May 18, 2018

Quick Test of Bitmain’s Antminer X3 CryptoNight ASIC Miner

Crypto Mining Blog

We got our hands on a Bitmain Antminer X3 CryptoNight ASIC miner for a few days and have decided to give this soon-to-be or already way too expensive paperweight a quick test to see what you can expect from the device as they have been shipping for a week or two already to customers. The Antminer X3 is capable of delivering 220 KHS at 550W of power usage as per specifications and the device kind of manages to actually deliver on these numbers. The kind of part is because we’ve experienced some weird results trying to actually make the ASIC miner work properly on some popular pools and services such as NiceHash for example. When you point out the X3 to NiceHash’s CryptoNight (not CryptonightV7) stratum you get the device to connect and report extranonce support, but all you get are rejects and 0 as hashrate. So apparently the Antminer X3 does not work properly on NiceHash at the moment, even after flashing the latest available firmware that seemed a day newer than the one on the device we have tested. No go on NiceHash which seems as the best option for the moment considering that there are not that many CryptoNight coins left that offer good profit as most of the serious coins have already switched to the new ASIC-proof (for now at least) CryptoNight V7 algorithm.

Moving to a quick test on Nanopool’s Electroneum (ETN) mining pool as the next best thing after NiceHash in terms of profitability kind of worked, but not as we have expected. Here the miner connects and apparently works on the pool side, but the pool reports only about 20 KHS hashrate and not the full 220 KHS that it should. Locally the miner seems to work fine and the locally reported hashrate is also fine with a bit over 235 KHS average reported. People have reported success on some smaller ETN pools with the X3 ASIC miner, but even if you manage to make the device work properly on Electroneum you will not have a lot of time before ETH also forks and becomes unmineable with this miner.

The next thing to try was going for AntPool and Monero Classic (XMC) where with no surprise thins worked great out of the box, after all this is Bitmain’s mining pool, where they probably also test all the miners before shipping them to customers, so no surprise that it all works. The problem however is that you only get to mine XMC there and it is traded on only two exchanges according to CoinMarketCap, but at least it works and you can probably make a coin and a half to about two XMC coins per day at the moment or roughly maybe about $15-18 USD at the current rates and difficulty.

Here is how the situation looks profitability wise for the Antminer X3 ASIC miner on CryptoNight according to WhatToMine. The other possibly interesting coin to try mining with AntMiner X3 is ByteCoin (BCN) that has recently seen some boost in interest probably tied to the availability of the X3 ASIC miners in the hands of miners. So do you think that the BitMain AntMiner X3 is a soon-to-be or is already way too expensive paperweight? We definitely do not like the fact that it is not working properly on services like NiceHash or big pools like Nanopool out of the box, Bitmain should’ve had enough time to make sure possible issues have been resolved… and they can always release an update to fix problems like these while the devices are traveling to their customers. Can’t say we are happy for the short time we had with the X3 miner to give it a try and would definitely not recommend it at the moment, not that we did when they were announced either.

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DiarioBitcoin

IBM y Veridium se unen para lanzar tokens de impacto social y medioambiental

La iniciativa, también respaldada por Stellar, busca transformar los créditos de carbono en tokens basados en la tecnología Blockchain, “con el objetivo de facilitar a las empresas compensar sus huellas ambientales”

El gigante en tecnología IBM se ha asociado con Veridium Labs, iniciativa ambiental de tecnología financiera, para ayudar a convertir los bonos de carbono, también conocidos como créditos de carbono (el mecanismo internacional para reducir emisiones contaminantes al medio ambiente), en tokens basados en Blockchain.

En un comunicado de prensa conjunto, las compañías anunciaron una alianza para “transformar el mercado de créditos de carbono utilizando la tecnología Blockchain de IBM con el objetivo de facilitar a las empresas compensar sus huellas ambientales“.

“Mediante el uso de una red de Blockchain pública y autorizada, podemos ayudar a Veridium a crear un nuevo mercado sostenible que sea bueno para los negocios y bueno para el mundo“, dijo Bridget van Kralingen, vicepresidenta senior de IBM Industry Platforms and Blockchain. Añadió:

Este es un gran ejemplo de cómo las industrias están siendo reinventadas por la tecnología Blockchain, en este caso estableciendo un enfoque mucho más eficiente y transparente para la contabilidad y compensación de carbono que permitirá a los individuos y a las empresas desempeñar un papel en la mejora de nuestro medio ambiente“.

Los créditos de carbonos son uno de los tres mecanismos propuestos en el Protocolo de Kioto para la reducción de emisiones causantes del calentamiento global o efecto invernadero, se define como “un certificado que muestra que un gobierno o una empresa ha pagado para eliminar una cierta cantidad de dióxido de carbono del medio ambiente“. A cambio, las regulaciones ambientales permiten a los titulares de créditos de carbono quemar una cierta cantidad de combustibles fósiles .

Si bien el mercado de créditos de carbono existe, con muchos vendedores y compradores activos, medir las emisiones de carbono es complicado y costoso, y comprar créditos de carbono puede ser complejo. Según el comunicado de prensa conjunto, “los activos digitales basados en Blockchain, o tokens, pueden habilitar formas innovadoras de comprar y usar” estos bonos.

Un informe reciente producido por el IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), titulado “Avanzando hacia una economía basada en tokens: permitir la digitalización de activos del mundo real“, señala que los activos como el oro, los bienes raíces, las bellas artes o los créditos de carbono son difícil de transferir, lo que a menudo requiere una gran cantidad de trámites y procedimientos prolongados para compradores y vendedores.

“Al representar los activos físicos como tokens digitales en un libro contable digital distribuido o Blockchain es posible desbloquear el valor de los activos del mundo real e intercambiarlos en tiempo real“, afirma el informe.

Confiando en la tecnología y experiencia de IBM con la tecnología Blockchain, Veridium “planea transformar créditos de carbono en un nuevo tipo de activo digital fungible que puede canjearse e intercambiarse en la red Stellar“. Su enfoque “abarcará todo el proceso de contabilidad y compensación de la huella de carbono“.

Los créditos de carbono tokenizados incluirán créditos REDD+ de InfiniteEARTH, respaldados por proyectos que persiguen la sostenibilidad a largo plazo. Tanto Veridium como InfiniteEARTH están asociados con EnVision Corporation, una incubadora de tecnologías sostenibles.

Jared Klee, gerente de Blockchain para iniciativas de token de IBM, explicó a TechCrunch que la compra y contabilidad de créditos REDD+ es actualmente bastante complicada. “Es un gran inconveniente“, dijo. “Hoy los créditos de REDD+ son activos extraoficiales y no existe un intercambio central“.

Por lo tanto, la iniciativa de IBM y Veridium, también respaldada por Stellar, podría simplificar significativamente el comercio de créditos de carbono, haciendo de estos créditos atractivos que contribuyan a la preservación del medio ambiente y al desarrollo sostenible.

“Durante años, hemos estado tratando de mitigar los impactos ambientales en todos los puntos de la cadena de valor, sin embargo, las soluciones anteriores todavía presentaban complejidades y costos significativos“, comentó Todd Lemons, presidente de Veridium.

“Nuestro trabajo con IBM es el primer paso para simplificar drásticamente los procesos de contabilidad y compensación, y por lo tanto, ayuda a reducir los costos. Nuestros activos ambientales digitales están diseñados para ayudar a las empresas y los inversores institucionales a comprar y usar créditos de carbono para mitigar sus impactos ambientales actuales, e incluso cubrir sus riesgos potenciales de pasivos de carbono en el futuro“.

Fuente: Bitcoin Magazine

Traducción de Hannah Estefanía Pérez / DiarioBitcoin

Imagen de Pixabay

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November 26, 2017

Goodbye Bugs? How Formal Verification Could Fortify Smart Contracts

As a way to eliminate bugs in high-risk code, a style of software programming known as formal verification is making its way into the blockchain world.

Put simply, formal verification uses math to specify and analyze a program for errors in logic. However, because of the time and cost involved, formal verification is best reserved for situations where human life or large sums of money are at stake.

Currently, formal verification is used to verify the correctness of high-risk code in transportation, the military and cryptography. Chip companies use it to fortify algorithms before embedding them in silicon. And banks use it to develop financial algorithms.

Applied to blockchain technology, formal verification could provide assurances that self-executing transactions known as smart contracts will work as intended, eliminating some of the bugs and financial losses that come as a result of coding errors.

This year alone, bugs in Ethereum’s Parity wallet accounted for $180 million in losses. Last year, a bug in a virtual organization known as The DAO enabled a hacker to siphon $50 million from the Ethereum smart contract.

Platforms like Cardano and Tezos are already working on smart contract languages specifically designed to facilitate formal verification. Ethereum is also working on bringing formal verification to its smart contracts.

But what is formal verification? How does it work? And why is software so difficult to get right in the first place?

To Err Is Human

Software is inherently unforgiving. If you are constructing a building, you can leave out a nail or a screw, and the structure still stands. But when it comes to software, something as simple as a single typo can cause the entire program to stop working.

“Programming languages are incredibly powerful,” Gerard Holzmann, former lead scientist at NASA, explained in an interview with bitcoin Magazine. “As a programmer, you have to deal with a lot of detail, and unless you get every detail right, there is some effect.”

The traditional approach to getting software right is testing. After you write an algorithm, you input a variable and check to see if it gives back the correct output. But how do you test every single input? You can’t. There are too many to test, and there could be errors lurking in the cases that you do not test.

“There are so many possible executions that really, when you test or execute, you just scratch the surface of what is possible,” Holzmann said.

Put another way, testing only looks for the presence of bugs, not the absence of bugs, and one small mistake could have devastating results.

“If you take any failure of a system, like Fukushima and Three Mile Island, and look at the sequence of events that led to that failure, it is always fascinating because there are so many things that nobody could have predicted that would happen in a particular accommodation,” said Holzmann. “Same as in software; so many things can happen.”

In contrast, instead of testing one situation at a time, formal verification is a way to test that a program works in every situation. What you care about is whether the logic holds true, and the best way to check that logic is with a computer.

“A formalism for me has the purpose that you can reason about things, and the most useful way of reasoning about things is if you can program a machine to do the reasoning for you,” said Holzmann.

Making a Plan

Generally, the first step in formal verification is to create a mathematical model. The math needed is not complicated; it’s just basic logic written up in a so-called “formal language” that is machine checkable.

Typically, the process of specifying a model begins with a stakeholder who understands what the system needs to do. In the case of a medical device, the stakeholder might be a doctor; in the case of a smart contract, it might be a lawyer or a banker, or both.

The job of a stakeholder is to convey the information in her head to a requirements engineer who collects that information and creates the model. The process begins informally with discussions and abstractions, but ends formally with a precise mathematical specification.

This is not easy. It is a time consuming, iterative process that can take months, depending on the situation, but it often brings a clarity to a situation that was not there before because it forces programmers to think deeply about the behavior of a software.

“You can think of it as laws and regulations,” said Andreas Zeller, professor of software engineering at Saarland University in Saarbruecken, Germany, who likens creating a formal specification to developing a plan for a building.

“You refine the regulations,” he told bitcoin Magazine. “But if you do not have regulations in the first place, your building crashes, and that is when you realize, you had better make a plan.”

Checking the Logic

Once a model is specified, the next step is to verify the model’s logic with proofs. This is a critical step in the process. “If you do not have a proof, you do not have a guarantee that the model, as it is, will work,” explained Zeller.

But because you have to make explicit every single logical step, proofs can be immensely long and complex. In the past, this made formal verification agonizingly difficult. Even the simplest statement could require dozens of theorems and lemmas.

Fortunately, these days, many formal systems use automated theorem provers, like Coq, Isabelle or Metamath, that can check or even partially construct a formal proof.

Once a model is proven to work, the next step is building your program. But you still must make sure the software you build conforms to the specification.

This is where functional programming languages like ML, Haskell, OCaml or F# enter into the picture. Because these languages are closer to algebra in their expressiveness, they are a better match for formal verification than languages like C, Java, or JavaScript.

For this reason, Tezos is written in OCaml and Cardano is written in Haskell, so changes to the protocol are easier to formally verify. (A formal specification for Ouroboros Praos, the next generation of the consensus algorithm powering Cardano, is already in the works.) Similarly, Tezos’ smart contract language Michelson is based on OCaml; Cardano’s smart contract language Plutus is based on Haskell.

Pros and Cons

On the plus side, formal verification allows computer scientists greater assurances in developing software. On the negative side, because of the rigor involved, formal methods can be a time-consuming, costly undertaking for projects developing the code.

Because of this, formal methods are best used to guarantee smaller building blocks of code that get reused over and over. You would not use it for, say, an entire operating system, but only those parts of a system that require the highest safety or security assurances.

Naturally, any type of security comes at a cost. The question is, how much security will blockchain and smart contract developers be willing to pay for?

If you want something that is error free, “you had better be prepared to spend tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars for people who will provide a full proof,” cautioned Zeller.

On the other hand, for smart contracts securing tens of millions of dollars in funds, those costs may be well worth it. Looking at it another way, in a competitive environment, formal verification could make smart contracts more appealing to the consumer.

If, for instance, you had the choice of entrusting your funds to a smart contract that had been formally verified versus one that has not, which one would you choose?

___________

Thanks to Tim Menzies, professor of computer science at North Carolina University, and Brighten Godfrey, co-founder and CTO at Veriflow, and Automated Software Engineering 2017.

The post Goodbye Bugs? How Formal Verification Could Fortify Smart Contracts appeared first on Bitcoin Magazine.

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