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Armenia Opens $50 Million Bitcoin, Ethereum Mining Farm (chepicap.com)
Armenia has opened a cryptocurrency mining farm to the tune of $50 million. It reportedly mines Bitcoin and Ethereum and consists of 3,000 machines. Chepicap reports: The country's first mining project, launched in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, is headed by Armenian real estate investment company Multi Group Concern and Malta-registered Omnia Tech International Company. Armenian entrepreneur and head of Multi Group, Gagik Tsarukyan said at the ceremony that $50 million had been invested into the farm. The first floor of the farm is designed for an IT business center with around the clock operating services. Bitcoin.com reports that Armenia is working at establishing its own Silicon Valley through the development of a free economic zone that will boast an advanced technology center.
* PoW (or PoS) based consensus is a strike, sabotage and pollution of unprecedented proportions.
* The nodes' history, their "subjective", called ledger, is dictated by the more powerful nodes. This ledger plays the role of truth or law, therefore the stronger nodes are judges or legislators.
This madness did sneak into our lives only because of our unwinnable stupidity. /* End-of-post (EOP) */
The blockchain's professed purpose is to serve as a means for participants to agree upon who gave money to whom. It does this by keeping parallel histories of transactions in a tree structure, and this on each node (a distributed database, so your computer stores many gigabytes, some bits of which are pedophilic material: cf. OP). The "official" history is *a* longest branch of this tree. A tree's node is called a "block" the payload of which consists of so-called "transactions" which say that x gave y a coin. One is expected to have a hard time counterfeiting such a translation because in order not to be rejected by a participating node, said transaction has to be signed with x's private key, must include y's public key, and a reference to a signed transaction saying that x is the receiving party (containing x's public key).
Still one can multiply transactions (aka "double spending"), they need not be rejected by the nodes only kept in different blocks.
A block also holds, as overhead, a block's hash which is used as a pointer to its father in the tree. Now, in order for a block to be grafted it has to be referenceable i.e., to have an address or, in blockchain parlance, a hash. An acceptable hash has a growing with time collision prefix (sequence of 0s) each further bit of which rarefies them by half, so that a longer 0-prefixed hash is more precious and takes longer to find by exhaustive search.
A quantum computer can spit longest branches instantaneously, even by yesterday. These branches become the official history or ledger which the crass proletariat nodes believe to have been arrived at through the masses' consensus.
Imagine the likely consequences. /* EOP */
Alright here's a quick and easy summary of the technology behind Bitcoin which is trivially generalizable to other cryptocurrencies since their authors aren't discoverers but puny copying dwarves.
The seminal idea of Bitcoin is that of standpoint or of reference frame. Satoshi Nakamoto (be it a juridical person or otherwise) looked at the world from a particular, discrete, individual coin's perspective.
The only relevant life of which coin, the "subjective" of it, is whoever owns it, thus *a coin can be reduced to a memory, a history, a graph of its owners.* This graph, once you postulate that the same owner is different persons at different times (like the coin), has tree topology. Branches sprout when it is "double spent" i.e., when an owner gives it more than once without first losing it & being given it back. This is of course an undesirable possibility in a copy happy computer setting.
Each node of the coin tree is a signature of a certain hash. The hash is computed on a sequence consisting of a signature & of a public key.
What is a hash? A hash of a set of things can be imagined as a synthesis of sorts of that set: given an arbitrarily long (bit) string, a string of length invariant from input to input is output. Now, of course, the hash is a noninjective correspondence because, obviously, its image is of bounded size (the set of hash strings of a certain length) while its domain isn't (strings, whatever the length), but in practice one treats them as injective because the size of the image is a big enough integer relative to the number of hash function applications.
What is a signature? A signature is what is obtained by encrypting something with a private key. Anybody can verify that the originator of that thing is the one who has signed it by decrypting the signature into that thing by using the public key of the signer.
A coin is a