Original author: Jack ( 0x137 ), BlockBeats
“We have sold all our graphics cards, and there is no panic.” In BlockBeats’ conversations with multiple miners, this view represents the majority of Ethereum miners.
Compared with the sudden restrictions of the Bitcoin mining policy in June last year, and the passive choice of all China’s Bitcoin miners having to wait for the shutdown to stop losses, Ethereum’s miners are obviously in a much better mood. They have nearly a year to come. Digest about not being able to mine.
The most traditional mining in the crypto world relies on the computing power of machines to perform extremely complex calculations. Bitcoin is the originator of mining, and Ethereum is also a grandfather. Many people have heard of Bitcoin’s large-scale mining industry in China. The 24-hour roar of mines, mining machines, and machines in the valley’s flowing water, and Ethereum is not bad. For example, the former Spark mining pool was built by Ethereum. The world’s largest mining pool.
But these are no more. China’s Bitcoin computing power, which once accounted for 75% of the world’s computing power, completely disappeared under the policy last June, and Ethereum also abandoned computing power mining with the complete transformation of its own mechanism. In theory, with the transformation of the Ethereum consensus mechanism, the two largest network mining in the world have completely disappeared in China.
The end of 8 years of Ethereum mining is also the end of China’s mining industry. In this field, people advocate computing power and resist the increase in entropy, creating a super unicorn with a single quarter profit of 1.1 billion US dollars. Graphics giants like Nvidia have had to redesign their pricing strategies. We want to use these words to record a piece of history that all Web3 people should know.
prehistoric
One night in May 2010, a hungry programmer traded 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas worth $30, and bitcoin had its first price — $0.003. This invisible and intangible protocol has had real value since then, and what followed was a bull market full of rich myths and the rise of crypto mining.
Early Bitcoins had no value, few people participated in the network, and only one computer CPU was required for mining. Hal Finney was one of the earliest miners at the time. He mined thousands of bitcoins with his computer within a week or two. Later, the mining software was turned off because the CPU was too hot and the noise of the computer fan was annoying. .
But the $0.003 denominated deal changed everything. Seeing that Bitcoin mining is profitable, more and more people are participating in the network. Soon, geeks from all walks of life began to write their own GPU graphics card mining programs, set up targeted mining machines, and also It is the mining machine we are now familiar with.
Soon, this technology boom spread to domestic geek forums, causing heated discussions among a small group of people. It was around this time that Wu Jihan, a student of the Department of Finance of Peking University, established the earliest bitcoin forum in China, Babbitt, and began to talk about how to mine on the forum. Zhang Nangeng, who studied integrated circuit design at Beihang University, became famous for making FPGA mining machines and was called “Pumpkin Zhang” by netizens. In addition, there is Xigua Li, a software engineer from Guilin, who developed the “Watermelon Miner” which was very popular.
Just when GPUs became popular, a small company called Butterfly Labs in the United States began to announce that it would develop a machine specifically for Bitcoin mining-ASIC. This machine ditches all other computer functions and is specialized in Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm, much faster than GPU miners.
Butterfly mining machine, the picture comes from the Internet
After the concept of ASIC mining machine spread to China, some people took action soon. In addition to the aforementioned “Pumpkin Zhang” Zhang Nangeng, there is another legend in the mining circle, the roast cat Jiang Xinyu. Roast Cat entered the University of Science and Technology of China at the age of 15, and then went to Yale to study for a doctorate in computer science. When he first heard about Bitcoin, he was attracted by its concept. Before he finished reading the book, he ran back to China and became a miner, becoming the second person in China to develop an ASIC mining machine after Zhang Nangeng.
At this time, on the other side of the ocean, our protagonist Vitalik appeared.
In major overseas Bitcoin forums, Vitalik appeared frequently and began to write and share popular science articles about Bitcoin. Because he had no money to buy bitcoin, he reached an agreement with a blogger to pay 5 bitcoin per article (the bitcoin was only $0.8 at the time). Although Vitalik was also interested in bitcoin at that time, he did not participate in the trend of making wealth in bitcoin mining. For him, the decentralization story of bitcoin was even more fascinating to him.
Talented since childhood, Vitalik entered the school’s “genius class” very early, but because of his fast speech, it was difficult for others to communicate with him. When he was 10 years old, Vitalik’s father gave him an important gift – an IBM computer. Since then he has opened up a new world, while other children are playing outside, he is addicted to writing computer games.
When Vitalik was 13 years old, “World of Warcraft” was born. Like many people, he became an Internet addict, playing games day and night. Later, because of Blizzard, he weakened his hard-trained full-level warlock. Emailed Blizzard engineers. Vitalik was heartbroken after his repeated requests were rejected, and later wrote on his blog: “That was the first time I woke up crying while sleeping.” That is, because of Blizzard’s revision, Vitalik realized the hegemony brought about by centralization. “Developers can change the game as soon as they say it, but players can only accept or give up.”
Vitalik playing with IBM as a child, picture from Vitalik blog
In 2011, Vitalik’s father heard about Bitcoin by chance at the company, and when he got home, he was excited to introduce the novelty to his son. Soon after, his father sold his software company to start a blockchain incubator. Under the influence of his father, Vitalik also took action. In September of the same year, the 17-year-old Vitalik founded the now well-known Bitcoin magazine “Bitcoin Magazine”. He wrote and edited himself, and made the magazine bigger and bigger. Acquired by BTC Media in 2015.
Bitcoin magazine journal, the picture comes from the Internet
But although his magazine was already well-known, Vitalik had not yet entered the public eye at this time.
Birth: Chinese Mining and Ethereum
Mining Mecca
Look back at home. In August 2012, Roast Cat established a company in Shenzhen and conducted an IPO on the Internet, issuing 160,000 shares at the price of 0.1 bitcoin per share, with the code ASICMINER. After that, he opened a mining farm in Shenzhen with the funds from crowdfunding, and used his own mining machine to mine Bitcoin. It is rumored that he earned 200 million yuan in three months.
One of the few public photos of the roast cat (left), the pictures are from the Internet
17 days after the announcement of Roast Cat’s ASIC prototype, Zhang Nangeng also formed his own Avalon team to complete the delivery of the first mining machine Avalon 1. Just as Roast Cat and Zhang Nangeng were developing rapidly, another competitor also ran into the field. In the first half of 2013, Wu Jihan established Bitmain and launched 3 computing power chips in just 13 months, forming a tripartite relationship with Roast Cat and Zhang Nangeng. After the winter, Bitmain’s Antminer S1 swept a large number of competitors, allowing its mining machine agents to make a lot of money.
Roasted cats and Zhang Nangeng are also hard to find, their business is booming, and the era of Bitcoin ASIC mining machines is roaring.
The huge wealth effect has attracted countless entrepreneurs to enter the game, and produced a variety of Bitcoin mining machines, including chrysanthemum mining machines, Xiaoqiang mining machines, and silver fish mining machines. Manufacturers are competing with each other, and the iteration of mining machines is getting faster and faster, so that there is a crazy scene of early pre-ordered futures mining machines, which will become outdated when they get them. Later, the manufacturers discovered that their own mining machines were still on the production line, and their rival customers had already obtained mining machines with better performance. Companies such as Bitmain, which entered the game early, have begun to deploy larger-scale computing power in units of P. Since then, more than 70% of Bitcoin’s computing power has been firmly rooted in China.
On the other hand, under the leadership of geek miners, a large number of gold diggers have poured into China’s bitcoin market. Driven by the “Chinese Aunt”, the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed. After breaking the 4,000 yuan mark, it approached 7,000 yuan within a few days. At the beginning of the year, bitcoin was less than 80 yuan. In just a few months, about 10 billion yuan of capital has been put into the market, and China has become the world’s most enthusiastic market for mining and trading Bitcoin.
In the past 13 years, Bitcoin has created one wealth myth after another, and Li Xiaolai is the most typical one. This early New Oriental English teacher, who bought 100,000 bitcoins in 2011, is now China’s “Bitcoin richest man”. He not only founded the Bit Fund, but also established Yunbi.com. Lao Mao is another example. A 10-year-old cat was on a business trip with his boss and saw a report on Bitcoin in a newspaper on a newsstand, which changed the trajectory of his life.
“99% of the people in the domestic bitcoin circle missed this opportunity”
This is what Lao Mao wrote in a later article when he recalled the early investment opportunities of Ethereum. In the early stage of Bitcoin development, the grasp of opportunities in the Chinese capital circle established the unshakable position of Chinese people in the blockchain world, and it can even be said that they have the ability to control the future development of this industry. But under such conditions, most of the elites in the circle still missed the early opportunity of the next big trend of encrypted gold.
In 2013, Bitcoin was also very popular in the United States. Vitalik’s Bitcoin magazine also held an exhibition in California. This exhibition allowed Vitalik to experience not only the active online community, but also offline people’s interest in Bitcoin, Strong interest in blockchain. Vitalik, who was still in college, decided to drop out and go to the rest of the world to see how the Bitcoin community and the crypto industry are growing.
While traveling in Israel, Vitalik met two crypto companies that were trying to develop a set of Bitcoin-based smart contracts to issue their own tokens and run financial contracts. Vitalik immediately became interested. As one of the developers of Bitcoin 2.0, he immediately proposed a new idea to the Mastercoin community who was studying the scalability of Bitcoin: to develop a smart contract platform for Bitcoin, so that users can easily Quick and easy scripting to create your own applications based on Bitcoin. But because all of Bitcoin’s improved technology at the time revolved around payment and security properties, Vitalik’s proposal was quickly rejected.
Vitalik’s Ultimate Scripting proposal, image via Vitalik Blog
Vitalik, who was rejected, quickly decided to start anew. In December of the same year, he began to share a white paper he wrote, in which he explained in detail the shortcomings of the Bitcoin system and the idea behind his new project: a Turing-complete, Programmable general-purpose blockchain, based on smart contracts, making it the ultimate platform for decentralized applications. In the white paper, Vitalik named his project Ethereum.
“Ether is ether, and the root of eum means factory.” Cancer recalled to BlockBeats, “I finally decided on the Chinese name of Ethereum.” The two predecessors, Cancer and Gulu, worked together to translate the Ethereum white paper, allowing Chinese For the first time on the Internet, the vision of this smart contract network was recognized, and Cancer finally determined the translation of Ethereum as “Ethereum”, representing the historical positioning of this platform-based public chain. The translation of Ethereum seems unparalleled to us now, but there were also dissatisfied voices back then. “If it wasn’t for the name you translated, I would have invested in this project.” An investor said this to Cancer at the time.
At the beginning, Vitalik only sent the white paper to a few of his closest friends. After reading it, they found it interesting and sent it to other community members. Just like this, Vitalik’s idea of Ethereum quickly exploded in the Bitcoin community. Many people were so excited about this avant-garde idea that they came to Vitalik to discuss and discuss in person. Among them, the most active Yes, it was Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot later.
Dr. Gavin Wood has strong C++ programming skills and was one of the first people to contact and support Vitalik, and he also became the co-founder and CTO of Ethereum. Later, Vitalik wrote on his blog: “The Ethereum protocol at the time was entirely my own creation. However, from here, new players started to join. By far the most prominent on the protocol side is Gavin Wood, In December 2013, via http://about.me The message contacted me…. The subtle change in seeing Ethereum as building a programmable platform is also credited to Gavin, which started with a slight change in terminology, and this influence has become more pronounced with the increasing emphasis on the “Web3″ system Strongly, this system sees Ethereum as part of a suite of decentralized technologies. ”
Email from Gavin Wood to Vitalik, image via Vitalik Blog
Coincidentally, for his outstanding contributions to the development of Bitcoin 2.0, Vitalik received a $100,000 Thiel scholarship from Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal and an early investor in Facebook. Vitalik, who got the money, did not stop for a minute, and began to develop Ethereum full-time with Gavin Wood.
In February 2014, Vitalik first publicized the Ethereum project at the Bitcoin Miami Conference. In April of the same year, Gavin Wood published the Ethereum Yellow Paper, expounding the technical description of EVM, which became the technical bible of Ethereum. According to the specific instructions in the Yellow Paper, Ethereum is compatible with 7 programming languages such as C++, Go, Python, and Java, making Ethereum more optimized in development and programming.
On the issue of Ethereum’s consensus mechanism, Vitalik also has a very novel idea. He wrote in the Ethereum white paper:
“The Bitcoin mining algorithm (Proof of Work) is vulnerable to two forms of centralization attacks. First, the mining ecosystem is specially designed to be thousands of times more efficient on the particular task of Bitcoin mining. ASICs and computer chip control. This means that Bitcoin mining is no longer highly decentralized and egalitarian, but requires the effective participation of huge amounts of capital. Second, most Bitcoin miners are no longer in fact Complete block verification locally; instead rely on centralized mining pools to provide block headers. This problem can be said to be serious: at the time of this writing, the two largest mining pools indirectly control about 50% of the computing power of the entire network, although The fact that miners can switch to other pools when a pool or consortium attempts a 51% attack mitigates the problem.”
It is not difficult to see that Vitalik wrote these words precisely because he saw the phenomenon of “extreme involution” in Bitcoin mining, especially China’s Bitcoin mining industry. In his opinion, PoS proof of stake (Proof of Stake) would be a better choice for Ethereum.
In fact, the PoS consensus mechanism was proposed on the BitcoinTalk forum as early as 2011 and has been the most popular PoW alternative. Therefore, in the earliest Ethereum white paper, Vitalik hoped to adopt PoS as the consensus mechanism of Ethereum. However, when discussing with Gavin Wood and other development members, the Ethereum team also realized that the PoS technology at the current stage is not yet mature, and everyone does not have a good understanding of PoS, which cannot guarantee the security of Ethereum. At the same time, the entire blockchain industry is still in the early stage, and there is not so much capital involved. Therefore, PoW is still the best choice to ensure the growth of Ethereum.
Vitalik, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, and Gavin Wood working on Ethereum. Image via Vitalik’s blog
After several trade-offs, the team still adopted PoW. However, Vitalik did not give up the pursuit of PoS. He always believed that PoW would only make the entire network more expensive and less efficient. Therefore, after deciding to adopt PoW as the consensus mechanism, Vitalik and his team immediately started Set out to develop plans for Ethereum to move to PoS in the future.
Ultimately, the plan was divided into four extremes: Frontier (new frontier), Homestead (homeland), Metropolis (colonial metropolis), Serenity (serenity) .
The main purpose of Frontier is to introduce miners to ensure network security. It adopts the PoW model familiar to the Bitcoin community, including an interface for mining Ethereum and some simple ways to upload and execute contracts. Homestead is mainly to make the Ethereum network run safely and smoothly, such as adjusting mining incentives, providing a wallet with a graphical interface, etc. Metropolis will provide a relatively full-featured user interface for a wide range of users, and the team also expects to release a dApp store and several well-designed projects at this stage to demonstrate the capabilities of the network.
The Serenity stage will realize the final conversion of Ethereum PoW to PoS. In the introduction article on the four stages of Ethereum development released in 2015, the tone of Ethereum developer Vinay Gupta was full of expectation and hope. At that time, no one in the Ethereum team thought that the road of PoS of Ethereum would take a full eighth Years have been accompanied by various winds and frosts along the way.
Towards the Frontier: Chinese Mining Meets Young Ethereum
According to the established development route, Vitalik started the publicity and development of Ethereum. The first step in launching and securing the Ethereum network is to attract development funds and miners, and the first place Vitalik thought of was China.
Unfavorable encounter with Ethereum
“The first time I came to China was in May 2014. At that time, I only saw miners and trading platforms. They were already strong, Huobi and OKcoin already had more than 70 people, but there were not many interesting companies other than these few companies. thing”.
This is Vitalik’s most profound influence on China’s encryption industry in 2014. In order to promote the pre-sale of Ethereum, Vitalik came to the world’s largest encryption market. On the first stop, I visited Du Jun of Huobi and introduced him to the goals and concepts of Ethereum, hoping to get funding from Du Jun, but was dismissed as a “liar”.
Later, at a blockchain community event in Shanghai, Vitalik gave a speech for more than an hour to Da Hongfei, Chu Xiahu, Xu Yiji and other bigwigs who were sitting off the field with the theme of “The Opportunity of the Second Generation of Digital Cryptocurrency”. . As a result, half of the bosses were drowsy, and the other half were busy trading, and gave roughly the same conclusion to the 19-year-old “Little V” in front of him: This little brat is a liar, just to make money. During the group photo, Vitalik was not only pushed to the back row, but his face was half covered.
Group photo of event attendees, Vitalik is in the back right corner, the picture comes from the Internet
It is not surprising that Vitalik encountered such a cold reception. The Chinese encryption market in 2014 is undergoing rapid changes, and no one has time to pay attention to this young man who appeared out of nowhere.
At the beginning of this year, Wu Gang, the founder of Good Bitcoin, and Wu Jihan from Bitmain made a 10-bit bet: Can the computing power of Bitcoin exceed 1000P by the end of the year? Wu Jihan thought it was impossible, Wu Gang thought it was possible. At that time, the global Bitcoin computing power had just broken through the P level, and it was unrealistic to want to break through a thousand. But after a whole year of soaring prices, everyone in the circle is full of confidence, capital talents are running into the market one after another, and the mining machine business continues to heat up. It seems that nothing can stop the pace of Bitcoin.
In May, the Bitcoin mining machine conference organized by Bao Erye Guo Hongcai was held in Shenzhen. Zhang Nangeng, Li Lin, Xu Mingxing, Xie Jian and other bigwigs in the circle were present. The atmosphere of the conference was very lively, and the whole market was full of vitality. At this time, in the Chinese crypto market, the mainstream voice is Bitcoin mining and trading. They have no knowledge of Ethereum, which is new to the market. Many people even suspect that Ethereum is a project started by Hangzhou people, and Vitalik is an actor hired by them.
The 2014 Bitcoin Mining Machine Conference, Bao Erye Group’s “Hanzi Bureau”, the picture comes from the Internet
In July 2014, Vitalik, who had run into a wall in China, moved the team to Zug, Switzerland, which was later known as the “Encrypted Silicon Valley”, and created the Ethereum Foundation here to be responsible for the development and management of Ethereum. Because there was no money to run the project, the team even put a sticker on the gate saying “Everyone is welcome to sponsor a cup of coffee”.
In order to obtain development funds, the team quickly conducted an Ethereum IC0 pre-sale, and 1 Bitcoin can be exchanged for 2,000 Ethereum. The whole process lasted for 42 days. The total amount of Ethereum sold exceeded 60 million, and a total of 31,531 bitcoins were raised, which was equivalent to about 18.43 million US dollars at the price at that time, which exceeded everyone’s expectations. Although the proceeds from the sale were quickly used to pay off mounting legal debts and pay developers salaries, the fundraising still caused quite a stir in the country, and people began to ask: what exactly is Ethereum? What’s going on? There is also the regret of the old cat that “99% of the people in the domestic bitcoin circle have missed this opportunity”.
Meanwhile, the crypto market is undergoing a subtle shift.
negative market
At the end of 2013, the central bank issued the “Notice on Preventing Bitcoin Risks and the Impact of the Tulip Bubble”, and the wind direction of the entire market began to change. After the crazy skyrocketing, the crypto industry ushered in its first winter baptism, a 3-year bear market that brought Bitcoin back to 900 yuan from the sky-high price of 8,000 yuan. Due to the plummeting price, many people’s beliefs collapsed, and the crowd that once flooded in like a tide began to exit quickly. Amid the wailing, the Chinese bitcoin market began to experience earth-shaking changes.
As the currency price fell, the demand for miners to purchase mining machines dropped sharply. The rapidly shrinking market made it difficult for mining machine manufacturers to continue. Silverfish mining machines and Litecoin mining machines disappeared one after another. The lucrative mining machine business suddenly suddenly It was turned into a massacre with rivers of blood and corpses everywhere. Xiaoqiang Mining Machine, which was once brilliant, also shut down the mine in the second half of 2014 due to continuous losses. According to the founder Xie Jian, “the investment of 6 million at the beginning of the year is now only 2 million.”
The trading platform is also not good-looking. In order to retain investors in the bear market, various companies have begun to look for potential opportunities other than spot trading. In the second half of 2013, Li Lin founded Huobi from the group buying website Renrenzhe, and Xu Xingxing left the position of CTO of Douding.com and founded OKCoin, the predecessor of OKex. In the second year, He Yi, the host of Travel TV, and Changpeng Zhao (CZ), a researcher of Bloomberg Futures, joined OKCoin and formed the famous “iron triangle of currency circle”. Everyone should know what happened next.
OKex founder Xu Mingxing and two Binance founders He Yi and CZ, the picture comes from the Internet
At that time, in order to retain users, OKCoin and Huobi, which successfully completed financing in 2014, successively announced the launch of financial leverage tools such as bitcoin futures services and peer-to-peer lending in order to achieve new growth.
These new ways of playing worked quickly. Prior to this, there was no leveraged trading in the Bitcoin market, and the dominance of price trends was mainly in the hands of mining machine manufacturers. After the emergence of new financial leverage tools, it immediately attracted a large number of speculative funds to re-enter the market to seek arbitrage opportunities, and the price of Bitcoin gradually broke away from the control of manufacturers and began to be priced by the market. This also directly threatens the living space of mining machine manufacturers.
In the second half of the year, the price of Bitcoin was still falling all the way, breaking through a new low, and the competition among miners has entered a white-hot stage. When the living space is shrinking and the sale of mining machines is in a deadlock, Bitmain and Roast Cat have started cloud computing business. In early September, Bitmain took the lead in announcing the launch of the cloud computing service platform “Hashpower Nest”, and the number of user registrations exceeded 10,000 within 30 days. And Xie Jian of Xiaoqiang Mining Machinery has reached a cooperation with Roast Cat to jointly promote the cloud computing power project AMHash. However, the platform soon broke the door of fake computing power, and then the roast cat disappeared, investors lost all their money, and AMHash also became a “pyramid sales scam”.
In the end, Wu Jihan won the 10-bit bitcoin bet, but at this time his mood was much different from the beginning of the year.
Ethereum genesis block mined
On the Ethereum side, development is still going on. At the end of 2014, the first Ethereum developer conference, Devcon-0, was held in Berlin. This conference brought together Ethereum developers from all over the world to discuss various topics of Ethereum technology and some things that can make Ethereum more reliable. , safe plan. In May of the following year, the last test network of Ethereum, Olympic, was launched. In order to better complete the network test, the team launched the “Vgrants” program, and everyone who participated in the test network would receive Ethereum rewards.
After nearly two months of rigorous testing, on July 30, 2015, the first-phase version of Ethereum, Frontier, was released, the first Ethereum block was mined, and the “Infinite Machine” officially began to operate.
The primary version of the Ethereum network was not secure. V began to walk around giving speeches, inviting Ethereum enthusiasts to contribute code, and inviting miners to join the Ethereum network to increase network security while earning ether. With the efforts of Buterin, the Ethereum community has become active. The early Ethereum was very easy to mine. Some Internet cafe owners used idle equipment to mine Ethereum, and some of them accumulated tens of thousands of ETH.
Vitalik has dinner with early Chinese developers such as Shentu Qingchun, the picture comes from the Internet
Although Frontier looks like a public beta at best, it has far exceeded expectations in terms of introducing miners. Because of the strong incentives, miners all over the world began to enter the Ethereum network to mine, including many domestic Bitcoin miners, who improved the computing power of the Ethereum network and the ability of the network to resist attacks. The release of Frontier is the first milestone in the history of Ethereum development.
However, due to the implication of the Bitcoin market, the price of Ethereum has also been very low for a long time, and some investors have not seen returns for a long time, and even questioned Ethereum. At that time, Wanchain founder Lu Xujun went against the mainstream consensus and believed that Ethereum was the future of blockchain technology. The loyal fans of the currency, they all laughed at me, I didn’t dare to say that I invested in Ethereum at that time.”
The low price affects not only investors, but also the Ethereum development team itself. Seeing that the foundation was running out of money, Vitalik came to China again to try his luck.
At this time in China, both the mining circle and the currency circle were overwhelmed and mourning, and Vitalik’s financing in China still encountered great difficulties. But by chance, Vitalik met Xiao Feng, CEO of Wanxiang Blockchain Lab and partner of Fenbushi Capital. As one of the first investors to accept blockchain technology, Xiao Feng immediately purchased ether worth $500,000 at the time. Square. Vitalik said in a later interview: “Wanxiang’s $500,000 at the time became the lifeblood of Ethereum.” The timely rain sent by Xiao Feng gave Vitalik enough funds to pay for developers and continue to develop the Ethereum platform.
In addition to the $500,000 grant, Xiao Feng also leveraged his huge influence in investment and politics to bring broader investment and community connections to Vitalik and Ethereum, and help them communicate with Chinese regulators. Under his promotion, Shen Bo, a partner of Fenbushi Capital, invited Cancer and Gulu to translate the Ethereum white paper. Under the influence of Wanxiang, Xie Jian, the founder of Bitcoin Xiaoqiang Mining Machine, established Ethfan, the largest and earliest Ethereum community in China, in Hangzhou, and contributed a lot of computing power to the early Ethereum.
In October 2019, Dragonfly hosted the Encryption Summit. Dragonfly founder Feng Bo, Meituan CEO Wang Xing, Vitalik and Wanxiang Xiao Feng, pictures from the Internet
From November 9th to November 13th, 2015, the first DEVCON-1 developer conference held by Ethereum was held in London. There were more than 100 speakers and more than 300 developers from all over the world participated. What really benefited Ethereum from this conference was the presence of major companies like SoftBank, IBM, and Microsoft. It is the moment when blockchain technology becomes mainstream, and Ethereum represents the cutting-edge technology of blockchain.
Stabilize the homeland and open up the land: community division, IC0 wave, NVIDIA entry
In the second half of 2015, some domestic trading platforms began to launch Ethereum, among which Li Xiaolai’s Yunbi was the earliest. At that time, Lao Mao, the person in charge of Yunbi, called Li Xiaolai to persuade him to buy more Ethereum, but Li Xiaolai replied that he would not buy it. In his eyes, Ethereum is too complicated, and a complex system means that it is not secure enough, so he feels that Ethereum does not meet his investment logic. At that time, the total market value of Ethereum was less than 70 million US dollars, but after just 3 months, its market value reached 1.1 billion US dollars.
Ethereum roller coaster
After entering 2016, Ethereum gradually ushered in its own spring.
On March 14, 2016, on the day of Pi Day, Ethereum successfully entered the second phase Homestead. Compared with Frontier, Homestead has no obvious technical milestones, but has made improvements in the stability, security and usability of network operation. The release of the Homestead version also means that Ethereum has truly become a safe and reliable network.
At the same time, at this stage, Ethereum began to provide a wallet with a graphical interface, and the ease of use was greatly improved. Ethereum is no longer exclusive to developers, and ordinary people can easily experience and use Ethereum. In addition, in order to prevent miners from boycotting the upgrade of Ethereum from PoW to PoS in the future, the team introduced the difficulty bomb (Difficulty Bomb), which has been mentioned many times in the future, in the mining difficulty design.
After the initial stabilization of the ecology, Vitalik began to pursue the Decentralized Organization (DAO) dream that he hoped to realize as early as in the white paper. In May, The DAO, the first DAO organization in history, launched a public fundraising, raising a record-breaking $150 million in a 28-day crowdfunding, making Ethereum once again the focus of the media in the circle.
Perhaps it was the big tree that attracted the wind, and Ethereum, which had just stabilized its new home, immediately ushered in a blow.
On June 16, The DAO was attacked. Hackers exploited a loophole in the contract code to allow the system to allocate funds repeatedly, stealing more than 3.7 million Ethereum, amounting to about $60 million. After the news came out, the price of Ethereum fell, which directly caused the market value to evaporate by 500 million US dollars. The fact that the contract has not yet allowed users to withdraw their own ether has bought the team time to develop a response. After a brief discussion, the team came up with two options: close The DAO, and everyone including the hacker will bear the loss, or roll back the block through a fork to compensate the DAO investors.
As the leader of Ethereum, Vitalik clearly favored the latter solution, but it also caused fierce quarrels in the community, and the Ethereum community was severely divided. Those who oppose forks insist on the principle that the blockchain cannot be changed, and believe that forks will kill Ethereum, because as long as this fork is passed, new forks may appear at any time in the future. Those who support the hard fork believe that the behavior of hackers has caused harm to many people and allowed them to succeed, which is morally unjustifiable.
Vitalik finally decided to let everyone choose freely. People who insist that the blockchain cannot be changed will stay to maintain and manage the original Ethereum, and those who agree with themselves will accept the fork and modify the security loopholes of the current Ethereum. A few days later, the hard fork plan was announced, and more than 85% of the miners’ computing power supported the hard fork. On July 20, the hard fork was successful, and the Ethereum network and community were split in two, with what is now Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC).
Later, it turned out that the fork did not kill Ethereum, and after the fork was completed, the Ethereum community regrouped and quickly got back on track. But those who questioned the fork were not wrong, and this fork did buy another ticking time bomb on Ethereum’s development path.
On September 19, 2016, the reinvigorated Ethereum held the third developer conference DEVCON-2 in Shanghai. Directly sponsored by Microsoft, the conference discussed some of the network’s upgrades and updates in March, including smart contracts that allow developers to freely create dApps on Ethereum, and later a far-reaching new token standard, ERC20. The arrival of ERC20 has provided great convenience for the blockchain team to issue coins for financing, and its huge potential has far exceeded the expectations of the developers participating in this conference.
DEVCON-2 promotional poster, the picture comes from the Internet
The king of IC0 has become Nvidia’s revenue-generating hero
On May 19, 2017, the price of Ethereum broke through the $100 mark for the first time, and a new round of crypto bull market was imminent. In this bull market, the most impressive thing is the prevalence of IC0.
IC0 (Initial Coin Offering) corresponds to the IPO (Initial Price Offering) in the stock market, and is the main way of financing blockchain projects in the early years. With the help of the ERC-20 standard, IC0s on Ethereum have mushroomed, bringing a large amount of OTC funds to the crypto market. In 2016, there were only dozens of IC0 projects on Ethereum, and the total financing amount was only more than tens of thousands of US dollars. After 17 years, both the number of IC0 and the financing amount have more than doubled.数以百计的区块链项目都借助以太坊的平台来进行融资，在市值排名前100 的加密项目中，94% 都是建立在以太坊之上的。
狂潮中，以太坊的价格一涨再涨，5 月底，以太坊上线Huobi 等国内一线交易平台，价格势如破竹般节节攀升，到了年底，市场上IC0 融资总额超过了60 亿美元，随之而来的各种乱象一发不可收拾。不仅区块链项目发币，就连传统传统互联网以及各种上市公司也要发，发币不仅成了机构融资的渠道，还成了传销骗子的圈钱机器。牛市期间，在媒体刊发一篇介绍IC0 项目的软文价格达到了5 万甚至是10 万，包装IC0、运营社区、代理投资成了投机者们的财富密码。
尽管如此，IC0 依旧让很多人对智能合约有了更深入的认知，以太坊的用户也有了爆发式的增长，地址数量从年初的100 万增长至年底的1800 万。Vitalik 也从「小V」晋升成了「V 神」，常常受邀参加国内的各类会议、圆桌以及AMA。
Vitalik 在中文社区的活动上发表演讲，图片源自网络
同时，以太坊在国内的忠实群体也在不断壮大。除了Ethfans，ECN、以太坊最大矿池之一Sparkpool，以及当时国内流行的imToken 钱包都在持续地为以太坊作出贡献。他们当中有矿工、有交易员，还有早期的「DeFi 传教士」，他们会定期翻译Vitalik 的文章并在中文社区传播，举办研究以太坊最新主题的线下聚会，甚至帮Vitalik 解决在微信上的技术问题。又一次，中国社区挑起了以太坊生态发展的大梁，为它提供了安全的算力和充裕的资金。
而大洋彼岸，对区块链的关注和热情同样高涨，比特币、以太坊、IC0 成了财经媒体每日必报的焦点，生怕自己错过新的内容和潮流。不过在离加密赛场不远的硅谷，媒体的聚光灯却忽视一个看似与区块链毫不沾边的重要人物，他也在这轮牛市里尝到了以太坊起飞的甜头。
从2016 到2018 年，英伟达的市值从140 亿美元增长到了1750 亿美元，这个硅谷巨头的价值在两年时间里翻了十倍之多，惊掉了所有投资者的下巴。仅2017 一年，英伟达的营业收入就达到了97.14 亿美元，环比增长40.58%。作为CEO，黄仁勋对公司的表现十分满意，为此还在自己左臂上搞了一个新的纹身。
乍一看上边的数据，你可能并不会把它与17 年的以太坊甚至是加密市场扯上关系，但其实仔细观察后，我们就能发现二者之间异常紧密的联系。不夸张地说，17 年的加密牛市，为英伟达带来了相当丰厚可观的回报。
18 年英伟达CEO 黄仁勋在显卡发布会上展示自己新的「英伟达纹身」，图片源自网络
在这里我们需要先搞明白，以太坊挖矿和比特币挖矿的不同。
比特币采用的是SHA-256 加密算法，在挖矿的时候，比拼的是算力。因此为了提高算力，普通的CPU 和GPU 并不能满足矿工的竞争需求，专业化程度更高的ASIC 矿机很快就统治了矿机市场。Vitalik 在看到比特币挖矿的这种恶性竞争后，认为以太坊的PoW 机制应该允许普通用户通过自己的台式或笔记本电脑就可以进行一定量的挖矿活动，以去除了对中心化矿池的需要。
因此以太坊采用的是Ethash 加密算法，在挖矿的过程中，需要读取内存并存储DAG 文件。由于计算机每次读取内存的带宽都是有限的，而现有的设备又很难在这个技术上有突破，所以无论矿工怎么提高算力，挖矿效率都不会得到显著提升，这也就让以太坊的PoW 机制有了「抗ASIC 性」。
加密算法的不同，使得比特币和以太坊在挖矿设备和算力规模上都存在着很大的差异。比特币的ASIC 矿机基本被几家厂商垄断，矿工只能从市场上购买，而虽说以太坊的显卡矿机也有专门的厂商生产，但大部分仍然是矿工根据自己的需求进行DIY，从市场上购买配件然后组装。
也就是说，这个全球最大的去中心化开发网络，给黄仁勋的显卡销售创造了一个无比巨大的市场。
作为显卡生产的绝对龙头，英伟达是不会错过这块又大又甜的蛋糕的。2017 年，见以太坊交易和挖矿日渐活跃，英伟达是立马针对以太坊挖矿，推出了取消输出接口的GTX 1060 6GB 显卡，首批供货就是30 万块，后来甚至停掉了正常带输出显卡的市场供给。年底又有针对性的优化了显卡的性能，推出了P106、P104 等一系列算力更强、价格更低的专业「矿卡」，这个系列的显卡连IO 输出接口都没有，用户甚至没法用它来打游戏。
为了抢占挖矿市场的芯片供给，英伟达甚至不惜与自己的头号死敌AMD 展开密切合作，加速「挖矿产品」的研发与生产。然而，与生产线上的风骚操作相反，英伟达在财务和公关上却极力摆开与以太坊的距离。2017 年97 亿美元的巨额营收中，55 亿来自游戏营销，占比超50%。
但事实上，游戏玩家所贡献的收入占比在16 年就已经开始势微。在Steam 2022 年8 月最新一期硬件报告中显示，这张诞生于2016 年的显卡GTX 1060 依旧是平台使用人数最多的显卡，占平台总用户的6.6%。换句话说，在自己的财报中，英伟达把矿工购买显卡带来的收入，大手一挥统统进了游戏营销中去。
Steam 2022 年6 月硬件和软件调查，图片源自Steam
但聪明的人还是揭穿了黄仁勋的小把戏。17 至18 年财报公布后不久，Susquehanna 就以虚拟货币相关收入占营收超10% 为由，下调了英伟达的股价预期。2022 年5 月，SEC 更是发表声明，称英伟达就加密挖矿对公司游戏业务显卡销售影响上的信息披露不充分，起诉后与英伟达和解。当然，这些都是后话了。
直到2018 年，英伟达CFO 才公开披露了自己依靠销售「矿卡」赚钱的事实，而黄仁勋则是在言语中，透露出了自己对挖矿行业的「兴趣」：「英伟达实际上对用户购买GPU 的用途有所把控…… 我们必须留意它（用户买显卡来挖矿）的存在，并保证充足的库存来应对」。
但好景不长，英伟达入场不久后，加密市场就迎来了又一场寒冬。
2018 年1 月14 日，加密货币市值到达峰值，以太坊价格达到1,418 美元，日交易量近百亿美元，市值从17 年初的11 亿美元增长至1350 亿美元。但在随后不久的一个清晨，整个市场开始骤然下跌，并从此一蹶不振。到18 年4 月，以太坊的价格已经跌落400 美元。
又一次，矿工们纷纷抛售显卡、跑步离场，市面上的显卡供过于求，导致库存积压，价格远低于正常售价。此时，专为矿工打造的P104 显卡已经无人购买，英伟达不得不把芯片转向消费者市场，产品线和下一代产品的定价体系受到了严重冲击。公司第四季度财报的收入更是瀑布式跳水，股价更是不堪入目，一度跌至160 美元。英伟达首次尝到了加密寒冬的苦头。
PoW 问题初显，网络升级屡次延迟
和仍然有收入的英伟达相比，以太坊的情况显得更加惨烈。
熊市下，以太坊的价格最低跌到了80 美元，在市值排名上甚至一度低于了XRP，市场上充斥着质疑的声音。在2017 年牛市期间，以太坊上出现了一款曾经引爆市场的dApp 游戏CryptoKitties，尽管只有一些简单的操作，但这款游戏却挤爆了以太坊网络，使得其他应用基本无法使用，Gas 费用也变得异常离谱。此后，针对以太坊扩容的讨论一下多了起来，但团队计划的君士坦丁堡升级却一再延迟。
君士坦丁堡升级是以太坊进入第三阶段Metropolis 的关键一步。为了让以太坊成功进入Metropolis 阶段，团队设计了两步走的方案，通过拜占庭和君士坦丁堡两次硬分叉实现。第一步的拜占庭计划在2017 年10 月16 日成功完成分叉，它主要调整了区块难度评估公式、减少了挖矿奖励，并将引爆「难度炸弹」的事件推迟了1 年。而第二部君士坦丁堡分叉本该于18 年初完成，但却由于市场等多种因素一直未能实施。面对这种情况，Vitalik 也被人指责为是不专心搞开发的以太坊「推销者」。
2018 年9 月，比特币核心开发者Jeremy Rubin 在TechCrunch 上发表了名为《ETH 的崩溃无法避免》的文章，称以太坊无法大量承载去中心化应用，即便以太坊网络存活下来也没有任何价值。此番言立刻论造成以太坊价格进一步下挫，许多以太坊上的项目甚至开始向EOS、波场等公链生态转移。在价格影响下，以太坊的全网算力也开始收缩，下跌近20％。
Jeremy 的这篇文章，也给以太坊社区敲响了警钟。
在回应Jeremy 的Reddit 博客中，Vitalik 承认了以太坊的问题所在，他写道：「如果以太坊不改变，Jeremy Rubin 的言论就可能成真」。紧接着，12 月Vitalik 又在推特上呼吁，未来采用PoS 分片技术的区块链「效率将提高数千倍」。
Vitalik 回复Jeremy 的Reddit 博客，图片源自网络
最终，在2018 年底的核心开发者会议上，以太坊开发团队成员就分叉的激活时间达成了一致。君士坦丁堡硬分叉在几经推迟之后，于2019 年2 月28 日，在区块高度达到7,280,000 时被成功触发。
君士坦丁堡升级启动了以太坊的「冰河时代」，在以太坊网络创建区块的难度开始不停地提升，直至减慢到完全停止。同时团队再次减少了挖矿的区块奖励，并将「难度炸弹」向后推迟了500 万个区块。这次升级的重中之重在于区块奖励的减少。随着挖矿收益的减少，矿机厂商和矿工们的机会成本增加，团队希望矿工在以太坊上挖矿的性价比会逐渐低于其他币种，以此迫使以太坊的矿工转而去挖ETC 等PoW 公链。
君士坦丁堡升级成功后，团队不再停歇，接连制定了进入Serenity，即我们今天以太坊2.0 的方案，还是和此前一样，将分「伊斯坦布尔」（该步骤同样被囊括在Metropolis 三阶段中）和「以太坊1.X」两步走。伊斯坦布尔硬分叉于2019 年12 月8 日成功完成，这次升级的关键词是成本和速度，降低了Gas 成本，并将TPS 上限提升至3000。
伊斯坦布尔的升级成功，意味着Metropolis「大都会第三阶段」顺利实施，以太坊向2.0 的转变迈出了重要一步。
宁静前的躁动：王者归来，接下来是什么？
以太坊进入2020 年后的故事我们就非常熟悉了。DeFi Summer 的到来掀起了加密市场又一轮强劲的牛市，数月内以太坊上的DeFi 总锁仓量就达到了305 亿美金，出现了借贷、DEX、保险、理财等各种协议和应用。随着NBA Top Shot、BAYC 等NFT 的爆火，以太坊的交易体量不断膨胀。紧跟着是Layer 2、DAO 等多个赛道的轮番增长。
以太坊自己也迎来了新的拓展机会。2020 年11 月4 日，以太坊2.0 存款合约正式部署，随后Lido 等一众以太坊2.0 流动性质押协议，为以太坊PoS 网络吸引了大量质押资产。2021 年8 月，以太坊伦敦升级完成，包括EIP-1559 等5 个协议，进一步优化和改进了以太坊网络的参与体验和机制，再次削弱了矿工的收益，为以太坊迈进2.0 做好了准备。
然而有意思的是，越在「靠近宁静」之际，社区躁动的声音却越大。毫无疑问，躁动仍然是从显卡挖矿市场开始。
再次出师的英伟达
伴随新一轮牛市的开启，以太坊也迎来了第二次矿潮，英伟达再次出动，顶着全球缺芯潮和玩家需求的压力，为显卡矿工们开发了CMP 系列矿卡。为了获得最高挖矿效率，CMP 直接舍弃了图形处理功能。后来迫于压力，才宣布新推出的GeForce RTX 30 系列显卡会限制挖矿性能，使得显卡价格再度高涨。更有意思的是，尽管新推出的Lite Hash Rate 显卡限制了挖矿性能，英伟达却在2021 年3 月份放出了一款开发者驱动程序，不到一年时间，各个版本的LHR 显卡都被不同程度地破解。
黄仁勋展示RTX 30 系显卡，图片源自网络
此时的以太坊价格已经逼近3000 美元，PoS 合并在上涨的价格面前不再被看作是潜在的威胁。黄仁勋成了加密货币的全力倡导者，公开对外表示自己对市场热潮和区块链价值的长期看好。矿工们也买账，显卡一抢而空，据知情人透露，一些大的矿场甚至是直接向英伟达提货，都不走一二级市场。
一时间，显卡价格上涨成了央视、自媒体反复报道的内容。据机构报告，2021 年，依靠向矿工出售显卡，英伟达大约创造了30 亿美元的收入。同年，英伟达的市值突破了5000 亿美元，次年2 月的财年财报里，公司的全年收入更是创下了269 亿美元的纪录，同比增长61%，实现连续7 个季度的营收上涨。
但到了五月，形势发生了急剧的变化。5 月19 日，加密市场再度跳水，市场开始转熊。本月，英伟达发布了最新财年的第一季度财报，利润却环比下降46%，8 月发布的第二季度财报中，挖矿芯片CMP 相关业务营收更是同比下降66%。2022 年的英伟达，又一次收到了加密市场的「连累」。
很快，大量二手显卡流入市场，直接与新品形成竞争，去库存成了让英伟达颇为头疼的一件事。为此英伟达鲜有地调低了RTX30 系显卡的官方价格。最让英伟达措手不及的，是那些直接供给矿场的货，被商户改造成了独立显卡，流回到了市场上冲击现有显卡的库存销售。
本次显卡抛售的主要原因，除了价格的下跌外，就是即将到来的以太坊2.0，它意味着曾经庞大的显卡挖矿市场将不复存在。据估计，在以太坊转向PoS 后，会有超过三分之一的消费显卡市场彻底消失。
而随着占以太坊全网算力33% 的Ethermine 矿池宣布将结束以太坊PoW 挖矿矿池业务，GPU 显卡挖矿的黄金时代也宣告结束。以太坊矿工们开始各自寻找出路，有躺平观望的，有的折价卖掉了手上所有的显卡，还有的凭借挖矿获得的收益开始转型做Web3 应用的。
未来8 年
PoS 转换对以太坊网络的重要性，不言而喻，但这就是以太坊的最终形态了么？当然不是。
以太坊还有一系列问题没有解决，比如PoS 的抗审查性，这是区块链根基，现在开始被质疑；比如性能，Rollups 能让以太坊的性能提升到什么水平；比如有了Rollups 还是否需要分片技术等等，这些都是问题。
以太坊在2014 年的白皮书里就写了要转型PoS，谁想到一等就是8 年，而上面那些问题，需要每一个生态成员一点一点摸索，去期待下一个8 年。
以太坊PoW 已成为历史，Vitalik、以太坊开发团队以及矿工们八年来的功过是非。我们用文字记录下来，and then move on。
参考文献：
《 A Prehistory of the Ethereum Protocol 》
《 The Ethereum Launch Process 》
《 Why Vitalik Buterin is Known as the ‘V God’ in China 》
《 以太坊五年》
《比特币矿机在中国的全部发展历程一览》
《英伟达挖矿史：「把这一代最优秀的工程师聚在一起，然后研究挖比特币」 》
来源：知乎www.zhihu.com
作者： 律动BlockBeats
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