Xu Mingxing: The mining machine consumes so much electricity, what are they calculating?

Author: OK Blockchain Engineering Institute

Among the many factors that currently restrict the development of blockchain technology, many people believe that one of the key factors is the high energy consumption. In fact, with the further development of blockchain technology, more and more people are participating, generating huge amounts of data, and the amount of computing required is also growing exponentially.

Not long ago, the American Quartz website published an article titled "Should we worry about Bitcoin's huge power consumption?" to discuss the issue of Bitcoin's power consumption. A recent study published in the Cell journal Joule, which focuses on energy materials, believes that globally, the amount of electricity consumed by Bitcoin mining in a year is at least equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of Ireland, which is about 24 terawatt hours (trillion watt hours).

According to Bloomberg, New York State regulators recently approved an electricity distribution plan for the cryptocurrency mining industry that will allow miners to negotiate electricity contracts. Just a few months ago, the New York State government allowed power departments in 36 cities to charge cryptocurrency miners higher electricity rates than other users.

What are mining machines calculating when they consume so much power? Xu Mingxing said that this actually goes back to the essence of how blockchain works.

Many people are talking about blockchain now, but they don’t know how it works. Xu Mingxing said: Blockchain is essentially made up of linked data blocks that record transaction information. The proof of work required to generate a new block is to find a random number so that the hash value obtained by substituting the random number, the hash value of the previous block, and the transaction data of the new block into the hash operation meets the target difficulty requirement.

Xu Mingxing explained that hash operation, in simple terms, is to input a string of any length for hash operation, and a shorter string of fixed bits will be obtained, which is called the hash value of the input information. Different input information, even a difference of one punctuation mark, will generate completely different hash values. The hash value of the previous block is the only hash value obtained by substituting the previous block information into the hash operation.

The expression of the hash value is composed of 10 numbers from 0 to 9 and 6 numbers abcdef, which means that there are 16 possibilities for each digit. The expression of the hash value generated by any input is very random and uncontrollable. The specific difficulty requirement refers to limiting the target range of a hash value expression - the number of consecutive digits at the beginning of the hash value is 0.

"When randomly substituting values, the probability of the first digit being 0 is 1/16, and the probability of the first 8 digits being 0 is 1/2^32, which means that approximately 2^32 random numbers are needed to get a hash value with the first 8 digits being 0. Therefore, the process of accounting nodes consuming a lot of computing power is to substitute a large number of random numbers for hash operations until they find a hash value that allows them to participate in the generation and achieve the required number of 0s as the beginning." said Xu Mingxing.

In general, as a milestone blockchain digital currency, Bitcoin has great value derived from a large amount of computing power investment and user trust. This is beyond doubt.

Xu Mingxing said that the requirements for computing difficulty are adjusted according to changes in the computing power of the entire network. After every 2016 blocks generated by the Bitcoin network consensus, the nodes of the entire network re-evaluate the computing power level to determine the new difficulty requirements. Currently, the time required to find a target random number is about 10 minutes.

But despite this, Alan Shipman of the Open University in the UK said: There is no need to worry, most economists believe that the market will regulate everything.