increased decentralisation. Sharding comes in many forms and Zilliqa uses network-, transaction- and computational sharding. Network sharding opens up the possibility of using transaction- and computational sharding on top. Zilliqa does not use state sharding for now. We’ll come back to this later.
Before we continue disecting how Zilliqa achieves such from a technological standpoint it’s good to keep in mind that a blockchain being decentralised and secure and scalable is still one of the main hurdles in allowing widespread usage of decentralised networks. In my opinion this needs to be solved first before blockchains can get to the point where they can create and add large scale value. So I invite you to read the next section to grasp the underlying fundamentals. Because after all these premises need to be true otherwise there isn’t a fundamental case to be bullish on Zilliqa, right?
Down the rabbit hole
How have they achieved this? Let’s define the basics first: key players on Zilliqa are the users and the miners. A user is anybody who uses the blockchain to transfer funds or run smart contracts. Miners are the (shard) nodes in the network who run the consensus protocol and get rewarded for their service in Zillings (ZIL). The mining network is divided into several smaller networks called shards, which is also referred to as ‘network sharding’. Miners subsequently are randomly assigned to a shard by another set of miners called DS (Directory Service) nodes. The regular shards process transactions and the outputs of these shards are eventually combined by the DS shard as they reach consensus on the final state. More on how these DS shards reach consensus (via pBFT) will be explained later on.
The Zilliqa network produces two types of blocks: DS blocks and Tx blocks. One DS Block consists of 100 Tx Blocks. And as previously mentioned there are two types of nodes concerned with reaching consensus: shard nodes and DS nodes. Becoming a shard node or DS node is being defined by the result of a PoW cycle (Ethash) at the beginning of the DS Block. All candidate mining nodes compete with each other and run the PoW (Proof-of-Work) cycle for 60 seconds and the submissions achieving the highest difficulty will be allowed on the network. And to put it in perspective: the average difficulty for one DS node is ~ 2 Th/s equaling 2.000.000 Mh/s or 55 thousand+ GeForce GTX 1070 / 8 GB GPUs at 35.4 Mh/s. Each DS Block 10 new DS nodes are allowed. And a shard node needs to provide around 8.53 GH/s currently (around 240 GTX 1070s). Dual mining ETH/ETC and ZIL is possible and can be done via mining software such as Phoenix and Claymore. There are pools and if you have large amounts of hashing power (Ethash) available you could mine solo.
The PoW cycle of 60 seconds is a peak performance and acts as an entry ticket to the network. The entry ticket is called a sybil resistance mechanism and makes it incredibly hard for adversaries to spawn lots of identities and manipulate the network with these identities. And after every 100 Tx Blocks which corresponds to roughly 1,5 hour this PoW process repeats. In between these 1,5 hour no PoW needs to be done meaning Zilliqa’s energy consumption to keep the network secure is low. For more detailed information on how mining works click here. Okay, hats off to you. You have made it this far. Before we go any deeper down the rabbit hole we first must understand why Zilliqa goes through all of the above technicalities and understand a bit more what a blockchain on a more fundamental level is. Because the core of Zilliqa’s consensus protocol relies on the usage of pBFT (practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance) we need to know more about state machines and their function. Navigate to Viewblock, a Zilliqa block explorer, and just come back to this article. We will use this site to navigate through a few concepts.
We have established that Zilliqa is a public and distributed blockchain. Meaning that everyone with an internet connection can send ZILs, trigger smart contracts etc. and there is no central authority who fully controls the network. Zilliqa and other public and distributed blockchains (like Bitcoin and Ethereum) can also be defined as state machines.
Taking the liberty of paraphrasing examples and definitions given by Samuel Brooks’ medium article, he describes the definition of a blockchain (like Zilliqa) as:
“A peer-to-peer, append-only datastore that uses consensus to synchronise cryptographically-secure data”.
Next he states that: >“blockchains are fundamentally systems for managing valid state transitions”.* For some more context, I recommend reading the whole medium article to get a better grasp of the definitions and understanding of state machines. Nevertheless, let’s try to simplify and compile it into a single paragraph. Take traffic lights as an example: all its states (red, amber and green) are predefined, all possible outcomes are known and it doesn’t matter if you encounter the traffic light today or tomorrow. It will still behave the same. Managing the states of a traffic light can be done by triggering a sensor on the road or pushing a button resulting in one traffic lights’ state going from green to red (via amber) and another light from red to green.
With public blockchains like Zilliqa this isn’t so straightforward and simple. It started with block #1 almost 1,5 years ago and every 45 seconds or so a new block linked to the previous block is being added. Resulting in a chain of blocks with transactions in it that everyone can verify from block #1 to the current #647.000+ block. The state is ever changing and the states it can find itself in are infinite. And while the traffic light might work together in tandem with various other traffic lights, it’s rather insignificant comparing it to a public blockchain. Because Zilliqa consists of 2400 nodes who need to work together to achieve consensus on what the latest valid state is while some of these nodes may have latency or broadcast issues, drop offline or are deliberately trying to attack the network etc.
Now go back to the Viewblock page take a look at the amount of transaction, addresses, block and DS height and then hit refresh. Obviously as expected you see new incremented values on one or all parameters. And how did the Zilliqa blockchain manage to transition from a previous valid state to the latest valid state? By using pBFT to reach consensus on the latest valid state.
After having obtained the entry ticket, miners execute pBFT to reach consensus on the ever changing state of the blockchain. pBFT requires a series of network communication between nodes, and as such there is no GPU involved (but CPU). Resulting in the total energy consumed to keep the blockchain secure, decentralised and scalable being low.
pBFT stands for practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance and is an optimisation on the Byzantine Fault Tolerant algorithm. To quote Blockonomi: “In the context of distributed systems, Byzantine Fault Tolerance is the ability of a distributed computer network to function as desired and correctly reach a sufficient consensus despite malicious components (nodes) of the system failing or propagating incorrect information to other peers.” Zilliqa is such a distributed computer network and depends on the honesty of the nodes (shard and DS) to reach consensus and to continuously update the state with the latest block. If pBFT is a new term for you I can highly recommend the Blockonomi article.
The idea of pBFT was introduced in 1999 - one of the authors even won a Turing award for it - and it is well researched and applied in various blockchains and distributed systems nowadays. If you want more advanced information than the Blockonomi link provides click here. And if you’re in between Blockonomi and University of Singapore read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 2 dating from October 2017. Quoting from the Zilliqa tech whitepaper: “pBFT relies upon a correct leader (which is randomly selected) to begin each phase and proceed when the sufficient majority exists. In case the leader is byzantine it can stall the entire consensus protocol. To address this challenge, pBFT offers a view change protocol to replace the byzantine leader with another one.”
pBFT can tolerate ⅓ of the nodes being dishonest (offline counts as Byzantine = dishonest) and the consensus protocol will function without stalling or hiccups. Once there are more than ⅓ of dishonest nodes but no more than ⅔ the network will be stalled and a view change will be triggered to elect a new DS leader. Only when more than ⅔ of the nodes are dishonest (>66%) double spend attacks become possible.
If the network stalls no transactions can be processed and one has to wait until a new honest leader has been elected. When the mainnet was just launched and in its early phases, view changes happened regularly. As of today the last stalling of the network - and view change being triggered - was at the end of October 2019.
Another benefit of using pBFT for consensus besides low energy is the immediate finality it provides. Once your transaction is included in a block and the block is added to the chain it’s done. Lastly, take a look at this article where three types of finality are being defined: probabilistic, absolute and economic finality. Zilliqa falls under the absolute finality (just like Tendermint for example). Although lengthy already we skipped through some of the inner workings from Zilliqa’s consensus: read the Zilliqa Design Story Part 3 and you will be close to having a complete picture on it. Enough about PoW, sybil resistance mechanism, pBFT etc. Another thing we haven’t looked at yet is the amount of decentralisation.
Decentralisation
Currently there are four shards, each one of them consisting of 600 nodes. 1 shard with 600 so called DS nodes (Directory Service - they need to achieve a higher difficulty than shard nodes) and 1800 shard nodes of which 250 are shard guards (centralised nodes controlled by the team). The amount of shard guards has been steadily declining from 1200 in January 2019 to 250 as of May 2020. On the Viewblock statistics you can see that many of the nodes are being located in the US but those are only the (CPU parts of the) shard nodes who perform pBFT. There is no data from where the PoW sources are coming. And when the Zilliqa blockchain starts reaching their transaction capacity limit, a network upgrade needs to be executed to lift the current cap of maximum 2400 nodes to allow more nodes and formation of more shards which will allow to network to keep on scaling according to demand. Besides shard nodes there are also seed nodes. The main role of seed nodes is to serve as direct access points (for end users and clients) to the core Zilliqa network that validates transactions. Seed nodes consolidate transaction requests and forward these to the lookup nodes (another type of nodes) for distribution to the shards in the network. Seed nodes also maintain the entire transaction history and the global state of the blockchain which is needed to provide services such as block explorers. Seed nodes in the Zilliqa network are comparable to Infura on Ethereum.
The seed nodes were first only operated by Zilliqa themselves, exchanges and Viewblock. Operators of seed nodes like exchanges had no incentive to open them for the greater public.They were centralised at first. Decentralisation at the seed nodes level has been steadily rolled out since March 2020 ( Zilliqa Improvement Proposal 3 ). Currently the amount of seed nodes is being increased, they are public facing and at the same time PoS is applied to incentivize seed node operators and make it possible for ZIL holders to stake and earn passive yields. Important distinction: seed nodes are not involved with consensus! That is still PoW as entry ticket and pBFT for the actual consensus.
5% of the block rewards are being assigned to seed nodes (from the beginning in 2019) and those are being used to pay out ZIL stakers.The 5% block rewards with an annual yield of 10.03% translates to roughly 610 MM ZILs in total that can be staked. Exchanges use the custodial variant of staking and wallets like Moonlet will use the non custodial version (starting in Q3 2020). Staking is being done by sending ZILs to a smart contract created by Zilliqa and audited by Quantstamp.
With a high amount of DS & shard nodes and seed nodes becoming more decentralised too, Zilliqa qualifies for the label of decentralised in my opinion.
Smart contracts
Let me start by saying I’m not a developer and my programming skills are quite limited. So I‘m taking the ELI5 route (maybe 12) but if you are familiar with Javascript, Solidity or specifically OCaml please head straight to Scilla - read the docs to get a good initial grasp of how Zilliqa’s smart contract language Scilla works and if you ask yourself “why another programming language?” check this article. And if you want to play around with some sample contracts in an IDE click here. Faucet can be found here. And more information on architecture, dapp development and API can be found on the Developer Portal. If you are more into listening and watching: check this recent webinar explaining Zilliqa and Scilla. Link is time stamped so you’ll start right away with a platform introduction, R&D roadmap 2020 and afterwards a proper Scilla introduction.
Generalised: programming languages can be divided into being ‘object oriented’ or ‘functional’. Here is an ELI5 given by software development academy: > “all programmes have two basic components, data – what the programme knows – and behaviour – what the programme can do with that data. So object-oriented programming states that combining data and related behaviours in one place, is called “object”, which makes it easier to understand how a particular program works. On the other hand, functional programming argues that data and behaviour are different things and should be separated to ensure their clarity.”
Scilla is on the functional side and shares similarities with OCaml: > OCaml is a general purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. It has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. For all its power, OCaml is also pretty simple, which is one reason it's often used as a teaching language.
Scilla is blockchain agnostic, can be implemented onto other blockchains as well, is recognised by academics and won a so called Distinguished Artifact Award award at the end of last year.
One of the reasons why the Zilliqa team decided to create their own programming language focused on preventing smart contract vulnerabilities safety is that adding logic on a blockchain, programming, means that you cannot afford to make mistakes. Otherwise it could cost you. It’s all great and fun blockchains being immutable but updating your code because you found a bug isn’t the same as with a regular web application for example. And with smart contracts it inherently involves cryptocurrencies in some form thus value.
Another difference with programming languages on a blockchain is gas. Every transaction you do on a smart contract platform like Zilliqa for Ethereum costs gas. With gas you basically pay for computational costs. Sending a ZIL from address A to address B costs 0.001 ZIL currently. Smart contracts are more complex, often involve various functions and require more gas (if gas is a new concept click here ).
So with Scilla, similar to Solidity, you need to make sure that “every function in your smart contract will run as expected without hitting gas limits. An improper resource analysis may lead to situations where funds may get stuck simply because a part of the smart contract code cannot be executed due to gas limits. Such constraints are not present in traditional software systems”.Scilla design story part 1
Some examples of smart contract issues you’d want to avoid are: leaking funds, ‘unexpected changes to critical state variables’ (example: someone other than you setting his or her address as the owner of the smart contract after creation) or simply killing a contract.
Scilla also allows for formal verification. Wikipedia to the rescue:
In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of intended algorithms underlying a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics.
Formal verification can be helpful in proving the correctness of systems such as: cryptographic protocols, combinational circuits, digital circuits with internal memory, and software expressed as source code.
“Scilla is being developed hand-in-hand with formalization of its semantics and its embedding into the Coq proof assistant — a state-of-the art tool for mechanized proofs about properties of programs.”
Simply put, with Scilla and accompanying tooling developers can be mathematically sure and proof that the smart contract they’ve written does what he or she intends it to do.
Smart contract on a sharded environment and state sharding
There is one more topic I’d like to touch on: smart contract execution in a sharded environment (and what is the effect of state sharding). This is a complex topic. I’m not able to explain it any easier than what is posted here. But I will try to compress the post into something easy to digest.
Earlier on we have established that Zilliqa can process transactions in parallel due to network sharding. This is where the linear scalability comes from. We can define simple transactions: a transaction from address A to B (Category 1), a transaction where a user interacts with one smart contract (Category 2) and the most complex ones where triggering a transaction results in multiple smart contracts being involved (Category 3). The shards are able to process transactions on their own without interference of the other shards. With Category 1 transactions that is doable, with Category 2 transactions sometimes if that address is in the same shard as the smart contract but with Category 3 you definitely need communication between the shards. Solving that requires to make a set of communication rules the protocol needs to follow in order to process all transactions in a generalised fashion.
There is no strict defined roadmap but here are topics being worked on. And via the Zilliqa website there is also more information on the projects they are working on.
Business & Partnerships It’s not only technology in which Zilliqa seems to be excelling as their ecosystem has been expanding and starting to grow rapidly. The project is on a mission to provide OpenFinance (OpFi) to the world and Singapore is the right place to be due to its progressive regulations and futuristic thinking. Singapore has taken a proactive approach towards cryptocurrencies by introducing the Payment Services Act 2019 (PS Act). Among other things, the PS Act will regulate intermediaries dealing with certain cryptocurrencies, with a particular focus on consumer protection and anti-money laundering. It will also provide a stable regulatory licensing and operating framework for cryptocurrency entities, effectively covering all crypto businesses and exchanges based in Singapore. According to PWC 82% of the surveyed executives in Singapore reported blockchain initiatives underway and 13% of them have already brought the initiatives live to the market. There is also an increasing list of organisations that are starting to provide digital payment services. Moreover, Singaporean blockchain developers Building Cities Beyond has recently created an innovation $15 million grant to encourage development on its ecosystem. This all suggest that Singapore tries to position itself as (one of) the leading blockchain hubs in the world.
Zilliqa seems to already taking advantage of this and recently helped launch Hg Exchange on their platform, together with financial institutions PhillipCapital, PrimePartners and Fundnel. Hg Exchange, which is now approved by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), uses smart contracts to represent digital assets. Through Hg Exchange financial institutions worldwide can use Zilliqa's safe-by-design smart contracts to enable the trading of private equities. For example, think of companies such as Grab, AirBnB, SpaceX that are not available for public trading right now. Hg Exchange will allow investors to buy shares of private companies & unicorns and capture their value before an IPO. Anquan, the main company behind Zilliqa, has also recently announced that they became a partner and shareholder in TEN31 Bank, which is a fully regulated bank allowing for tokenization of assets and is aiming to bridge the gap between conventional banking and the blockchain world. If STOs, the tokenization of assets, and equity trading will continue to increase, then Zilliqa’s public blockchain would be the ideal candidate due to its strategic positioning, partnerships, regulatory compliance and the technology that is being built on top of it.
What is also very encouraging is their focus on banking the un(der)banked. They are launching a stablecoin basket starting with XSGD. As many of you know, stablecoins are currently mostly used for trading. However, Zilliqa is actively trying to broaden the use case of stablecoins. I recommend everybody to read this text that Amrit Kumar wrote (one of the co-founders). These stablecoins will be integrated in the traditional markets and bridge the gap between the crypto world and the traditional world. This could potentially revolutionize and legitimise the crypto space if retailers and companies will for example start to use stablecoins for payments or remittances, instead of it solely being used for trading.
Zilliqa also released their DeFi strategic roadmap (dating November 2019) which seems to be aligning well with their OpFi strategy. A non-custodial DEX is coming to Zilliqa made by Switcheo which allows cross-chain trading (atomic swaps) between ETH, EOS and ZIL based tokens. They also signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a (soon to be announced) USD stablecoin. And as Zilliqa is all about regulations and being compliant, I’m speculating on it to be a regulated USD stablecoin. Furthermore, XSGD is already created and visible on block explorer and XIDR (Indonesian Stablecoin) is also coming soon via StraitsX. Here also an overview of the Tech Stack for Financial Applications from September 2019. Further quoting Amrit Kumar on this:
There are two basic building blocks in DeFi/OpFi though: 1) stablecoins as you need a non-volatile currency to get access to this market and 2) a dex to be able to trade all these financial assets. The rest are build on top of these blocks.
So far, together with our partners and community, we have worked on developing these building blocks with XSGD as a stablecoin. We are working on bringing a USD-backed stablecoin as well. We will soon have a decentralised exchange developed by Switcheo. And with HGX going live, we are also venturing into the tokenization space. More to come in the future.”*
Additionally, they also have this ZILHive initiative that injects capital into projects. There have been already 6 waves of various teams working on infrastructure, innovation and research, and they are not from ASEAN or Singapore only but global: see Grantees breakdown by country. Over 60 project teams from over 20 countries have contributed to Zilliqa's ecosystem. This includes individuals and teams developing wallets, explorers, developer toolkits, smart contract testing frameworks, dapps, etc. As some of you may know, Unstoppable Domains (UD) blew up when they launched on Zilliqa. UD aims to replace cryptocurrency addresses with a human readable name and allows for uncensorable websites. Zilliqa will probably be the only one able to handle all these transactions onchain due to ability to scale and its resulting low fees which is why the UD team launched this on Zilliqa in the first place. Furthermore, Zilliqa also has a strong emphasis on security, compliance, and privacy, which is why they partnered with companies like Elliptic, ChainSecurity (part of PwC Switzerland), and Incognito. Their sister company Aqilliz (Zilliqa spelled backwards) focuses on revolutionizing the digital advertising space and is doing interesting things like using Zilliqa to track outdoor digital ads with companies like Foodpanda.
Zilliqa is listed on nearly all major exchanges, having several different fiat-gateways and recently have been added to Binance’s margin trading and futures trading with really good volume. They also have a very impressive team with good credentials and experience. They dont just have “tech people”. They have a mix of tech people, business people, marketeers, scientists, and more. Naturally, it's good to have a mix of people with different skill sets if you work in the crypto space.
Marketing & Community
Zilliqa has a very strong community. If you just follow their Twitter their engagement is much higher for a coin that has approximately 80k followers. They also have been ‘coin of the day’ by LunarCrush many times. LunarCrush tracks real-time cryptocurrency value and social data. According to their data it seems Zilliqa has a more fundamental and deeper understanding of marketing and community engagement than almost all other coins. While almost all coins have been a bit frozen in the last months, Zilliqa seems to be on its own bull run. It was somewhere in the 100s a few months ago and is currently ranked #46 on CoinGecko. Their official Telegram also has over 20k people and is very active, and their community channel which is over 7k now is more active and larger than many other official channels. Their local communities) also seem to be growing.
Moreover, their community started ‘Zillacracy’ together with the Zilliqa core team ( see www.zillacracy.com ). It’s a community run initiative where people from all over the world are now helping with marketing and development on Zilliqa. Since its launch in February 2020 they have been doing a lot and will also run their own non custodial seed node for staking. This seed node will also allow them to start generating revenue for them to become a self sustaining entity that could potentially scale up to become a decentralized company working in parallel with the Zilliqa core team. Comparing it to all the other smart contract platforms (e.g. Cardano, EOS, Tezos etc.) they don't seem to have started a similar initiatives (correct me if I’m wrong though). This suggest in my opinion that these other smart contract platforms do not fully understand how to utilize the ‘power of the community’. This is something you cannot ‘buy with money’ and gives many projects in the space a disadvantage.
Zilliqa also released two social products called SocialPay and Zeeves. SocialPay allows users to earn ZILs while tweeting with a specific hashtag. They have recently used it in partnership with the Singapore Red Cross for a marketing campaign after their initial pilot program. It seems like a very valuable social product with a good use case. I can see a lot of traditional companies entering the space through this product, which they seem to suggest will happen. Tokenizing hashtags with smart contracts to get network effect is a very smart and innovative idea.
Regarding Zeeves, this is a tipping bot for Telegram. They already have 1000s of signups and they plan to keep upgrading it for more and more people to use it (e.g. they recently have added a quiz features). They also use it during AMAs to reward people in real time. It’s a very smart approach to grow their communities and get familiar with ZIL. I can see this becoming very big on Telegram. This tool suggests, again, that the Zilliqa team has a deeper understanding what the crypto space and community needs and is good at finding the right innovative tools to grow and scale.
To be honest, I haven’t covered everything (i’m also reaching the character limited haha). So many updates happening lately that it's hard to keep up, such as the International Monetary Fund mentioning Zilliqa in their report, custodial and non-custodial Staking, Binance Margin, Futures & Widget, entering the Indian market, and more. The Head of Marketing Colin Miles has also released this as an overview of what is coming next. And last but not least, Vitalik Buterin has been mentioning Zilliqa lately acknowledging Zilliqa and mentioning that both projects have a lot of room to grow. There is much more info of course and a good part of it has been served to you on a silver platter. I invite you to continue researching by yourself :-) And if you have any comments or questions please post here!
Predictions: 2020 The USMC will adopt Lululemon PT uniforms. The new trend in flash mob performances will be speed metal rock and mosh pits. “Duck face” will be required on all passport photos. Amtrak will open new lines and reinvent itself using popular themes. All northern lines will Polar Express trains. All southern routes will be Chattanooga Choo-Choo trains. All West Coast trains will be called Orient Express. And all other lines will be called Thomas the Tank Engine routes and will include animatronic faces on the fronts of all trains that can answer passenger questions. “This is the reality of operating in Fantasyland today,” will say the Director of the Amtrak Board.
UsToo, #ThemToo and #YouToo will be the new viral social media phenomena.
TRUMP will open on Broadway. Taylor Swift will be named Democratic Party candidate for POTUS. Armed teachers will proliferate in rural counties and school districts across the US. So will tactical shooting schools and courses, for teachers and students. Many school districts will open and manage their own shooting ranges. Shooting teams, rifle, pistol and shotgun, precision and tactical, will become the hot new sports in rural schools. Personal bubbles will become hot new products and services. They will sell by the millions. These will be actual bubbles that people wear when they leave the sanctuary of their homes. They will come in various sizes, colors, and several ballistic and acoustic ratings. They will offer defense not only from bullets and knives, but also from antagonistic ideas, annoying co-workers, troubling truths and mean parents. Fortnite will unveil a “permanent residence” option, including sustenance, hygiene and employment options, allowing for users to never have to leave the game. Robots will replace nurses in nursing homes. A majority of residents will claim the robots are better than their “biofamilies.” The American Baptist Association will re-issue warnings to all faithful to be careful during sex, lest dancing spontaneously happen. LeBron James will hold a press conference and ask all NBA fans, “How the hell did I become the old man of basketball?” To which Michael Jordan will tweet, “Dude…” Trump will announce that each US citizen will be issued a firearm of their choice, any make, caliber or model, but with the stipulation that participants must prove that they do not already own any firearms. “We’re not adding to anyone’s collection,” Trump will say at a White House press conference. “We just need more good guys and good gals out there with the tools to engage the bad guys.” “Oh, fuck me,” most law enforcement officers will say to each other. Tactical body armor with roll over the fashion industry like a ceramic plate typhoon. Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard will be seen leaving a hotel room early one morning after a Democratic Party debate, leading to all sorts of media questions and speculations, and to calls by the Gay and Lesbian Legitimacy Board for investigations. The American Psychiatric Association will announce that anxiety is actually a treatment for depression. A report from the Coalition of Conservative Scientists will claim that all existing species of animals, and also some plants, engage in rape, and so did the dinosaurs, and thus it is part of the natural order. “So, get over it.” Scientific American, Science News and National Geographic will all publish editorials, in response, claiming that the same can be said of homosexual behavior, documented in hundreds of other animals species, in nature. “So, you first.” Greenland will become the new Florida. Florida will become the new Atlantis. Gondoleer will become a hot new job opportunity in Miami, New Orleans and New York. The entire Sackler family will have their last name legally changed to Gonzalez. India will announce a new campaign to reform Jammu and Kashmir into the “Indian Switzerland,” complete with quaint mountain villages, lots of ski resorts and hundreds of new mountain gondolas and aerial trams. Prime Minister Modi will announce contests to select a new cheese, new beer and Hindu mountain lederhausen to support the new Jammu and Kashmir brand. The first SETI signal will be received from aliens claiming that they have Jeffrey Epstein and that they would like to return him. But, they still want to hang onto Elvis for a while longer, if that is OK. Boeing’s stock will rebound and surge after they rebrand the 737 Max to the 737 Maxine. Greta Thunberg will appear in the next X-Men movie as ClimaRage and will beat down Magneto with guilt and shame. Joe Biden will be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but will not pull out of the race. “Does it even matter anymore?” he will say at the press conference announcing the diagnosis. Hong Kong will go dark and become the worlds largest abandoned mall. Disney will announce its purchase of the Notre Dame Cathedral. The entertainment behemoth will claim that only it has the resources to successfully complete the renovation of the fire-damaged landmark, and the culture to maintain French history and tradition. Tours of the site will begin soon after and will be led by Snow White and Mickey Mouse. Disney will also announce that it has purchased Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China, and that all these new properties will be anchors for new entertainment megahubs. Disney spokespeople will claim that only Disney has the resources to maintain these historical and cultural marvels, and at the same time better leverage their tourism revenue potentials. And they also have animated feature length movies for each site, coincidentally. A Religious Liberty bill will be signed into law reassigning all non-Christians to their new Christian denominations. Buddhists will become Baptists. Muslims will become Methodists. The Hindus will become Congregationalists. Mormons will become Presbyterians. “What about us?” the Unitarians will ask in a barely heard voice, to which the official response will be, “Go talk to the Catholics. Maybe they want you.” Pay day loans, reverse mortgages and high frequency trading will be recognized by the SEC, FTC and Justice Department as key corruptions and cancers to capitalism. Nonetheless, they will spread and proliferate like weeds. New types and styles of snake oils and shell games will join them in the disfigurement of capitalism. A growing number and majority of stores, restaurants and businesses in general will no longer accept cash, preferring credit cards and digital currency. Most panhandlers, prostitutes and drug dealers will also stop accepting cash and will instead require PayPal, Venmo or Bitcoin. Surveillance will become ubiquitous as all devices in our lives - phones, doorbells, coffeemakers, tablets, speakers, watches, TVs, thermostats, crockpots, electrical plugs, litter boxes, remote controls, dog collars, security systems, vibrators, cars, weapons, (the list is growing) etc. - will harvest data about our lives and behaviors and feed that data to “data brokers” who analyze and sell that to other corporations. In response to this growing threat, personal data security companies will emerge that will require customers to register their personal data with them and will promise to protect that data. People will fall for this. Online social influencer and personal data broker will become top paying jobs. The first inter-species hybrid human will come to light in a gene-splicing lab somewhere in China. It will be either a pigboy or a monkeygirl. Scientific and medical authorities around the world will express their outrage. Meanwhile, millions will clamor to place orders for puppyboys and kittygirls. The U.S. Department of Defense will officially begin planning strategies to weaponize the Internet. PornhubDoD.mil will be announced as the “nuclear option.” The Republican and Democratic parties will assume new nicknames, the Hatfields and McCoys. “Oh, puh-lease,” will say 89-year-old Dolly Hatfield, granddaughter of “Devil” Anse Hatfield, of Possum Holler, Kentucky, to reporters from her nursing home, “we was never as bad as all them DC politicians. They’re downright crazy. We was just a mite pissed off.” Dating apps will go the way of porn magazines as mating algorithms begin populating our phones and browsers with photos of candidates in our lane, based on various demographic variables. Amazon and Google will provide online weddings, will even provide avatars to act as bridesmaid and best-man. Digisex will trend as the new safe alternative to physical sex. The $15.5 trillion US corporate debt bubble, 74% of US GDP, will burst, throwing the US into economic chaos. Celebrations, by those who have dreamed of the event, will be short-lived when it is realized that no one’s phones work. Nancy Pelosi and Bill Maher will be the first residents to check in at a luxurious new reeducation camp outside of Fairbanks. The string of new American Gulags with be a booming new industry and will provide many jobs for patriotic Alaskans. Many US churches will begin installing security checkpoints, gun emplacements and sniper overwatch. Many schools will implement TCPs, Traffic Control Points, manned by armed security personnel, except at rural schools, where TCPs will be manned by armed teachers and parents, and in some districts, students. The PSC, Private Security Corporation, industry will surge and boom like a high school band at halftime at a Friday night football game. High school bands will begin wearing tactical body armor at Friday night halftimes. Hillary Clinton will finally reveal the location of Jimmy Hoffa’s body. “I told her not to do it!” Bill will say at her trial. Trump will get reelected and will immediately sign an executive order establishing The Department of Truth, whose mandate will be to officially and legally determine which facts are truths and which are lies. Using the term “alternative facts” will become illegal. The Democratic Party candidates for president will switch from debates to playing concerts as a band, during which each gets a solo spotlight, during which they have 5 minutes to play their instrument and riff on politics. Squabbles over who plays lead guitar and the drums will follow the band throughout their tour. Buttigieg will never stop complaining about having to play the flute. A startup company will release a new product called the Emonilometer, which will measure a person’s emotional and spiritual depth and flow. Various plans ands price points will be available. Sales will soar as customers catch on that the more you pay the deeper your flow. (Note: A “nilometer” is used to measure river depth and flow, was first used by the ancient Egyptians.) Multiple sources within the White House will claim that Trump’s favorite new phrase is “It’s good to be the king.” Sources close to Mel Brooks will claim that his favorite new phrase is, “Oy vey.” A new extinct human species will be discovered. Homo idioticus will answer a lot of burning questions regarding the human tree of evolution, and the current state of humanity. The collapse of the dairy industry, due to unmanageable costs and ratios, will lead scientists and farmer to look for other sources of milk, beyond almond and oat. New options will include shark milk, beetle milk, flamingo milk and even spider milk, for which demand will quickly out-strip supplies, due to consumers hoping for spider super powers. A joint Chinese-Israeli-SpaceX project will start building a lunar station on the moon. The station will be focused on research and mining, but also will offer “Do It On the Moon” romantic get-away packages for couples. The Labor Secretary will quip during a press conference that “retirement is for pussies.” US Space Command will begin selecting and training its first class of Space Rangers. LSD and psilocybin will be the new cure-all super-drugs, for everything from depression, addiction and dementia. Doctors and pharmacists will take to referring to these as Timothy Leary treatments. Members of the Leary family will demand a cut of the action. Coach Orgeron and LSU will replace Saban and Alabama as the defining college football program, and will set new standards in 2020 when LSU becomes the first to sign a QB right out of middle school. Other schools will soon follow. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders will make a soft porn short film together in an attempt to connect with American voters. Copyright Jeff Forker 2020
338 BC Macedonian army led by Philip II defeats combined forces of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea, securing Macedonian hegemony in Greece and the Aegean
216 BC Second Punic War: Battle of Cannae - Carthaginian army lead by Hannibal defeats numerically superior Roman army under command consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro
1921 Chicago jury brings in not guilty verdict against the Black Sox
1921 After 3 hours deliberation a Chicago jury acquits 8 Chicago White Sox accused in Black Sox scandal, next day banned from organised baseball for life
1943 Uprising at Treblinka Concentration Camp (crematorium destroyed)
1944 Jewish survivors of Kovono Ghetto emerge from their bunker
1944 Turkey breaks diplomatic relationship with nazi-Germany
1945 After 3½ days suffering exhaustion, lack of water and shark attacks in the Philippine Sea, the surviving crew of USS Indianapolis are spotted by Wilbur “Chuck” Gwinn, a PV-1 Ventura pilot on a routine sector search. 316 had survived.
1945 Potsdam Conference between Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill ends
1948 Fanny Blankers-Koen of the Netherlands wins the 100m in 11.9 at the London Olympics; 1st of unprecedented 3 individual track & field gold medals
1948 Danish swimmer Greta Anderson (1:06.3) touches out American Ann Curtis by 0.2 in the women's 100m freestyle at the London Olympics
1948 Italians Adolfo Consolini and Giuseppe Tosi go 1-2 in the men's discus final at the London Olympics
1952 17 year-old future world champion Floyd Patterson wins the gold medal in the middleweight division at the Helsinki Olympic Games with a 1st round KO of Romanian Vasile Tita
1953 Betty Jack Davis, singer (w/Skeeter Davis), killed in car crash
1953 KCPQ TV channel 13 in Tacoma-Seattle, WA (IND) begins broadcasting
1967 The second Blackwall Tunnel opens in Greenwich, London
1967 "In the Heat of the Night" directed by Norman Jewison, based on John Ball's novel of the same name, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger premieres in New York (Academy Awards Best Picture 1968)
1968 35th Chicago College All-Star Game: Green Bay 34, All-Stars 17, 69,917 at Soldier Field
1968 Ron Hansen (Washington) & Tim Cullen (Chicago WS) become the first MLB players to be traded for each other twice in the same season, they had been traded in February in opposite directions
1969Bob Dylan makes surprise appearance at Hibbing HS Minn 10th reunion
1973 Future Baseball Hall of Fame 3rd baseman George Brett gets his 1st MLB hit on debut for the Kansas City Royals in 3-1 win v Chicago WS
1975 104°F (40°C) at Providence, Rhode Island (state record)
1975 107°F (42°C) at ChesteNew Bedford, Massachusetts (state record)
1977 In his comeback Test, England cricket batsman Geoff Boycott is unbeaten on 80 after a 1st innings 107 as England beats Australia by 7 wickets in the 3rd Test at Trent Bridge
1979 "Broadway Opry '79" closes at St James Theater NYC after 6 performances
1979 Gilda Radner Live From New York opens on Broadway
1979 Washington, D.C. trial attorney Edward Bennett Williams buys MLB's Baltimore Orioles from Jerold Hoffberger for reported $12.3 million
1980 Cuban super-heavyweight Teofilo Stevenson becomes the 1st fighter to win 3 Olympic gold medals in the same division, scores 4-1 points decision over Pyotr Zayev (Soviet Union) in Moscow
1981 England cricket all-rounder Ian Botham takes 5 for 11 to end Australia's chase of 151 target, all out 121 for 29 run defeat in 4th Test at Edgbaston
1982 Oakland outfielder Rickey Henderson steals his 100th MLB base of the season in 6-5 win v Seattle, first to steal 100 twice in modern era
1982 Roger Ebert's "Movie News" premieres on ABC FM network
1984 Jeff Blatnick becomes first American to win a gold medal in Greco-Roman wrestling at the Los Angeles Olympics, Blatnick was in remission for Hodgkin’s disease
1986 Curtis Cup Women's Golf, Prairie Dunes CC: Great Britain & Ireland beats the US 13-5, the visitors first win on American soil
1986 Lee Elder fires a record 11-under par 61 on his way to winning the Senior PGA Merrill Lynch/Golf Digest Commemorative at Sleepy Hollow CC; mark stands for 11 years
1987 Don Brown sets flight record for handbow (1,336 yds 1'3")
1987 Cincinnati outfielder Eric Davis is 7th to hit 30 HRs & steal 30 bases in one season as he homers in Reds 5-4 win v Giants
1987 Michael Andretti runs fastest Indy car race in history (171.49mph) in winning the Marlboro 500 at the Michigan International Speedway, Brooklyn, Michigan
1987 USSR performs nuclear test at Eastern Kazakh/Semipalitinsk USSR
1988 Raymond Acevedo is retired from singing group Menudo
1988 System Enhancement Association settles case with PKware (ARC vs PKARC)
1989 NASA confirmed Voyager 2's discovery of 3 more moons of Neptune designated temporarily 1989 N2, 1989 N3 & 1989 N24
1990 Iraq invades and occupies Kuwait, Emir flees to Saudi Arabia
1990 Yankees rookie 1st baseman Kevin Maas hits his 10th MLB homer in 6-5 loss v Detroit, fastest to reach that mark, just 77 at bats
1992 "Death & the Maiden" closes at Brooks Atkinson NYC after 159 performances
1992 Tom Seaver, Rollie Fingers, Hal Newhouser & Bill McGowan are inducted into Baseball Hall of Fame
1992 American Jacki Joyner-Kersee becomes first athlete to win consecutive gold medals in the gruelling heptathlon with a 199 point win over Irina Belova (Soviet Union) at the Barcelona Olympics
1992 Vitaly Scherbo of Belarus becomes the first gymnast to win 6 gold medals at one Olympics in Barcelona, also first to win 4 gold in one day's competition (pommel, vault, rings & parallel bars)
1993 NYC radio (WFAN) personality Don Imus' lung collapes
1993 Maryland investors led by Baltimore attorney Peter Angelos buy the Baltimore Orioles at auction in New York for $173m, nearly $50m more than ever paid for a baseball team
1993 Train crash in tunnel at Vega de Anzo Spain, 12 killed
1993 Shamrock Broadcasting, a Disney company, officially takes ownership of Cleveland's WMMS-FM/100.7 & WHK-AM/1420
2003 South African cricket batsman Graeme Smith blazes 259, fast bowler Makhaya Ntini has 5 wickets in each England innings as Proteas win 2nd Test by an innings and 92 at Lord's
2005 The largest trade in NBA history is completed as 5 teams combine to swap 13 players; deal brings Antoine Walker & Jason Williams to Miami, leads to Heat's 1st ever championship that season
2009Michael Phelps ends the World Swimming Championships in Rome with his 5th gold medal as part of the US 4x100m medley relay team that recorded the 43rd world record of the controversial meet
2009 US Open Senior Men's Golf, Crooked Stick GC: Fred Funk wins by 6 strokes from Joey Sindelar with a tournament record score (-20)
2012 23 people are killed after two blasts in a fruit market in Lahore, Pakistan
2012 American swimmer Michael Phelps wins an unprecedented third consecutive gold medal in the 200m individual medley in 1:54.27 at the London Olympics
2012 American swimmer Rebecca Soni becomes first woman to win the 200m breaststroke twice with a world record 2:19.59 at the London Olympics
2013 40 people are killed after an ammunition depot explodes in Homs, Syria
2014 Super Rugby Final, ANZ Stadium, Sydney: NSW Waratahs win their first SR title in a nail-biting 33-32 home effort against New Zealand's Canterbury Crusaders
2017 First successful gene editing in human embryos to repair disease-causing mutation reported by scientists in "Nature"
2017 US President Donald Trump signs legislation imposing sanctions on Russia, limiting his ability to ever lift them
2017 Great Britain's Prince Philip aged 96 makes his final solo public appearance before retiring from public engagements
2017 New larger crypto-currency Bitcoin Cash created
2017 First footage of white giraffes posted by Hirola Conservation Program in north eastern Kenya
2017 More than a billion people around the world need glasses and 36 million are blind, according to new study published in "The Lancet"
2018 Apple becomes the first American public listed company to reach $1 trillion in value
2018 Fields Medal for mathematics awarded to Caucher Birkar (his stolen minutes later), Alessio Figalli, Peter Scholze and Akshay Venkatesh
2018 Pope Frances declares the death penalty unacceptable in all cases, reversing church teachings and adding to Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church
2018 Oldest library in Germany confirmed unearthed in Cologne dating to 2AD, possibly held 20,000 scolls
2018 Tokyo Medical University revealed to have been tampering with female entrance exams to ensure under 30% accepted, by Japanese newspaper "Yomiuri Shimbun"
BOLT (3 versions, Unidirectional, bi, and third party)
Lightning + anon HTLC vs Tumblebit vs Bolt
ValueShuffle: Mixing Confidential Transactions \ Tim Ruffing \ T3
Bitcoin is not private, Address links have been made
CoinJoin
Peer to Peer (P2P) Mixing - Multiple addresses per user
If protocol disrupted break anonymity
Mixing Sucks
CoinJoin as it should be, sig aggregation Bellare-Neven, saves time, space, and privacy
Variants of DiceMix, DiceMix Light
ValueShuffle
Scalability
FlyClient: Super Light Clients for Cryptocurrencies \ Benedikt Bünz (Stanford University) \ T4
Block Headers \ Hash Tree
Longest Chain Rule
SPV Properties and Problems
NiPoPoWs
Merkle Mountain Ranges
FlyClient
BlockSci: a Platform for Blockchain Science and Exploration \ Harry Kalodner (Princeton University) \ T5
Demand analysis
Velocity of Bitcoin
Store of Value
Understanding Wallets
Open Source Python project
High performance \ Functionality
BlockSci
Privacy
Graphene: A New Protocol for Block Propagation Using Set Reconciliation \ Brian N. Levine (College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst) \ T6
Data between peers - Block \ Mempool data
Faster block propagation not block size.
Less Orphaning \ Efficient mining
Reduced to 1/10th size of current methods
Bloom Filters
IBLTs (Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables)
Graphene
Measuring maximum sustained transaction throughput on a global network of Bitcoin nodes \ Peter Rizun, Andrea Suisani, Andrew Stone (Bitcoin Unlimited) \ T7
GB Testnet
Scaling Concerns
GB Testnet Setup
Ramp Tests + Bottlenecks
Xthin Block Propagation
Transaction processing architecture
Fast Bloom Filters
Smart Contracts
Atomically Trading with Roger: Gambling on the success of a hardfork \ Ethan Heilman (University College London \ T8
Hard Fork Trade Protocols (Atomic Trades across two forks)
Fork Trade with and without Tx Malleability fix (Segwit)
Designing bitcoin contracts with transaction malleability is non-trivial
Bitcoin script 2.0 and strengthened payment channels \ PRESENTER(s): Johnson Lau, Olaoluwa Osuntokun \ T10
Bitcoin Script Evolution 2009-2017
Shortcomings (Limitations of current script)
Useful New Functions (MAST, Public Key Aggregation, OP_CSFS, OP_ECADD, OP_ECMUL)
Work In Progress (Merkalized Script BIP114, Merk Branch Verification, Tail call Execution semantics, version-1 witness, Simplicity)
Script design philosophy
Re-Designing Payment Channels
Commitment invalidation
WatchTower State Outsourcing
Delegated Trapdoor Channel Outsourcing
Eliminate Historical Second-Level HTLC Storage
Invited Talk: The State of Cryptography \ Benedikt Bünz (Stanford University) \ T11
ECDSA SHA256
Schnorr BLS Threshold Ring Blind (Signatures)
Zero Knowledge Proofs (SUDOKU, Sigma, SNARKs, PCPs, CS-Proofs, STARKs, Bulletproofs)
Proof of Work
The Future of Proof of Work \ Min Chen, (Avalon) \ Min Chen, (Avalon) \ T12
Reward System of Bitcoin (Planned economy)
Solo, Pool, Reward mining
Economic Impact of mining
Is Hardware the default attacker
Economic path for long term scaling
Bobtail: A Proof-of-Work Target that Reduces Blockchain Mining Variance \ Brian N. Levine (College of Information and Computer Sciences University of Massachusetts Amherst) \ T13
Low Variance Mining - Why variance is the root of all evil
Inter block delay ~10min-1hr
Low variance mining
Double Spend \ Selfish Mining attacks
Proportional Mining Rewards
Using existing Asic's
Invited Talk: The Past, Present, and Future of Bitcoin in China \ Bobby Lee (BTCC) \ T14
Is Bitcoin in China finally over
Early China involvement
2014-2015 Bear Market
2017 Bull Market
ICO's - China Ban
Bitcoins price in the future
China Bitcoin is about Investing & Speculative trading not payments and spending.
PSA: Users, (solo)miners, exchanges/merchants, and pool operators must be on v0.10.1 in advance of the hardfork otherwise you will get forked/booted off the network. Miners, please contact your pool operator to ask them if they have upgraded | Monero v0.10.1 released - mandatory upgrade! (139 points, 81 comments)
Contest: I will pay 1000 Monero to anyone who can successfully leak the most significant and damning information regarding the organization known as Correct The Record. (125 points, 72 comments)
One of the unfortunate side effects of birthing a truly decentralized financial network is that you have to make a few people rich along the way. Do not lose sight of the big picture: we are all part of one of the most important endeavors in the known universe. (111 points, 55 comments)
ZCash is hitting Poloniex tomorrow and the price will likely go up. But I won't be touching it, ever. The entire project is already compromised on principles alone. (93 points, 59 comments)
71 points: mustbemoney's comment in ZCash is hitting Poloniex tomorrow and the price will likely go up. But I won't be touching it, ever. The entire project is already compromised on principles alone.
65 points: Tom___Tom's comment in Why is Monero's lead developer FluffyPony telling the audience in his speeches NOT to buy? (genuine question, no need to attack me)
62 points: JollyMort's comment in FBI Concerned About Criminal Use of Private Cryptocurrency Monero
62 points: Twentey's comment in Ummm... I'm a Monero Millionaire.
Simply said, a mining pool is a place where miners from all over the world join forces (mining machines) in order to stand a better chance at mining the next Bitcoin block, for example. If they are successful, they will split rewards in accordance with the contributed hash power (essentially, the mining power of a mining machine). 99Bitcoins supplies up to date tutorials on how to buy Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin wallets and reviews about the best Bitcoin exchanges. There were some awesome Bitcoin speakers, and the conference itself was interesting and content-rich, but it was the overall human experience around it to set it apart from other conferences: great people, great talks, unique mood. Keep up to date with the latest bitcoin event news on CoinDesk. You can also check out local Bitcoin Meetups in your area. CoinDesk also runs the Consensus Conference and an ‘Expert Briefings ... Abstract: Bitcoin, a distributed, peer to peer crypto currency, has gained a significant popularity among different users around the world by promising users a fully decentralized network with an inherently independence from governments and without the influence of any central authorities and organizations. Mining is the fundamental concept in Bitcoin which must be done in checking all ...
Nerva is a great new coin with a very unique twist. The only way to mine this coin is with your CPU. Take a peek and I'll tell you all about it! Website: htt... We take a look at profitability of USB miner solo mining Bitcoin and Litecoin. What are the chances to find a block on your own own of 12.5 BTC or 25 LTC. Ch... Bitcoin solo mining on Sony XPERIA Tablet S - Android 4.1.2 EASY SET UP URI: stratum+tcp://stratum.bitsolo.net:3334 Username: Your Bitcoin adress Live Bitcoin Trading With DeriBot on Deribit DeriBot Backup 161 watching Live now Stimulus and Economy Update: Fed Wants Money in Americans Hands NOW. $2,000 a month? How to mine bitcoins (solo mining) with the core client! (*solo mining now removed from client*) - Duration: 1:00. Bitcoin Blaster 48,648 views. 1:00.
