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.
 
And this is where the downsides of state sharding comes in currently. All shards in Zilliqa have access to the complete state. Yes the state size (0.1 GB at the moment) grows and all of the nodes need to store it but it also means that they don’t need to shop around for information available on other shards. Requiring more communication and adding more complexity. Computer science knowledge and/or developer knowledge required links if you want to dig further: Scilla - language grammar Scilla - Foundations for Verifiable Decentralised Computations on a Blockchain Gas Accounting NUS x Zilliqa: Smart contract language workshop
 
Easier to follow links on programming Scilla https://learnscilla.com/home Ivan on Tech
 
Roadmap / Zilliqa 2.0
 
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!

Author: Gamals Ahmed, CoinEx Business Ambassador
https://preview.redd.it/5bqakdqgl3g51.jpg?width=865&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b709794863977eb6554e3919b9e00ca750e3e704
A decentralized storage network that transforms cloud storage into an account market. Miners obtain the integrity of the original protocol by providing data storage and / or retrieval. On the contrary, customers pay miners to store or distribute data and retrieve it.
Filecoin announced, that there will be more delays before its main network is officially launched.
Filecoin developers postponed the release date of their main network to late July to late August 2020.
As mentioned in a recent announcement, the Filecoin team said that the initiative completed the first round of the internal protocol security audit. Platform developers claim that the results of the review showed that they need to make several changes to the protocol’s code base before performing the second stage of the software testing process.
Created by Protocol Labs, Filecoin was developed using File System (IPFS), which is a peer-to-peer data storage network. Filecoin will allow users to trade storage space in an open and decentralized market.
Filecoin developers implemented one of the largest cryptocurrency sales in 2017. They have privately obtained over $ 200 million from professional or accredited investors, including many institutional investors.
The main network was slated to launch last month, but in February 2020, the Philly Queen development team delayed the release of the main network between July 15 and July 17, 2020.
They claimed that the outbreak of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) in China was the main cause of the delay. The developers now say that they need more time to solve the problems found during a recent codecase audit.
The Filecoin team noted the following:
“We have drafted a number of protocol changes to ensure that building our major network launch is safe and economically sound.” The project developers will add them to two different implementations of Filecoin (Lotus and go-filecoin) in the coming weeks.
Filecoin developers conducted a survey to allow platform community members to cast their votes on three different launch dates for Testnet Phase 2 and mainnet.
The team reported that the community gave their votes. Based on the vote results, the Filecoin team announced a “conservative” estimate that the second phase of the network test should begin by May 11, 2020. The main Filecoin network may be launched sometime between July 20 and August 21, 2020.
The updates to the project can be found on the Filecoin Road Map.
Filecoin developers stated:
“This option will make us get the most important protocol changes first, and then implement the rest as protocol updates during testnet.” Filecoin is back down from the final test stage.
Another filecoin decentralized storage network provider launched its catalytic test network, the final stage of the storage network test that supports the blockchain.
In a blog post on her website, Filecoin said she will postpone the last test round until August. The company also announced a calibration period from July 20 to August 3 to allow miners to test their mining settings and get an idea of how competition conditions affected their rewards.
Filecoin had announced earlier last month that the catalytic testnet test would precede its flagship launch. The delay in the final test also means that the company has returned the main launch window between August 31 and September 21.
Despite the lack of clear incentives for miners and multiple delays, Filecoin has succeeded in attracting huge interest, especially in China. Investors remained highly speculating on the network’s mining hardware and its premium price.
Mining in Filecoin
In most blockchain protocols, “miners” are network participants who do the work necessary to promote and maintain the blockchain. To provide these services, miners are compensated in the original cryptocurrency.
Mining in Filecoin works completely differently — instead of contributing to computational power, miners contribute storage capacity to use for dealing with customers looking to store data.
Filecoin will contain several types of miners:
Storage miners responsible for storing files and data on the network. Miners retrieval, responsible for providing quick tubes for file recovery. Miners repair to be carried out.
Storage miners are the heart of the network. They earn Filecoin by storing data for clients, and computerizing cipher directories to check storage over time. The probability of earning the reward reward and transaction fees is proportional to the amount of storage that the Miner contributes to the Filecoin network, not the hash power.
Retriever miners are the veins of the network. They earn Filecoin by winning bids and mining fees for a specific file, which is determined by the market value of the said file size. Miners bandwidth and recovery / initial transaction response time will determine its ability to close recovery deals on the network.
The maximum bandwidth of the recovery miners will determine the total amount of deals that it can enter into.
In the current implementation, the focus is mostly on storage miners, who sell storage capacity for FIL.

Hardware recommendations

The current system specifications recommended for running the miner are:

• CPU 8+
• NVIDIA-manufactured GPU (to be expanded).
• SSD drive designated as large buffer (512GB +).
• Large amount of RAM for data replication account (128GB +)

Compared to the hardware requirements for running a validity checker, these standards are much higher — although they definitely deserve it. Since these will not increase in the presumed future, the money spent on Filecoin mining hardware will provide users with many years of reliable service, and they pay themselves many times. Think of investing as a small business for cloud storage. To launch a model on the current data hosting model, it will cost millions of dollars in infrastructure and logistics to get started. With Filecoin, you can do the same for a few thousand dollars.
Proceed to mining
Deals are the primary function of the Filecoin network, and it represents an agreement between a client and miners for a “storage” contract.
Once the customer decides to have a miner to store based on the available capacity, duration and price required, he secures sufficient funds in a linked portfolio to cover the total cost of the deal. The deal is then published once the mine accepts the storage agreement. By default, all Filecoin miners are set to automatically accept any deal that meets their criteria, although this can be disabled for miners who prefer to organize their deals manually.
After the deal is published, the customer prepares the data for storage and then transfers it to the miner. Upon receiving all the data, the miner fills in the data in a sector, closes it, and begins to provide proofs to the chain. Once the first confirmation is obtained, the customer can make sure the data is stored correctly, and the deal has officially started.
Throughout the deal, the miner provides continuous proofs to the chain. Clients gradually pay with money they previously closed. If there is missing or late evidence, the miner is punished. More information about this can be found in the Runtime, Cut and Penalties section of this page.
At Filecoin, miners earn two different types of rewards for their efforts: storage fees and reward prevention.
Storage fees are the fees that customers pay regularly after reaching a deal, in exchange for storing data. This fee is automatically deposited into the withdrawal portfolio associated with miners while they continue to perform their duties over time, and is locked for a short period upon receipt.
Block rewards are large sums given to miners calculated on a new block. Unlike storage fees, these rewards do not come from a linked customer; Instead, the new FIL “prints” the network as an inflationary and incentive measure for miners to develop the chain. All active miners on the network have a chance to get a block bonus, their chance to be directly proportional to the amount of storage space that is currently being contributed to the network.
Duration of operation, cutting and penalties
“Slashing” is a feature found in most blockchain protocols, and is used to punish miners who fail to provide reliable uptime or act maliciously against the network.
In Filecoin, miners are susceptible to two different types of cut: storage error cut, unanimously reduce error.
Storage Error Reduction is a term used to include a wider range of penalties, including error fees, sector penalties, and termination fees. Miners must pay these penalties if they fail to provide reliability of the sector or decide to leave the network voluntarily.
An error fee is a penalty that a miner incurs for each non-working day. Sector punishment: A penalty incurred by a miner of a disrupted sector for which no error was reported before the WindowPoSt inspection.
The sector will pay an error fee after the penalty of the sector once the error is discovered.
Termination Fee: A penalty that a miner incurs when a sector is voluntary or involuntarily terminated and removed from the network.
Cutting consensus error is the penalty that a miner incurs for committing consensus errors. This punishment applies to miners who have acted maliciously against the network consensus function.
Filecoin miners
Eight of the top 10 Felticoin miners are Chinese investors or companies, according to the blockchain explorer, while more companies are selling cloud mining contracts and distributed file sharing system hardware. CoinDesk’s Wolfe Chao wrote: “China’s craze for Filecoin may have been largely related to the long-standing popularity of crypto mining in the country overall, which is home to about 65% of the computing power on Bitcoin at discretion.”
With Filecoin approaching the launch of the mainnet blocknet — after several delays since the $ 200 million increase in 2017 — Chinese investors are once again speculating strongly about network mining devices and their premium prices.
Since Protocol Labs, the company behind Filecoin, released its “Test Incentives” program on June 9 that was scheduled to start in a week’s time, more than a dozen Chinese companies have started selling cloud mining contracts and hardware — despite important details such as economics Mining incentives on the main network are still endless.
Sales volumes to date for each of these companies can range from half a million to tens of millions of dollars, according to self-reported data on these platforms that CoinDesk has watched and interviews with several mining hardware manufacturers.
Filecoin’s goal is to build a distributed storage network with token rewards to spur storage hosting as a way to drive wider adoption. Protocol Labs launched a test network in December 2019. But the tokens mined in the testing environment so far are not representative of the true silicon coin that can be traded when the main network is turned on. Moreover, the mining incentive economics on testnet do not represent how final block rewards will be available on the main network.
However, data from Blockecoin’s blocknetin testnet explorers show that eight out of 10 miners with the most effective mining force on testnet are currently Chinese miners.
These eight miners have about 15 petabytes (PB) of effective storage mining power, accounting for more than 85% of the total test of 17.9 petable. For the context, 1 petabyte of hard disk storage = 1000 terabytes (terabytes) = 1 million gigabytes (GB).
Filecoin craze in China may be closely related to the long-standing popularity of crypt mining in the country overall, which is home to about 65% of the computing power on Bitcoin by estimation. In addition, there has been a lot of hype in China about foreign exchange mining since 2018, as companies promote all types of devices when the network is still in development.
“Encryption mining has always been popular in China,” said Andy Tien, co-founder of 1475, one of several mining hardware manufacturers in Philquin supported by prominent Chinese video indicators such as Fenbushi and Hashkey Capital.
“Even though the Velikoyen mining process is more technologically sophisticated, the idea of mining using hard drives instead of specialized machines like Bitcoin ASIC may be a lot easier for retailers to understand,” he said.
Meanwhile, according to Feixiaohao, a Chinese service comparable to CoinMarketCap, nearly 50 Chinese crypto exchanges are often somewhat unknown with some of the more well-known exchanges including Gate.io and Biki — have listed trading pairs for Filecoin currency contracts for USDT.
In bitcoin mining, at the current difficulty level, one segment per second (TH / s) fragmentation rate is expected to generate around 0.000008 BTC within 24 hours. The higher the number of TH / s, the greater the number of bitcoins it should be able to produce proportionately. But in Filecoin, the efficient mining force of miners depends on the amount of data stamped on the hard drive, not the total size of the hard drive.
To close data in the hard drive, the Filecoin miner still needs processing power, i.e. CPU or GPU as well as RAM. More powerful processors with improved software can confine data to the hard drive more quickly, so miners can combine more efficient mining energy faster on a given day.
As of this stage, there appears to be no transparent way at the network level for retail investors to see how much of the purchased hard disk drive was purchased which actually represents an effective mining force.
The U.S.-based Labs Protocol was behind Filecoin’s initial coin offer for 2017, which raised an astonishing $ 200 million.
This was in addition to a $ 50 million increase in private investment supported by notable venture capital projects including Sequoia, Anderson Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. CoinDk’s parent company, CoinDk, has also invested in Protocol Labs.
After rounds of delay, Protocol Protocols said in September 2019 that a testnet launch would be available around December 2019 and the main network would be rolled out in the first quarter of 2020.
The test started as promised, but the main network has been delayed again and is now expected to launch in August 2020. What is Filecoin mining process?
Filecoin mainly consists of three parts: the storage market (the chain), the blockecin Filecoin, and the search market (under the chain). Storage and research market in series and series respectively for security and efficiency. For users, the storage frequency is relatively low, and the security requirements are relatively high, so the storage process is placed on the chain. The retrieval frequency is much higher than the storage frequency when there is a certain amount of data. Given the performance problem in processing data on the chain, the retrieval process under the chain is performed. In order to solve the security issue of payment in the retrieval process, Filecoin adopts the micro-payment strategy. In simple terms, the process is to split the document into several copies, and every time the user gets a portion of the data, the corresponding fee is paid. Types of mines corresponding to Filecoin’s two major markets are miners and warehousers, among whom miners are primarily responsible for storing data and block packages, while miners are primarily responsible for data query. After the stable operation of the major Filecoin network in the future, the mining operator will be introduced, who is the main responsible for data maintenance.
In the initial release of Filecoin, the request matching mechanism was not implemented in the storage market and retrieval market, but the takeover mechanism was adopted. The three main parts of Filecoin correspond to three processes, namely the stored procedure, retrieval process, packaging and reward process. The following figure shows the simplified process and the income of the miners:
The Filecoin mining process is much more complicated, and the important factor in determining the previous mining profit is efficient storage. Effective storage is a key feature that distinguishes Filecoin from other decentralized storage projects. In Filecoin’s EC consensus, effective storage is similar to interest in PoS, which determines the likelihood that a miner will get the right to fill, that is, the proportion of miners effectively stored in the entire network is proportional to final mining revenue.
It is also possible to obtain higher effective storage under the same hardware conditions by improving the mining algorithm. However, the current increase in the number of benefits that can be achieved by improving the algorithm is still unknown.
It seeks to promote mining using Filecoin Discover
Filecoin announced Filecoin Discover — a step to encourage miners to join the Filecoin network. According to the company, Filecoin Discover is “an ever-growing catalog of numerous petabytes of public data covering literature, science, art, and history.” Miners interested in sharing can choose which data sets they want to store, and receive that data on a drive at a cost. In exchange for storing this verified data, miners will earn additional Filecoin above the regular block rewards for storing data. Includes the current catalog of open source data sets; ENCODE, 1000 Genomes, Project Gutenberg, Berkley Self-driving data, more projects, and datasets are added every day.
Ian Darrow, Head of Operations at Filecoin, commented on the announcement:
“Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. This data includes 294 billion emails, 500 million tweets and 64 billion messages on social media. But it is also climatology reports, disease tracking maps, connected vehicle coordinates and much more. It is extremely important that we maintain data that will serve as the backbone for future research and discovery”.
Miners who choose to participate in Filecoin Discover may receive hard drives pre-loaded with verified data, as well as setup and maintenance instructions, depending on the company. The Filecoin team will also host the Slack (fil-Discover-support) channel where miners can learn more.
Filecoin got its fair share of obstacles along the way. Last month Filecoin announced a further delay before its main network was officially launched — after years of raising funds.
In late July QEBR (OTC: QEBR) announced that it had ceded ownership of two subsidiaries in order to focus all of the company’s resources on building blockchain-based mining operations.
The QEBR technology team previously announced that it has proven its system as a Filecoin node valid with CPU, GPU, bandwidth and storage compatibility that meets all IPFS guidelines. The QEBR test system is connected to the main Filecoin blockchain and the already mined filecoin coin has already been tested.
“The disclosure of Sheen Boom and Jihye will allow our team to focus only on the upcoming global launch of Filecoin. QEBR branch, Shenzhen DZD Digital Technology Ltd. (“ DZD “), has a strong background in blockchain development, extraction Data, data acquisition, data processing, data technology research. We strongly believe Filecoin has the potential to be a leading blockchain-based cryptocurrency and will make every effort to make QEBR an important player when Mainecoin mainnet will be launched soon”.
IPFS and Filecoin
Filecoin and IPFS are complementary protocols for storing and sharing data in a decentralized network. While users are not required to use Filecoin and IPFS together, the two combined are working to resolve major failures in the current web infrastructure.
IPFS
It is an open source protocol that allows users to store and transmit verifiable data with each other. IPFS users insist on data on the network by installing it on their own device, to a third-party cloud service (known as Pinning Services), or through community-oriented systems where a group of individual IPFS users share resources to ensure the content stays live.
The lack of an integrated catalytic mechanism is the challenge Filecoin hopes to solve by allowing users to catalyze long-term distributed storage at competitive prices through the storage contract market, while maintaining the efficiency and flexibility that the IPFS network provides.
Using IPFS
In IPFS, the data is hosted by the required data installation nodes. For data to persist while the user node is offline, users must either rely on their other peers to install their data voluntarily or use a central install service to store data.
Peer-to-peer reliance caching data may be a good thing as one or multiple organizations share common files on an internal network, or where strong social contracts can be used to ensure continued hosting and preservation of content in the long run. Most users in an IPFS network use an installation service.
Using Filecoin
The last option is to install your data in a decentralized storage market, such as Filecoin. In Filecoin’s structure, customers make regular small payments to store data when a certain availability, while miners earn those payments by constantly checking the integrity of this data, storing it, and ensuring its quick recovery. This allows users to motivate Filecoin miners to ensure that their content will be live when it is needed, a distinct advantage of relying only on other network users as required using IPFS alone.
Filecoin, powered by IPFS
It is important to know that Filecoin is built on top of IPFS. Filecoin aims to be a very integrated and seamless storage market that takes advantage of the basic functions provided by IPFS, they are connected to each other, but can be implemented completely independently of each other. Users do not need to interact with Filecoin in order to use IPFS.
Some advantages of sharing Filecoin with IPFS:

• Filecoin and IPFS CIDs share hash specifications.
• Use libp2p by Filecoin nodes to create secure connections with each other.
• Messaging between nodes and cluster propagation is facilitated in Filecoin by libp2p pubsub.
• IPLD use for blockchain data structures.
• Use Graphsync to transfer data between nodes.

Of all the decentralized storage projects, Filecoin is undoubtedly the most interested, and IPFS has been running stably for two years, fully demonstrating the strength of its core protocol.
Filecoin’s ability to obtain market share from traditional central storage depends on end-user experience and storage price. Currently, most Filecoin nodes are posted in the IDC room. Actual deployment and operation costs are not reduced compared to traditional central cloud storage, and the storage process is more complicated.
PoRep and PoSt, which has a large number of proofs of unknown operation, are required to cause the actual storage cost to be so, in the early days of the release of Filecoin. The actual cost of storing data may be higher than the cost of central cloud storage, but the initial storage node may reduce the storage price in order to obtain block rewards, which may result in the actual storage price lower than traditional central cloud storage.
In the long term, Filecoin still needs to take full advantage of its P2P storage, convert storage devices from specialization to civil use, and improve its algorithms to reduce storage costs without affecting user experience. The storage problem is an important problem to be solved in the blockchain field, so a large number of storage projects were presented at the 19th Web3 Summit. IPFS is an important part of Web3 visibility. Its development will affect the development of Web3 to some extent. Likewise, Web3 development somewhat determines the future of IPFS. Filecoin is an IPFS-based storage class project initiated by IPFS. There is no doubt that he is highly expected.
Resources :

1. https://www.coindesk.com/filecoin-pushes-back-final-testing-phase-announces-calibration-period-for-miners
2. https://docs.filecoin.io/mine/#types-of-miners https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/inside-the-craze-for-filecoin-crypto-mining-in-china-2020-07-12؟amp
3. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/qebr-streamlines-holdings-to-concentrate-on-filecoin-development-and-mining-301098731.html
4. https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2020/05/161200-filecoin-seeks-to-boost-mining-with-filecoin-discove
5. https://zephyrnet.com/filecoin-seeks-to-boost-mining-with-filecoin-discove
6. https://docs.filecoin.io/introduction/ipfs-and-filecoin/#filecoin-powered-by-ipfs

So I'm thinking about mining bitcoin in college, but I'm not sure on where to start. Since electricity is free in college dorms I dont need to worry about it's energy efficiency. Does anyone have a good suggestion on a bitcoin miner that I can buy that has a lot of computing power? I'm a beginner in bitcoin mining but I'm ready to invest a lot of money and time into it as a way of getting some extra cash (and for fun).

So I was looking around Amazon IT for a new GPU and to see how the virus affected prices, and I stumbled upon a GTX 1080 G1 from Gigabyte that's used and in like new conditions for 350 euros; now, that is an insane price, but there's a high chance that the card has been used for mining. And there is also an AMP! edition from EVGA for around the same price. What worries me is that they're both sold from the same seller (a certain Jeran GmbH), so it's more than likely that it's been used intensely for bitcoin mining. I know that I already pretty much gave myself the answer, but should I consider this card as a viable option for an upgrade? (It's an amazing deal ngl)
Link for the G1: https://www.amazon.it/Gigabyte-GV-N1080WF3OC-8GD-B-Scheda-Grafica-GDDR5X/dp/B01J66BMXC/ref=sr_1_1?__mk_it_IT=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=gtx+1080&qid=1586738830&sr=8-1
Link for the AMP!: https://www.amazon.it/Zotac-GeForce-1080-GDDR5-Experience/dp/B01GCAVRSU/ref=sr_1_2?__mk_it_IT=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=gtx%2B1080&qid=1586738830&sr=8-2&th=1
​

Just want to share this "phenomenon" I've noticed for quite sometime. When my brother's mainboard failed, we thought of selling whatever that's left and upgrade to Ryzen. But it would never hurt to do another check, so I went on my wife's favourite online shopping platform to search for one. And voila, I found a B85 mainboard for ~$40.
Their recommendation engine quickly kicked in. To my surprise, "8GB DDR3" is one of the most popular search keywords. This means a lot of people were looking for them, so Haswell builds must be popular. I know mine is still running well.
So I decided to calculate the cost for a whole Haswell-based build, and this is what it cost to have an extremely decent gaming machine:

• Chip: i5-4460, $80. Cost the most, obviously.
• RAM: 2x8GB stick, $40. Advertised to be "HyperX Fury" or "Kingston" but definitely isn't. But they all come with 3 year warranty...
• Mainboard: B85 for $40. More adventurous people can even go for a H41 at $20. Yes, 20 bucks.
• PSU: "Antec" 450W for $15.
• GPU: HIS RX580 8GB for $75.
• Case: Xigmantek something for $25.

Total, minus HDD/SDD, monitor or mouse/kb: $275
There are, of course, a lot of risks:

• The RAM is counterfeit. But I've 2 of these "counterfeit" for my build and so far haven't got any problem with them.
• Mainboard: You never know when it'll break. The seller warranty is often only 1 month.
• PSU: There are reports of 300W PSU with 450W stamp be pasted over. Of course you need to complain to the seller and the e-com site.
• GPU: Obviously it came from a mining farm. The seller warranty is 1 month. There are, however, more comforting options. For example a MSI whose warranty will not be voided by farming cost ~$120. I had been using a ASUS RX 570 4GB (mining) for quite some time, and those are still working well.

​
And yes this build ins't going to win any speed contest, and the RX580 most likely gets bottlenecked by the CPU... But the beauty of this is, for $275, people can get a PC that can play pretty much ALL the AAA titles decently without breaking the bank. On my PC with similar configuration, I often get ~70-80fps out of TD1 and BF1. Even at Ultra in BF1, in smaller maps, I can still get ~60fps.
This is something I don't think has ever happened. I don't recall being able to play AAA games on a $275 build. Thank you, Bitcoin crash.
Edit: I just checked again and the price of the GPU went up, the cheapest RX 580 8GB now goes for ~$75. However $50 can still net you a RX 570 4GB, in this build the difference isn’t quite noticeable

I've had this card for a couple years. I bought it used off ebay for cheap.
I used to slightly overclock the card without issues when I first got it, but since I started playing a couple games again it crashes without an underclock. After playing around with Firestorm I found I have to underclock it by about -200 MHz on GPU and about -900 MHz Memory to get the card stable, this is nearly all it will allow on the sliders. If I don't, on benchmark tests it freezes up or artifacts if I don't do enough Memory underclock. Games run for some time then eventually crash or freeze if I don't...underclocked has no issues.
Any idea what may be causing this, card just dying? I'm sure it was used for bitcoin mining originally so that wouldn't shock me.

Introduction

Dear Groestlers, it goes without saying that 2020 has been a difficult time for millions of people worldwide. The groestlcoin team would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone our best to everyone coping with the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19. Let it bring out the best in us all and show that collectively, we can conquer anything.
The centralised banks and our national governments are facing unprecedented times with interest rates worldwide dropping to record lows in places. Rest assured that this can only strengthen the fundamentals of all decentralised cryptocurrencies and the vision that was seeded with Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper over 10 years ago. Despite everything that has been thrown at us this year, the show must go on and the team will still progress and advance to continue the momentum that we have developed over the past 6 years.
In addition to this, we'd like to remind you all that this is Groestlcoin's 6th Birthday release! In terms of price there have been some crazy highs and lows over the years (with highs of around $2.60 and lows of $0.000077!), but in terms of value– Groestlcoin just keeps getting more valuable! In these uncertain times, one thing remains clear – Groestlcoin will keep going and keep innovating regardless. On with what has been worked on and completed over the past few months.

UPDATED - Groestlcoin Core 2.18.2

This is a major release of Groestlcoin Core with many protocol level improvements and code optimizations, featuring the technical equivalent of Bitcoin v0.18.2 but with Groestlcoin-specific patches. On a general level, most of what is new is a new 'Groestlcoin-wallet' tool which is now distributed alongside Groestlcoin Core's other executables.
NOTE: The 'Account' API has been removed from this version which was typically used in some tip bots. Please ensure you check the release notes from 2.17.2 for details on replacing this functionality.

• Builds are now done through Gitian
• Calls to getblocktemplate will fail if the segwit rule is not specified. Calling getblocktemplate without segwit specified is almost certainly a misconfiguration since doing so results in lower rewards for the miner. Failed calls will produce an error message describing how to enable the segwit rule.
• A warning is printed if an unrecognized section name is used in the configuration file. Recognized sections are [test], [main], and [regtest].
• Four new options are available for configuring the maximum number of messages that ZMQ will queue in memory (the "high water mark") before dropping additional messages. The default value is 1,000, the same as was used for previous releases.
• The rpcallowip option can no longer be used to automatically listen on all network interfaces. Instead, the rpcbind parameter must be used to specify the IP addresses to listen on. Listening for RPC commands over a public network connection is insecure and should be disabled, so a warning is now printed if a user selects such a configuration. If you need to expose RPC in order to use a tool like Docker, ensure you only bind RPC to your localhost, e.g. docker run [...] -p 127.0.0.1:1441:1441 (this is an extra :1441 over the normal Docker port specification).
• The rpcpassword option now causes a startup error if the password set in the configuration file contains a hash character (#), as it's ambiguous whether the hash character is meant for the password or as a comment.
• The whitelistforcerelay option is used to relay transactions from whitelisted peers even when not accepted to the mempool. This option now defaults to being off, so that changes in policy and disconnect/ban behavior will not cause a node that is whitelisting another to be dropped by peers.
• A new short about the JSON-RPC interface describes cases where the results of anRPC might contain inconsistencies between data sourced from differentsubsystems, such as wallet state and mempool state.
• A new document (https://github.com/groestlcoin/groestlcoin/blob/mastedoc/groestlcoin-conf.md) about the groestlcoin.conf file describes how to use it to configure Groestlcoin Core.
• A new document introduces Groestlcoin Core's BIP174 interface, which is used to allow multiple programs to collaboratively work to create, sign, and broadcast new transactions. This is useful for offline (cold storage) wallets, multisig wallets, coinjoin implementations, and many other cases where two or more programs need to interact to generate a complete transaction.
• The output script descriptor (https://github.com/groestlcoin/groestlcoin/blob/mastedoc/descriptors.md) documentation has been updated with information about new features in this still-developing language for describing the output scripts that a wallet or other program wants to receive notifications for, such as which addresses it wants to know received payments. The language is currently used in multiple new and updated RPCs described in these release notes and is expected to be adapted to other RPCs and to the underlying wallet structure.
• A new --disable-bip70 option may be passed to ./configure to prevent Groestlcoin-Qt from being built with support for the BIP70 payment protocol or from linking libssl. As the payment protocol has exposed Groestlcoin Core to libssl vulnerabilities in the past, builders who don't need BIP70 support are encouraged to use this option to reduce their exposure to future vulnerabilities.
• The minimum required version of Qt (when building the GUI) has been increased from 5.2 to 5.5.1 (the depends system provides 5.9.7)
• getnodeaddresses returns peer addresses known to this node. It may be used to find nodes to connect to without using a DNS seeder.
• listwalletdir returns a list of wallets in the wallet directory (either the default wallet directory or the directory configured bythe -walletdir parameter).
• getrpcinfo returns runtime details of the RPC server. Currently, it returns an array of the currently active commands and how long they've been running.
• deriveaddresses returns one or more addresses corresponding to an output descriptor.
• getdescriptorinfo accepts a descriptor and returns information aboutit, including its computed checksum.
• joinpsbts merges multiple distinct PSBTs into a single PSBT. The multiple PSBTs must have different inputs. The resulting PSBT will contain every input and output from all the PSBTs. Any signatures provided in any of the PSBTs will be dropped.
• analyzepsbt examines a PSBT and provides information about what the PSBT contains and the next steps that need to be taken in order to complete the transaction. For each input of a PSBT, analyze psbt provides information about what information is missing for that input, including whether a UTXO needs to be provided, what pubkeys still need to be provided, which scripts need to be provided, and what signatures are still needed. Every input will also list which role is needed to complete that input, and analyzepsbt will also list the next role in general needed to complete the PSBT. analyzepsbt will also provide the estimated fee rate and estimated virtual size of the completed transaction if it has enough information to do so.
• utxoupdatepsbt searches the set of Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs) to find the outputs being spent by the partial transaction. PSBTs need to have the UTXOs being spent to be provided because the signing algorithm requires information from the UTXO being spent. For segwit inputs, only the UTXO itself is necessary. For non-segwit outputs, the entire previous transaction is needed so that signers can be sure that they are signing the correct thing. Unfortunately, because the UTXO set only contains UTXOs and not full transactions, utxoupdatepsbt will only add the UTXO for segwit inputs.
• getpeerinfo now returns an additional minfeefilter field set to the peer's BIP133 fee filter. You can use this to detect that you have peers that are willing to accept transactions below the default minimum relay fee.
• The mempool RPCs, such as getrawmempool with verbose=true, now return an additional "bip125-replaceable" value indicating whether thetransaction (or its unconfirmed ancestors) opts-in to asking nodes and miners to replace it with a higher-feerate transaction spending any of the same inputs.
• settxfee previously silently ignored attempts to set the fee below the allowed minimums. It now prints a warning. The special value of"0" may still be used to request the minimum value.
• getaddressinfo now provides an ischange field indicating whether the wallet used the address in a change output.
• importmulti has been updated to support P2WSH, P2WPKH, P2SH-P2WPKH, and P2SH-P2WSH. Requests for P2WSH and P2SH-P2WSH accept an additional witnessscript parameter.
• importmulti now returns an additional warnings field for each request with an array of strings explaining when fields are being ignored or are inconsistent, if there are any.
• getaddressinfo now returns an additional solvable Boolean field when Groestlcoin Core knows enough about the address's scriptPubKey, optional redeemScript, and optional witnessScript for the wallet to be able to generate an unsigned input spending funds sent to that address.
• The getaddressinfo, listunspent, and scantxoutset RPCs now return an additional desc field that contains an output descriptor containing all key paths and signing information for the address (except for the private key). The desc field is only returned for getaddressinfo and listunspent when the address is solvable.
• importprivkey will preserve previously-set labels for addresses or public keys corresponding to the private key being imported. For example, if you imported a watch-only address with the label "coldwallet" in earlier releases of Groestlcoin Core, subsequently importing the private key would default to resetting the address's label to the default empty-string label (""). In this release, the previous label of "cold wallet" will be retained. If you optionally specify any label besides the default when calling importprivkey, the new label will be applied to the address.
• getmininginfo now omits currentblockweight and currentblocktx when a block was never assembled via RPC on this node.
• The getrawtransaction RPC & REST endpoints no longer check the unspent UTXO set for a transaction. The remaining behaviors are as follows:
  1. If a blockhash is provided, check the corresponding block.
  2. If no blockhash is provided, check the mempool.
  3. If no blockhash is provided but txindex is enabled, also check txindex.
• unloadwallet is now synchronous, meaning it will not return until the wallet is fully unloaded.
• importmulti now supports importing of addresses from descriptors. A desc parameter can be provided instead of the "scriptPubKey" in are quest, as well as an optional range for ranged descriptors to specify the start and end of the range to import. Descriptors with key origin information imported through importmulti will have their key origin information stored in the wallet for use with creating PSBTs.
• listunspent has been modified so that it also returns witnessScript, the witness script in the case of a P2WSH orP2SH-P2WSH output.
• createwallet now has an optional blank argument that can be used to create a blank wallet. Blank wallets do not have any keys or HDseed. They cannot be opened in software older than 2.18.2. Once a blank wallet has a HD seed set (by using sethdseed) or private keys, scripts, addresses, and other watch only things have been imported, the wallet is no longer blank and can be opened in 2.17.2. Encrypting a blank wallet will also set a HD seed for it.
• signrawtransaction is removed after being deprecated and hidden behind a special configuration option in version 2.17.2.
• The 'account' API is removed after being deprecated in v2.17.2 The 'label' API was introduced in v2.17.2 as a replacement for accounts. See the release notes from v2.17.2 for a full description of the changes from the 'account' API to the 'label' API.
• addwitnessaddress is removed after being deprecated in version 2.16.0.
• generate is deprecated and will be fully removed in a subsequent major version. This RPC is only used for testing, but its implementation reached across multiple subsystems (wallet and mining), so it is being deprecated to simplify the wallet-node interface. Projects that are using generate for testing purposes should transition to using the generatetoaddress RPC, which does not require or use the wallet component. Calling generatetoaddress with an address returned by the getnewaddress RPC gives the same functionality as the old generate RPC. To continue using generate in this version, restart groestlcoind with the -deprecatedrpc=generate configuration option.
• Be reminded that parts of the validateaddress command have been deprecated and moved to getaddressinfo. The following deprecated fields have moved to getaddressinfo: ismine, iswatchonly,script, hex, pubkeys, sigsrequired, pubkey, embedded,iscompressed, label, timestamp, hdkeypath, hdmasterkeyid.
• The addresses field has been removed from the validateaddressand getaddressinfo RPC methods. This field was confusing since it referred to public keys using their P2PKH address. Clients should use the embedded.address field for P2SH or P2WSH wrapped addresses, and pubkeys for inspecting multisig participants.
• A new /rest/blockhashbyheight/ endpoint is added for fetching the hash of the block in the current best blockchain based on its height (how many blocks it is after the Genesis Block).
• A new Window menu is added alongside the existing File, Settings, and Help menus. Several items from the other menus that opened new windows have been moved to this new Window menu.
• In the Send tab, the checkbox for "pay only the required fee" has been removed. Instead, the user can simply decrease the value in the Custom Fee rate field all the way down to the node's configured minimumrelay fee.
• In the Overview tab, the watch-only balance will be the only balance shown if the wallet was created using the createwallet RPC and thedisable_private_keys parameter was set to true.
• The launch-on-startup option is no longer available on macOS if compiled with macosx min version greater than 10.11 (useCXXFLAGS="-mmacosx-version-min=10.11" CFLAGS="-mmacosx-version-min=10.11" for setting the deployment sdkversion)
• A new groestlcoin-wallet tool is now distributed alongside Groestlcoin Core's other executables. Without needing to use any RPCs, this tool can currently create a new wallet file or display some basic information about an existing wallet, such as whether the wallet is encrypted, whether it uses an HD seed, how many transactions it contains, and how many address book entries it has.
• Since version 2.16.0, Groestlcoin Core's built-in wallet has defaulted to generating P2SH-wrapped segwit addresses when users want to receive payments. These addresses are backwards compatible with all widely used software. Starting with Groestlcoin Core 2.20.1 (expected about a year after 2.18.2), Groestlcoin Core will default to native segwitaddresses (bech32) that provide additional fee savings and other benefits. Currently, many wallets and services already support sending to bech32 addresses, and if the Groestlcoin Core project sees enough additional adoption, it will instead default to bech32 receiving addresses in Groestlcoin Core 2.19.1. P2SH-wrapped segwit addresses will continue to be provided if the user requests them in the GUI or by RPC, and anyone who doesn't want the update will be able to configure their default address type. (Similarly, pioneering users who want to change their default now may set the addresstype=bech32 configuration option in any Groestlcoin Core release from 2.16.0 up.)
• BIP 61 reject messages are now deprecated. Reject messages have no use case on the P2P network and are only logged for debugging by most network nodes. Furthermore, they increase bandwidth and can be harmful for privacy and security. It has been possible to disable BIP 61 messages since v2.17.2 with the -enablebip61=0 option. BIP 61 messages will be disabled by default in a future version, before being removed entirely.
• The submitblock RPC previously returned the reason a rejected block was invalid the first time it processed that block but returned a generic "duplicate" rejection message on subsequent occasions it processed the same block. It now always returns the fundamental reason for rejecting an invalid block and only returns "duplicate" for valid blocks it has already accepted.
• A new submitheader RPC allows submitting block headers independently from their block. This is likely only useful for testing.
• The signrawtransactionwithkey and signrawtransactionwithwallet RPCs have been modified so that they also optionally accept a witnessScript, the witness script in the case of a P2WSH orP2SH-P2WSH output. This is compatible with the change to listunspent.
• For the walletprocesspsbt and walletcreatefundedpsbt RPCs, if thebip32derivs parameter is set to true but the key metadata for a public key has not been updated yet, then that key will have a derivation path as if it were just an independent key (i.e. no derivation path and its master fingerprint is itself).
• The -usehd configuration option was removed in version 2.16.0 From that version onwards, all new wallets created are hierarchical deterministic wallets. This release makes specifying -usehd an invalid configuration option.
• This release allows peers that your node automatically disconnected for misbehaviour (e.g. sending invalid data) to reconnect to your node if you have unused incoming connection slots. If your slots fill up, a misbehaving node will be disconnected to make room for nodes without a history of problems (unless the misbehaving node helps your node in some other way, such as by connecting to a part of the Internet from which you don't have many other peers). Previously, Groestlcoin Core banned the IP addresses of misbehaving peers for a period (default of 1 day); this was easily circumvented by attackers with multiple IP addresses. If you manually ban a peer, such as by using the setban RPC, all connections from that peer will still be rejected.
• The key metadata will need to be upgraded the first time that the HDseed is available. For unencrypted wallets this will occur on wallet loading. For encrypted wallets this will occur the first time the wallet is unlocked.
• Newly encrypted wallets will no longer require restarting the software. Instead such wallets will be completely unloaded and reloaded to achieve the same effect.
• A sub-project of Bitcoin Core now provides Hardware Wallet Interaction (HWI) scripts that allow command-line users to use several popular hardware key management devices with Groestlcoin Core. See their project page for details.
• This release changes the Random Number Generator (RNG) used from OpenSSL to Groestlcoin Core's own implementation, although entropy gathered by Groestlcoin Core is fed out to OpenSSL and then read back in when the program needs strong randomness. This moves Groestlcoin Core a little closer to no longer needing to depend on OpenSSL, a dependency that has caused security issues in the past. The new implementation gathers entropy from multiple sources, including from hardware supporting the rdseed CPU instruction.
• On macOS, Groestlcoin Core now opts out of application CPU throttling ("app nap") during initial blockchain download, when catching up from over 100 blocks behind the current chain tip, or when reindexing chain data. This helps prevent these operations from taking an excessively long time because the operating system is attempting to conserve power.

How to Upgrade?

Windows
If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes for older versions), then run the installer.
OSX
If you are running an older version, shut it down. Wait until it has completely shut down (which might take a few minutes for older versions), run the dmg and drag Groestlcoin Core to Applications.
Ubuntu
http://groestlcoin.org/forum/index.php?topic=441.0

Other Linux

http://groestlcoin.org/forum/index.php?topic=97.0

Download

Download the Windows Installer (64 bit) here
Download the Windows Installer (32 bit) here
Download the Windows binaries (64 bit) here
Download the Windows binaries (32 bit) here
Download the OSX Installer here
Download the OSX binaries here
Download the Linux binaries (64 bit) here
Download the Linux binaries (32 bit) here
Download the ARM Linux binaries (64 bit) here
Download the ARM Linux binaries (32 bit) here

Source

ALL NEW - Groestlcoin Moonshine iOS/Android Wallet

Built with React Native, Moonshine utilizes Electrum-GRS's JSON-RPC methods to interact with the Groestlcoin network.
GRS Moonshine's intended use is as a hot wallet. Meaning, your keys are only as safe as the device you install this wallet on. As with any hot wallet, please ensure that you keep only a small, responsible amount of Groestlcoin on it at any given time.

Features

• Groestlcoin Mainnet & Testnet supported
• Bech32 support
• Multiple wallet support
• Electrum - Support for both random and custom peers
• Encrypted storage
• Biometric + Pin authentication
• Custom fee selection
• Import mnemonic phrases via manual entry or scanning
• RBF functionality
• BIP39 Passphrase functionality
• Support for Segwit-compatible & legacy addresses in settings
• Support individual private key sweeping
• UTXO blacklisting - Accessible via the Transaction Detail view, this allows users to blacklist any utxo that they do not wish to include in their list of available utxo's when sending transactions. Blacklisting a utxo excludes its amount from the wallet's total balance.
• Ability to Sign & Verify Messages
• Support BitID for password-free authentication
• Coin Control - This can be accessed from the Send Transaction view and basically allows users to select from a list of available UTXO's to include in their transaction.
• Ability to Broadcast raw transactions

Download

iOS
Android

Source

ALL NEW! – HODL GRS Android Wallet

HODL GRS connects directly to the Groestlcoin network using SPV mode and doesn't rely on servers that can be hacked or disabled.
HODL GRS utilizes AES hardware encryption, app sandboxing, and the latest security features to protect users from malware, browser security holes, and even physical theft. Private keys are stored only in the secure enclave of the user's phone, inaccessible to anyone other than the user.
Simplicity and ease-of-use is the core design principle of HODL GRS. A simple recovery phrase (which we call a Backup Recovery Key) is all that is needed to restore the user's wallet if they ever lose or replace their device. HODL GRS is deterministic, which means the user's balance and transaction history can be recovered just from the backup recovery key.

Features

• Simplified payment verification for fast mobile performance
• No server to get hacked or go down
• Single backup phrase that works forever
• Private keys never leave your device
• Import password protected paper wallets
• Payment protocol payee identity certification

Download

Main Release (Main Net)
Testnet Release

Source

ALL NEW! – GroestlcoinSeed Savior

Groestlcoin Seed Savior is a tool for recovering BIP39 seed phrases.
This tool is meant to help users with recovering a slightly incorrect Groestlcoin mnemonic phrase (AKA backup or seed). You can enter an existing BIP39 mnemonic and get derived addresses in various formats.
To find out if one of the suggested addresses is the right one, you can click on the suggested address to check the address' transaction history on a block explorer.

Features

• If a word is wrong, the tool will try to suggest the closest option.
• If a word is missing or unknown, please type "?" instead and the tool will find all relevant options.

Live Version (Not Recommended)

https://www.groestlcoin.org/recovery/

Download

https://github.com/Groestlcoin/mnemonic-recovery/archive/master.zip

Source

ALL NEW! – Vanity Search Vanity Address Generator

NOTE: NVidia GPU or any CPU only. AMD graphics cards will not work with this address generator.
VanitySearch is a command-line Segwit-capable vanity Groestlcoin address generator. Add unique flair when you tell people to send Groestlcoin. Alternatively, VanitySearch can be used to generate random addresses offline.
If you're tired of the random, cryptic addresses generated by regular groestlcoin clients, then VanitySearch is the right choice for you to create a more personalized address.
VanitySearch is a groestlcoin address prefix finder. If you want to generate safe private keys, use the -s option to enter your passphrase which will be used for generating a base key as for BIP38 standard (VanitySearch.exe -s "My PassPhrase" FXPref). You can also use VanitySearch.exe -ps "My PassPhrase" which will add a crypto secure seed to your passphrase.
VanitySearch may not compute a good grid size for your GPU, so try different values using -g option in order to get the best performances. If you want to use GPUs and CPUs together, you may have best performances by keeping one CPU core for handling GPU(s)/CPU exchanges (use -t option to set the number of CPU threads).

Features

• Fixed size arithmetic
• Fast Modular Inversion (Delayed Right Shift 62 bits)
• SecpK1 Fast modular multiplication (2 steps folding 512bits to 256bits using 64 bits digits)
• Use some properties of elliptic curve to generate more keys
• SSE Secure Hash Algorithm SHA256 and RIPEMD160 (CPU)
• Multi-GPU support
• CUDA optimisation via inline PTX assembly
• Seed protected by pbkdf2_hmac_sha512 (BIP38)
• Support P2PKH, P2SH and BECH32 addresses
• Support split-key vanity address

Usage

https://github.com/Groestlcoin/VanitySearch#usage

Download

Source

ALL NEW! – Groestlcoin EasyVanity 2020

Groestlcoin EasyVanity 2020 is a windows app built from the ground-up and makes it easier than ever before to create your very own bespoke bech32 address(es) when whilst not connected to the internet.
If you're tired of the random, cryptic bech32 addresses generated by regular Groestlcoin clients, then Groestlcoin EasyVanity2020 is the right choice for you to create a more personalised bech32 address. This 2020 version uses the new VanitySearch to generate not only legacy addresses (F prefix) but also Bech32 addresses (grs1 prefix).

Features

• Ability to continue finding keys after first one is found
• Includes warning on start-up if connected to the internet
• Ability to output keys to a text file (And shows button to open that directory)
• Show and hide the private key with a simple toggle switch
• Show full output of commands
• Ability to choose between Processor (CPU) and Graphics Card (GPU) ( NVidia ONLY! )
• Features both a Light and Dark Material Design-Style Themes
• Free software - MIT. Anyone can audit the code.
• Written in C# - The code is short, and easy to review.

Download

Source

Remastered! – Groestlcoin WPF Desktop Wallet (v2.19.0.18)

Groestlcoin WPF is an alternative full node client with optional lightweight 'thin-client' mode based on WPF. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is one of Microsoft's latest approaches to a GUI framework, used with the .NET framework. Its main advantages over the original Groestlcoin client include support for exporting blockchain.dat and including a lite wallet mode.
This wallet was previously deprecated but has been brought back to life with modern standards.

Features

• Works via TOR or SOCKS5 proxy
• Can use bootstrap.dat format as blockchain database
• Import/Export blockchain to/from bootstrap.dat
• Import wallet.dat from Groestlcoin-qt wallet
• Export wallet to wallet.dat
• Use both groestlcoin-wpf and groestlcoin-qt with the same addresses in parallel. When you send money from one program, the transaction will automatically be visible on the other wallet.
• Rescan blockchain with a simple mouse click
• Works as a full node and listens to port 1331 (listening port can be changed)
• Fast Block verifying, parallel processing on multi-core CPUs
• Mine Groestlcoins with your CPU by a simple mouse click
• All private keys are kept encrypted on your local machine (or on a USB stick)
• Lite - Has a lightweight "thin client" mode which does not require a new user to download the entire Groestlcoin chain and store it
• Free and decentralised - Open Source under GNU license

Remastered Improvements

• Bech32 support
• P2sh support
• Fixed Import/Export to wallet.dat
• Testnet Support
• Rescan wallet option
• Change wallet password option
• Address type and Change type options through *.conf file
• Import from bootstrap.dat - It is a flat, binary file containing Groestlcoin blockchain data, from the genesis block through a recent height. All versions automatically validate and import the file "grs.bootstrap.dat" in the GRS directory. Grs.bootstrap.dat is compatible with Qt wallet. GroestlCoin-Qt can load from it.
• In Full mode file %APPDATA%\Groestlcoin-WPF\GRS\GRS.bootstrap.dat is full blockchain in standard bootstrap.dat format and can be used with other clients.

Download

Source

ALL NEW! – BIP39 Key Tool

Groestlcoin BIP39 Key Tool is a GUI interface for generating Groestlcoin public and private keys. It is a standalone tool which can be used offline.

Features

• Selection options for 3-24 words (simply putting the space separated words in the first word box will also work) along with a bip39 passphrase
• User input for total number of addresses desired
• Creation of P2PKH, P2SH, P2WPKH and P2WSH addresses along with xpriv and xpub as per BIP32 spec, using a word list as the starting point following the BIP39 standard.
• Pre-sets for BIP44, BIP49, BIP84 and BIP141 standards, along with custom user input for derivation path
• Option for Hardened or non-hardened addresses
• Option for Testnet private and public keys
• Output containing derivation path, private key in WIF, integer and hex format, public key address, public point on curve and scriptpubkey
• Results are output in a file titled 'wallet.txt' with the time addresses were generated, along with all information presented onscreen

Download

Windows
Linux :

 pip3 install -r requirements.txt python3 bip39\_gui.py 

Source

ALL NEW! – Electrum Personal Server

Groestlcoin Electrum Personal Server aims to make using Electrum Groestlcoin wallet more secure and more private. It makes it easy to connect your Electrum-GRS wallet to your own full node.
It is an implementation of the Electrum-grs server protocol which fulfils the specific need of using the Electrum-grs wallet backed by a full node, but without the heavyweight server backend, for a single user. It allows the user to benefit from all Groestlcoin Core's resource-saving features like pruning, blocks only and disabled txindex. All Electrum-GRS's feature-richness like hardware wallet integration, multi-signature wallets, offline signing, seed recovery phrases, coin control and so on can still be used, but connected only to the user's own full node.
Full node wallets are important in Groestlcoin because they are a big part of what makes the system be trust-less. No longer do people have to trust a financial institution like a bank or PayPal, they can run software on their own computers. If Groestlcoin is digital gold, then a full node wallet is your own personal goldsmith who checks for you that received payments are genuine.
Full node wallets are also important for privacy. Using Electrum-GRS under default configuration requires it to send (hashes of) all your Groestlcoin addresses to some server. That server can then easily spy on your transactions. Full node wallets like Groestlcoin Electrum Personal Server would download the entire blockchain and scan it for the user's own addresses, and therefore don't reveal to anyone else which Groestlcoin addresses they are interested in.
Groestlcoin Electrum Personal Server can also broadcast transactions through Tor which improves privacy by resisting traffic analysis for broadcasted transactions which can link the IP address of the user to the transaction. If enabled this would happen transparently whenever the user simply clicks "Send" on a transaction in Electrum-grs wallet.
Note: Currently Groestlcoin Electrum Personal Server can only accept one connection at a time.

Features

• Use your own node
• Tor support
• Uses less CPU and RAM than ElectrumX
• Used intermittently rather than needing to be always-on
• Doesn't require an index of every Groestlcoin address ever used like on ElectrumX

Download

Windows
Linux / OSX (Instructions)

Source

UPDATED – Android Wallet 7.38.1 - Main Net + Test Net

The app allows you to send and receive Groestlcoin on your device using QR codes and URI links.
When using this app, please back up your wallet and email them to yourself! This will save your wallet in a password protected file. Then your coins can be retrieved even if you lose your phone.

Changes

• Add confidence messages, helping users to understand the confidence state of their payments.
• Handle edge case when restoring via an external app.
• Count devices with a memory class of 128 MB as low ram.
• Introduce dark mode on Android 10 devices.
• Reduce memory usage of PIN-protected wallets.
• Tapping on the app's version will reveal a checksum of the APK that was installed.
• Fix issue with confirmation of transactions that empty your wallet.

Download

Main Net
Main Net (FDroid)
Test Net

Source

UPDATED – Groestlcoin Sentinel 3.5.06 (Android)

Groestlcoin Sentinel is a great solution for anyone who wants the convenience and utility of a hot wallet for receiving payments directly into their cold storage (or hardware wallets).
Sentinel accepts XPUB's, YPUB'S, ZPUB's and individual Groestlcoin address. Once added you will be able to view balances, view transactions, and (in the case of XPUB's, YPUB's and ZPUB's) deterministically generate addresses for that wallet.
Groestlcoin Sentinel is a fork of Groestlcoin Samourai Wallet with all spending and transaction building code removed.

Changes

• Removed Cryptopia
• Added adaptive icons for Android 8 and above
• Add block book block explorer

Download

Source

UPDATED – P2Pool Test Net

Changes

• Add compatibility for Groestlcoin Core 2.18.2

Download

Pre-Hosted Testnet P2Pool is available via http://testp2pool.groestlcoin.org:21330/static/

Source

The Cryptonight algorithm is described as ASIC resistant, in particular because of one feature:

A megabyte of internal memory is almost unacceptable for the modern ASICs. 

EDIT: Each instance of Cryptonight requires 2MB of RAM. Therefore, any Cryptonight multi-processor is required to have 2MB per instance. Since CPUs are incredibly well loaded with RAM (ie: 32MB L3 on Threadripper, 16 L3 on Ryzen, and plenty of L2+L3 on Skylake Servers), it seems unlikely that ASICs would be able to compete well vs CPUs.
In fact, a large number of people seem to be incredibly confident in Cryptonight's ASIC resistance. And indeed, anyone who knows how standard DDR4 works knows that DDR4 is unacceptable for Cryptonight. GDDR5 similarly doesn't look like a very good technology for Cryptonight, focusing on high-bandwidth instead of latency.
Which suggests only an ASIC RAM would be able to handle the 2MB that Cryptonight uses. Solid argument, but it seems to be missing a critical point of analysis from my eyes.
What about "exotic" RAM, like RLDRAM3 ?? Or even QDR-IV?

QDR-IV SRAM

QDR-IV SRAM is absurdly expensive. However, its a good example of "exotic RAM" that is available on the marketplace. I'm focusing on it however because QDR-IV is really simple to describe.
QDR-IV costs roughly $290 for 16Mbit x 18 bits. It is true Static-RAM. 18-bits are for 8-bits per byte + 1 parity bit, because QDR-IV is usually designed for high-speed routers.
QDR-IV has none of the speed or latency issues with DDR4 RAM. There are no "banks", there are no "refreshes", there are no "obliterate the data as you load into sense amplifiers". There's no "auto-charge" as you load the data from the sense-amps back into the capacitors.
Anything that could have caused latency issues is gone. QDR-IV is about as fast as you can get latency-wise. Every clock cycle, you specify an address, and QDR-IV will generate a response every clock cycle. In fact, QDR means "quad data rate" as the SRAM generates 2-reads and 2-writes per clock cycle. There is a slight amount of latency: 8-clock cycles for reads (7.5nanoseconds), and 5-clock cycles for writes (4.6nanoseconds). For those keeping track at home: AMD Zen's L3 cache has a latency of 40 clocks: aka 10nanoseconds at 4GHz
Basically, QDR-IV BEATS the L3 latency of modern CPUs. And we haven't even begun to talk software or ASIC optimizations yet.

CPU inefficiencies for Cryptonight

Now, if that weren't bad enough... CPUs have a few problems with the Cryptonight algorithm.

1. AMD Zen and Intel Skylake CPUs transfer from L3 -> L2 -> L1 cache. Each of these transfers are in 64-byte chunks. Cryptonight only uses 16 of these bytes. This means that 75% of L3 cache bandwidth is wasted on 48-bytes that would never be used per inner-loop of Cryptonight. An ASIC would transfer only 16-bytes at a time, instantly increasing the RAM's speed by 4-fold.
   
2. AES-NI instructions on Ryzen / Threadripper can only be done one-per-core. This means a 16-core Threadripper can at most perform 16 AES encryptions per clock tick. An ASIC can perform as many as you'd like, up to the speed of the RAM.
   
3. CPUs waste a ton of energy: there's L1 and L2 caches which do NOTHING in Cryptonight. There are floating-point units, memory controllers, and more. An ASIC which strips things out to only the bare necessities (basically: AES for Cryptonight core) would be way more power efficient, even at ancient 65nm or 90nm designs.
   

Ideal RAM access pattern

For all yall who are used to DDR4, here's a special trick with QDR-IV or RLDRAM. You can pipeline accesses in QDR-IV or RLDRAM. What does this mean?
First, it should be noted that Cryptonight has the following RAM access pattern:

• Read
• Write
• Read #2
• Write #2

QDR-IV and RLDRAM3 still have latency involved. Assuming 8-clocks of latency, the naive access pattern would be:

1. Read
2. Stall
3. Stall
4. Stall
5. Stall
6. Stall
7. Stall
8. Stall
9. Stall
10. Write
11. Stall
12. Stall
13. Stall
14. Stall
15. Stall
16. Stall
17. Stall
18. Stall
19. Read #2
20. Stall
21. Stall
22. Stall
23. Stall
24. Stall
25. Stall
26. Stall
27. Stall
28. Write #2
29. Stall
30. Stall
31. Stall
32. Stall
33. Stall
34. Stall
35. Stall
36. Stall

This isn't very efficient: the RAM sits around waiting. Even with "latency reduced" RAM, you can see that the RAM still isn't doing very much. In fact, this is why people thought Cryptonight was safe against ASICs.
But what if we instead ran four instances in parallel? That way, there is always data flowing.

1. Cryptonight #1 Read
2. Cryptonight #2 Read
3. Cryptonight #3 Read
4. Cryptonight #4 Read
5. Stall
6. Stall
7. Stall
8. Stall
9. Stall
10. Cryptonight #1 Write
11. Cryptonight #2 Write
12. Cryptonight #3 Write
13. Cryptonight #4 Write
14. Stall
15. Stall
16. Stall
17. Stall
18. Stall
19. Cryptonight #1 Read #2
20. Cryptonight #2 Read #2
21. Cryptonight #3 Read #2
22. Cryptonight #4 Read #2
23. Stall
24. Stall
25. Stall
26. Stall
27. Stall
28. Cryptonight #1 Write #2
29. Cryptonight #2 Write #2
30. Cryptonight #3 Write #2
31. Cryptonight #4 Write #2
32. Stall
33. Stall
34. Stall
35. Stall
36. Stall

Notice: we're doing 4x the Cryptonight in the same amount of time. Now imagine if the stalls were COMPLETELY gone. DDR4 CANNOT do this. And that's why most people thought ASICs were impossible for Cryptonight.
Unfortunately, RLDRAM3 and QDR-IV can accomplish this kind of pipelining. In fact, that's what they were designed for.

RLDRAM3

As good as QDR-IV RAM is, its way too expensive. RLDRAM3 is almost as fast, but is way more complicated to use and describe. Due to the lower cost of RLDRAM3 however, I'd assume any ASIC for CryptoNight would use RLDRAM3 instead of the simpler QDR-IV. RLDRAM3 32Mbit x36 bits costs $180 at quantities == 1, and would support up to 64-Parallel Cryptonight instances (In contrast, a $800 AMD 1950x Threadripper supports 16 at the best).
Such a design would basically operate at the maximum speed of RLDRAM3. In the case of x36-bit bus and 2133MT/s, we're talking about 2133 / (Burst Length4 x 4 read/writes x 524288 inner loop) == 254 Full Cryptonight Hashes per Second.
254 Hashes per second sounds low, and it is. But we're talking about literally a two-chip design here. 1-chip for RAM, 1-chip for the ASIC/AES stuff. Such a design would consume no more than 5 Watts.
If you were to replicate the ~5W design 60-times, you'd get 15240 Hash/second at 300 Watts.

RLDRAM2

Depending on cost calculations, going cheaper and "making more" might be a better idea. RLDRAM2 is widely available at only $32 per chip at 800 MT/s.
Such a design would theoretically support 800 / 4x4x524288 == 95 Cryptonight Hashes per second.
The scary part: The RLDRAM2 chip there only uses 1W of power. Together, you get 5 Watts again as a reasonable power-estimate. x60 would be 5700 Hashes/second at 300 Watts.
Here's Micron's whitepaper on RLDRAM2: https://www.micron.com/~/media/documents/products/technical-note/dram/tn4902.pdf . RLDRAM3 is the same but denser, faster, and more power efficient.

Hybrid Cube Memory

Hybrid Cube Memory is "stacked RAM" designed for low latency. As far as I can tell, Hybrid Cube memory allows an insane amount of parallelism and pipelining. It'd be the future of an ASIC Cryptonight design. The existence of Hybrid Cube Memory is more about "Generation 2" or later. In effect, it demonstrates that future designs can be lower-power and give higher-speed.

Realistic ASIC Sketch: RLDRAM3 + Parallel Processing

The overall board design would be the ASIC, which would be a simple pipelined AES ASIC that talks with RLDRAM3 ($180) or RLDRAM2 ($30).
Its hard for me to estimate an ASIC's cost without the right tools or design. But a multi-project wafer like MOSIS offers "cheap" access to 14nm and 22nm nodes. Rumor is that this is roughly $100k per run for ~40 dies, suitable for research-and-development. Mass production would require further investments, but mass production at the ~65nm node is rumored to be in the single-digit $$millions or maybe even just 6-figures or so.
So realistically speaking: it'd take ~$10 Million investment + a talented engineer (or team of engineers) who are familiar with RLDRAM3, PCIe 3.0, ASIC design, AES, and Cryptonight to build an ASIC.

TL;DR:

• Current CPUs waste 75% of L3 bandwidth because they transfer 64-bytes per cache-line, but only use 16-bytes per inner-loop of CryptoNight.
  
• Low-latency RAM exists for only $200 for ~128MB (aka: 64-parallel instances of 2MB Cryptonight). Such RAM has an estimated speed of 254 Hash/second (RLDRAM 3) or 95 Hash/second (Cheaper and older RLDRAM 2)
  
• ASICs are therefore not going to be capital friendly: between the higher costs, the ASIC investment, and the literally millions of dollars needed for mass production, this would be a project that costs a lot more than a CPU per-unit per hash/sec.
  
• HOWEVER, a Cryptonight ASIC seems possible. Furthermore, such a design would be grossly more power-efficient than any CPU. Though the capital investment is high, the rewards of mass-production and scalability are also high. Data-centers are power-limited, so any Cryptonight ASIC would be orders of magnitude lower-power than a CPU / GPU.
  
• EDIT: Greater discussion throughout today has led me to napkin-math an FPGA + RLDRAM3 option. I estimated roughly ~$5000 (+/- 30%, its a very crude estimate) for a machine that performs ~3500 Hashes / second, on an unknown number of Watts (Maybe 75Watts?). $2000 FPGA, $2400 RLDRAM3, $600 on PCBs, misc chips, assembly, etc. etc. A more serious effort may use Hybrid Cube Memory to achieve much higher FPGA-based Hashrates. My current guess is that this is an overestimate on the cost, so -30% if you can achieve some bulk discounts + optimize the hypothetical design and manage to accomplish the design on cheaper hardware.
  

I'm relatively new, have one rig running about 3000 kH/s. But I want to maximize my potential while lite coin is still profitable. Should I just build more rigs? But won't that tax my homes max power on residential grid? Any advice is appreciated, even if it's just for shiz and gigs as I might invest elsewhere. Thanks in advance!

__
​
​
"**well I got some stuff to sell, shipping included unless local only (80023 broomfield co, or 81501 Grand Junction), prices obo but I may not budge much depending on the item. Crypto preferred. Minimum order $50 (I may lower if im not too busy).**
​
_
​
​
-----wanted-----
​
audio gear (high end speakers/amps)
​
new gpu (1080 or above)
​
paypal
​
local cash
​
bitcoin, ether, zcash, other cryptos
​
Timestamps/Pics- https://imgur.com/a/Xoc01TO
​
MINING GPUS |Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
AMD SKY 900|NEW they do just under 550h/s on zcash and ~1000h/s on monero|$200 (small quantities available)
AMD SKY 700|NEW. A sky 700 will do 280h/s on zcash and 500h/s on monero|$110 (medium quantities available)
AMD W7000|used and mined on |$100 (medium quantities available)
s9150|used and mined on |$250 (5 available)
​
_
​
DDR3 ram |Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
4gb 1600mhz ddr3 non-ecc for desktop|ad3u1600w4g11-b|$15 each 4 sticks available
4gb 1600mhz ddr3 non-ecc for laptop|5M30G75129|$15 1 stick avalible
4gb 1600mhz ddr3 non-ecc for desktop|CMX8GX3M2A1333C9|$15 2 stick avalible
​
_
​
​
INTEL PHI GEAR |Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
intel s7200ap motherboard | Proprietary board and wiring |$550
intel Compute Module HNS7200AP (no fans) | works with intel h2000g chassis |$599
very barebone h2000g chassis and 4 compute moduals | VERY BAREBONE |$1800
Earily es Intel phi | 64 cores, 256 threads, and 8gb of mcdram, thats half of what the production chips have. This chip isnt fantastic for mining |$400 (2 available)
complete running server with 4 cpus| 256 cores, 1024 threads, 48gb mcdram, dual 2100w psu (2 es 8gb chips and 2 es 16gb chips) |$3800 + shipping
~
​
Faqs about these systems
​
​
~
​
Q: ddr4 is expensive what do I do!
A: good news! you can run the cache on the cpus in flat mode and you do longer need ram. this is not a joke my server
running right now has empty dimms.
​
Q: why the excitement?
A: the intel s7200ap is the only motherboard available outside of a prebuild system for the x200 intel phis
​
Q: I hate computers but like these what should I do
A: Buy a full h2000g chassis and 4 compute modules. it will be plug and play.
​
Q: but does windows like them?
A: in typical windows fashion of hating everything that is cool, not so much. I got it to work in windows when I disabled
hyperthreading and im still testing. linux worked flawlessly. Edit: if you disable 4 cores they will work with hperthreading
enabled
​
Q: how do I control my raging boner?
A: Embrace it and if it doesn't die down in 4 hours consult a doctor.
​
Q: WHY DO I NEED THIS!
A: It can mine :P (2700h/s on monero on only 200w)
​
​
Q: how do I give you monies
A: I take anything of value including crypto, cash, the corpse of a x99 rig your parting with as a result of this intel bug, ect...
​
~
​
​
​
_
​
​
Items|Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
Opteron 6234|12 core, decent for monero or cryptonight|$25 (3 available)
supermicro x11dpl-i|dual lga 3647| $380
Fusion IO 640GB IODRIVE |pcie ssd| $140
Seagate Constellation ES 2tb sas drive|ST32000444SS|$40
W3680| 6 core @ 3.3ghz| $60
unknown lga 3647 cpu| 1.5ghz looks like a gold or platinum series chip| $150 (2 available)
Emu 1212M PCI 24-Bit/192kHz Balanced Interface | Mastering-grade 24-bit, 192kHz converters.Multi-effects Processor.|$15
EMC 200GB ENTERPRISE 2.5"" SSD HUSSL4020ASS600|Decent enterprise ssd's|$60 (2 available)
I7 960|Socket 1366|$40
AMCC 9650SE-12ML |sata raid controler | $10
Jetway PICO NP93-2930r pico itx pc|http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/NP93.html|$110
Intel 80+ platinum 2130w psu (no fans included)|FXX2130PCRPS| $50 (quantity available)
2011 combo 1 |24gb ddr3 ecc, evga sr-x mobo (has some small issues), dual e5-2670's| $420
2011 combo 2 |24gb ddr3 ecc, intel mobo , dual e5-2650's | $380
2011 combo 3 |24gb ddr3 ecc, supermicro mobo , dual e5-2650's | $400
24a apc pdu|typical 220v dryer connection on the end|$50\
pcie risers|powered, molex|$5 (15+ available)
_
​
**LOCAL ONLY** (unless buyer pays shipping)
​
_
​
LOCAL ONLY|Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
Custom built server|Dual e5-2670, intel mobo, 16tb of hdd, 640gb of ssd, 60gb of ram|$2200
Corsair h100 AIO|fairly old by now|$40
mining rig 1|4x amd sky 900, dual opteron|$2000
mining rig 2|4 w7000, 1 sky 900, cheap cpus|$1100
mining rig 3|5 s9150, dual e5-2650|$1500
mining rig 4|5 s9000, cheap cpus|$1200
boxes|mostly consumer gpus from abit ago|$5
​
_
​
As-is hardware|No returns for any reason on as-is hardware. I will only accept non refundable payment for these items ie. bitcoin, paypal f&f, or local cash|Price
:--|:--|:--
R9 290|Worked for abit, looks like cap fell off|$45
ASUS P6t v2 deluxe|Killed it with my direct di water cooling setup. 95% chance its dead|$20
s10000|most likely dead|$100
cat s60 phone|the bottom circuit board needs to be replaced currently it all works except the cell service and aux|$100
​
"
​

__
​
​
"**well I got some stuff to sell, shipping included unless local only (80023 broomfield co, or 81501 Grand Junction), prices obo but I may not budge much depending on the item. Crypto preferred. Minimum order $50 (I may lower if im not too busy).**
​
_
​
​
-----wanted-----
​
audio gear (high end speakers/amps)
​
new gpu (1080 or above)
​
paypal
​
local cash
​
bitcoin, ether, zcash, other cryptos
​
Timestamps/Pics- https://imgur.com/a/Xoc01TO
​
MINING GPUS |Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
AMD SKY 900|NEW they do just under 550h/s on zcash and ~1000h/s on monero|$200 (small quantities available)
AMD SKY 700|NEW. A sky 700 will do 280h/s on zcash and 500h/s on monero|$110 (medium quantities available)
AMD W7000|used and mined on |$100 (medium quantities available)
s9150|used and mined on |$250 (5 available)
​
_
​
DDR3 ram |Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
4gb 1600mhz ddr3 non-ecc for desktop|ad3u1600w4g11-b|$15 each 4 sticks available
4gb 1600mhz ddr3 non-ecc for laptop|5M30G75129|$15 1 stick avalible
4gb 1600mhz ddr3 non-ecc for desktop|CMX8GX3M2A1333C9|$15 2 stick avalible
​
_
​
​
INTEL PHI GEAR |Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
intel s7200ap motherboard | Proprietary board and wiring |$550
intel Compute Module HNS7200AP (no fans) | works with intel h2000g chassis |$599
very barebone h2000g chassis and 4 compute moduals | VERY BAREBONE |$1800
Earily es Intel phi | 64 cores, 256 threads, and 8gb of mcdram, thats half of what the production chips have. This chip isnt fantastic for mining |$400 (2 available)
complete running server with 4 cpus| 256 cores, 1024 threads, 48gb mcdram, dual 2100w psu (2 es 8gb chips and 2 es 16gb chips) |$3800 + shipping
~
​
Faqs about these systems
​
​
~
​
Q: ddr4 is expensive what do I do!
A: good news! you can run the cache on the cpus in flat mode and you do longer need ram. this is not a joke my server
running right now has empty dimms.
​
Q: why the excitement?
A: the intel s7200ap is the only motherboard available outside of a prebuild system for the x200 intel phis
​
Q: I hate computers but like these what should I do
A: Buy a full h2000g chassis and 4 compute modules. it will be plug and play.
​
Q: but does windows like them?
A: in typical windows fashion of hating everything that is cool, not so much. I got it to work in windows when I disabled
hyperthreading and im still testing. linux worked flawlessly. Edit: if you disable 4 cores they will work with hperthreading
enabled
​
Q: how do I control my raging boner?
A: Embrace it and if it doesn't die down in 4 hours consult a doctor.
​
Q: WHY DO I NEED THIS!
A: It can mine :P (2700h/s on monero on only 200w)
​
​
Q: how do I give you monies
A: I take anything of value including crypto, cash, the corpse of a x99 rig your parting with as a result of this intel bug, ect...
​
~
​
​
​
_
​
​
Items|Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
Opteron 6234|12 core, decent for monero or cryptonight|$25 (3 available)
supermicro x11dpl-i|dual lga 3647| $380
Fusion IO 640GB IODRIVE |pcie ssd| $140
Seagate Constellation ES 2tb sas drive|ST32000444SS|$40
W3680| 6 core @ 3.3ghz| $60
unknown lga 3647 cpu| 1.5ghz looks like a gold or platinum series chip| $150 (2 available)
Emu 1212M PCI 24-Bit/192kHz Balanced Interface | Mastering-grade 24-bit, 192kHz converters.Multi-effects Processor.|$15
EMC 200GB ENTERPRISE 2.5"" SSD HUSSL4020ASS600|Decent enterprise ssd's|$60 (2 available)
I7 960|Socket 1366|$40
AMCC 9650SE-12ML |sata raid controler | $10
Jetway PICO NP93-2930r pico itx pc|http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/NP93.html|$110
Intel 80+ platinum 2130w psu (no fans included)|FXX2130PCRPS| $50 (quantity available)
2011 combo 1 |24gb ddr3 ecc, evga sr-x mobo (has some small issues), dual e5-2670's| $420
2011 combo 2 |24gb ddr3 ecc, intel mobo , dual e5-2650's | $380
2011 combo 3 |24gb ddr3 ecc, supermicro mobo , dual e5-2650's | $400
24a apc pdu|typical 220v dryer connection on the end|$50\
pcie risers|powered, molex|$5 (15+ available)
_
​
**LOCAL ONLY** (unless buyer pays shipping)
​
_
​
LOCAL ONLY|Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
Custom built server|Dual e5-2670, intel mobo, 16tb of hdd, 640gb of ssd, 60gb of ram|$2200
Corsair h100 AIO|fairly old by now|$40
mining rig 1|4x amd sky 900, dual opteron|$2000
mining rig 2|4 w7000, 1 sky 900, cheap cpus|$1100
mining rig 3|5 s9150, dual e5-2650|$1500
mining rig 4|5 s9000, cheap cpus|$1200
boxes|mostly consumer gpus from abit ago|$5
​
_
​
As-is hardware|No returns for any reason on as-is hardware. I will only accept non refundable payment for these items ie. bitcoin, paypal f&f, or local cash|Price
:--|:--|:--
R9 290|Worked for abit, looks like cap fell off|$45
ASUS P6t v2 deluxe|Killed it with my direct di water cooling setup. 95% chance its dead|$20
s10000|most likely dead|$100
​
"
​

Time has flown by, and it's time for another short summary.
​
Some general stats (and changes since last time):
Mining difficulty: 864,881,523 (0.00%) (next: ~698,329,853) (+2.70%)​
Estimated hashrate: 697.62 Gh/s (+11.52%)
Rewards until readjustment: 270 (-52.29%) (~16.2 days) (-59.46%)
Current average reward time: 86.67 minutes (-10.40%)
Tokens minted: 3,007,250 0xBTC (+0.49%)
Token holders: 4356 holders (+0.57%)
Total contract operations: 185081 txs (+0.26%)
Source: https://0x1d00ffff.github.io/0xBTC-Stats/?page=stats&#
​
Tokens required to be a top holder (and changes since last time):
Top 10: 35486.89301407 0xBTC (0.00%)
Top 25: 19500 0xBTC (-2.96%)
Top 50: 12550 0xBTC (+0.49%)
Top 100: 6626.43 0xBTC (+10.45%)
Top 200: 2799.08946054 0xBTC (+10.45%)
Top 300: 1453.24253492 0xBTC (+7.78%)
Top 500: 585.21591206 0xBTC (+7.33%)​
Top 1000: 150 0xBTC (+3.44%)
Source: https://etherscan.io/token/0xb6ed7644c69416d67b522e20bc294a9a9b405b31#balances
​
If one were to market buy all the tokens available (24,044 0xBTC) on the most popular exchange (Mercatox), then that would cost them 116.2 ETH, which is currently $22,775, and make them the top 20 holder. Extreme outliers (price per 0xBTC above 0.1 ETH, which is currently $19.6) excluded.
Source: https://mercatox.com/exchange/0xBTC/ETH
​
Some general stuff that's been happening lately:

1. Userbrn's community fund reached 0.1 BTC and the application was submitted to list on YoBit. There hasn't been any feedback from the exchange yet, hopefully some new information surfaces over the course of the week.
2. User dave牟 talked about an upcoming DEX, which will have 0xBTC as one of its main trading pairs. From the Discord: "By the way my project received 1000ETH in angel funding /.../ we will have trading pairs in ETH, DAI and 0xBTC it will be online in about 3 months. We also have an interesting “gameified” listing process that is kind of like fomo3d."
3. Ethereum core developers decided to cut block rewards from 3 ETH to 2 ETH with the upcoming Constantinople hard fork in late October. This just goes to show how opaque and mutable Ether's monetary policy is.
4. Talking about ETH - its price has been in a total trashfire for the last few weeks. Several high-profile articles have said that the pump to $1,400 was completely artificial and only driven by ICO's, a large part of which are slowly beginning to crash and burn. It's only a matter of time before people begin searching for an Ethereum-compatible store of value, and those people will find 0xBTC already waiting for them. The article that spurred most of the recent debate: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/02/the-collapse-of-eth-is-inevitable/amp/
5. When replying to the above article, Vitalik described a new possible way of transacting tokens on the Ethereum network: "One could also use intermediate solutions, where third parties create "wrapper transactions" that take the fees for operations from users that are paid in spankchain tokens, and the third parties provide the ETH to the block proposer". This is exactly the idea behind LavaWallet, and the comment caused the price of 0xBTC to spike over a 100%.
6. User MyCryptoDad had a meeting with a crypto influencer, whom he advertised 0xBTC to. After the meeting, he said: "Came back from the Meetup with the influencer, he and the rest of the crew never heard of it. Good and bad, good that we are under the radar to accumulate, bad because we might be too under the radar. They seemed interested in the details behind it like fair distribution, the founder is mining on a 1060, no airdrop etc... Other good news to come out I was invited to their telegram group and meetups. The influencer also said he'd be willing to work with me on an idea. I'll be seeing these people a bit more. I'm telling everyone here because I believe in this project (0xBitcoin) and I want to see us succeed as organically as possible. I'll keep spreading the good word." I guess we'll just have to wait and see what comes of it.
7. Mr Fahrenheit released "Wheel of 0xBitcoin", the first dapp built specifically for 0xBTC. It's basically a decentralized way to gamble, you can be sure that the odds aren't rigged against you and it doesn't serve only to enrich its creators. When the house wins, then the prize doesn't go to the creator, but to the smart contract, which then pays winners out of the fund. You can also keep the money in the contract without gambling, in which case you will be gaining money when people gamble and lose (but also losing money, when they gamble and win). The developers receive money in the form of a 3% deposit fee. http://wheelof0xbitcoin.io/
8. Lieutenant Tofu developed a miner that has multi-GPU support, among other improvements. https://www.reddit.com/0xbitcoin/comments/9e1ziv/miner_cosmic_v41t_multigpu_for_windows_x64cuda/
9. The 0xBitcoin Foundation is making steady progress and is in the final stages of launching. The most recent update was published just 2 days ago: https://www.reddit.com/0xbitcoin/comments/9dzl7w/0xbitcoin_foundation_update/

As always, feel free to add anything you think I missed in the comments.

TL;DR: look at my component list, is it ok? Or did I butcher it?
So after a few years of trading through exchanges (coinbase) and making a bit of cash from latest Bitcoin surge (not much, like others I sold thinking it would tank again, but hey, it's cash I didn't have before). I decided to make jump to mining. Never really use Reddit. So never knew there were communities on here for it.
Read reviews, guides, and forums elsewhere, and came up with / bought hardware for a rig. Plan on having it up and running before New year. Just wanted to check with some experts if I did ok, or if I made some bad choices. Open to suggestions and advice. Thanks in advance!
CPU : Intel CPU BX80662G3900 Celeron G390
MoBo: Biostar Motherboard TB250-BTC 1151
Risers (6 pack to have spares and room to expand) : Mailiya 6-Pack PCIe Dual Chip PCI-E 16x to 1x Powered Riser Adapter Card w/ 60cm USB 3.0
RAM (from what I understand 4gb will be plenty, I'm going to try my hand at Linux, but if that doesn't work out I have a win7 license I can use): Ballistix Sport LT 4GB Single DDR4 2666
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 1200 P2 80+ PLATINUM
I also already have some other equipment I plan on utilizing, a couple push buttons for power, a power usage monitor I have had for bit, but will work for this purpose. I also have an unused 120gb SSD that should work just fine, And I managed to snag an open air frame that someone must have given to a pawn shop, I found it there and recognized what it was, even though they had it labeled as a "server rack" technically true I guess) it came complete NiB for 100$ and retails for 160$ on Amazon, I was going to use an old tower I had laying around, but figured this was worth investment, it's a: Veddha 6 GPU Minercase V3C Aluminum
Finally, the bread and butter, 3 identical GPUs, brand new (I had an option for used, but got these brand new from a few different sources): ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1060 AMP Edition, ZT-P10600B-10M, 6GB GDDR5
All in all, including things I've bought previously and are still serviceable, this set me back about $1600
The goal was to have a rig I can not only expand, but one I will be able to swap out cards into / out of to upgrade without changing much else. Like any other miner I dont expect to strike it rich, but averaging a few hundred a month after power costs would be nice. I did some research and am thinking I can get my RoI in about 6 months. Before system is up and running I plan on researching more about pools (the guide here is great!) And picking some coins to go after other than Eth. I'd appreciate any other tips. Thanks for sticking around all!
So will it work? Or did I butcher it?

__
​
​
"**well I got some stuff to sell, shipping included unless local only (80023 broomfield co, or 81501 Grand Junction), prices obo but I may not budge much depending on the item. Crypto preferred. Minimum order $50 (I may lower if im not too busy).**
​
_
​
​
-----wanted-----
​
audio gear (high end speakers/amps)
​
new gpu (1080 or above)
​
paypal
​
local cash
​
bitcoin, ether, zcash, other cryptos
​
Timestamps/Pics- https://imgur.com/a/Xoc01TO
​
MINING GPUS |Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
AMD SKY 900|NEW they do just under 550h/s on zcash and ~1000h/s on monero|$200 (small quantities available)
AMD SKY 700|NEW. A sky 700 will do 280h/s on zcash and 500h/s on monero|$110 (medium quantities available)
AMD W7000|used and mined on |$100 (medium quantities available)
s9150|used and mined on |$250 (5 available)
​
_
​
DDR3 ram |Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
4gb 1600mhz ddr3 non-ecc for desktop|ad3u1600w4g11-b|$15 each 4 sticks available
4gb 1600mhz ddr3 non-ecc for laptop|5M30G75129|$15 1 stick avalible
4gb 1600mhz ddr3 non-ecc for desktop|CMX8GX3M2A1333C9|$15 2 stick avalible
​
_
​
​
INTEL PHI GEAR |Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
intel s7200ap motherboard | Proprietary board and wiring |$550
intel Compute Module HNS7200AP (no fans) | works with intel h2000g chassis |$599
very barebone h2000g chassis and 4 compute moduals | VERY BAREBONE |$1800
Earily es Intel phi | 64 cores, 256 threads, and 8gb of mcdram, thats half of what the production chips have. This chip isnt fantastic for mining |$400 (2 available)
complete running server with 4 cpus| 256 cores, 1024 threads, 48gb mcdram, dual 2100w psu (2 es 8gb chips and 2 es 16gb chips) |$3800 + shipping
~
​
Faqs about these systems
​
​
~
​
Q: ddr4 is expensive what do I do!
A: good news! you can run the cache on the cpus in flat mode and you do longer need ram. this is not a joke my server
running right now has empty dimms.
​
Q: why the excitement?
A: the intel s7200ap is the only motherboard available outside of a prebuild system for the x200 intel phis
​
Q: I hate computers but like these what should I do
A: Buy a full h2000g chassis and 4 compute modules. it will be plug and play.
​
Q: but does windows like them?
A: in typical windows fashion of hating everything that is cool, not so much. I got it to work in windows when I disabled
hyperthreading and im still testing. linux worked flawlessly. Edit: if you disable 4 cores they will work with hperthreading
enabled
​
Q: how do I control my raging boner?
A: Embrace it and if it doesn't die down in 4 hours consult a doctor.
​
Q: WHY DO I NEED THIS!
A: It can mine :P (2700h/s on monero on only 200w)
​
​
Q: how do I give you monies
A: I take anything of value including crypto, cash, the corpse of a x99 rig your parting with as a result of this intel bug, ect...
​
~
​
​
​
_
​
​
Items|Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
Opteron 6234|12 core, decent for monero or cryptonight|$25 (3 available)
supermicro x11dpl-i|dual lga 3647| $380
Fusion IO 640GB IODRIVE |pcie ssd| $140
Seagate Constellation ES 2tb sas drive|ST32000444SS|$40
W3680| 6 core @ 3.3ghz| $60
unknown lga 3647 cpu| 1.5ghz looks like a gold or platinum series chip| $150 (2 available)
Emu 1212M PCI 24-Bit/192kHz Balanced Interface | Mastering-grade 24-bit, 192kHz converters.Multi-effects Processor.|$15
EMC 200GB ENTERPRISE 2.5"" SSD HUSSL4020ASS600|Decent enterprise ssd's|$60 (2 available)
I7 960|Socket 1366|$40
AMCC 9650SE-12ML |sata raid controler | $10
Jetway PICO NP93-2930r pico itx pc|http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/NP93.html|$110
Intel 80+ platinum 2130w psu (no fans included)|FXX2130PCRPS| $50 (quantity available)
2011 combo 1 |24gb ddr3 ecc, evga sr-x mobo (has some small issues), dual e5-2670's| $420
2011 combo 2 |24gb ddr3 ecc, intel mobo , dual e5-2650's | $380
2011 combo 3 |24gb ddr3 ecc, supermicro mobo , dual e5-2650's | $400
24a apc pdu|typical 220v dryer connection on the end|$50\
pcie risers|powered, molex|$5 (15+ available)
_
​
**LOCAL ONLY** (unless buyer pays shipping)
​
_
​
LOCAL ONLY|Description|Price
:--|:--|:--
Custom built server|Dual e5-2670, intel mobo, 16tb of hdd, 640gb of ssd, 60gb of ram|$2200
Corsair h100 AIO|fairly old by now|$40
mining rig 1|4x amd sky 900, dual opteron|$2000
mining rig 2|4 w7000, 1 sky 900, cheap cpus|$1100
mining rig 3|5 s9150, dual e5-2650|$1500
mining rig 4|5 s9000, cheap cpus|$1200
boxes|mostly consumer gpus from abit ago|$5
​
_
​
As-is hardware|No returns for any reason on as-is hardware. I will only accept non refundable payment for these items ie. bitcoin, paypal f&f, or local cash|Price
:--|:--|:--
R9 290|Worked for abit, looks like cap fell off|$45
ASUS P6t v2 deluxe|Killed it with my direct di water cooling setup. 95% chance its dead|$20
s10000|most likely dead|$100
cat s60 phone|the bottom circuit board needs to be replaced currently it all works except the cell service and aux|$100
​
"
​