Mining Bitcoin on a laptop is a great way to learn more about how decentralized cryptocurrencies work. But it won’t make you rich. Crypto hobbyists report Bitcoin earnings equivalent to just a few cents a day. And even if you scale this up by adding tens of GPUs to your home setup, you’ll still only push those takings into single dollar digits. The reality is that crypto mining has entered its industrial phase. And that begs the question – will market forces make BTC data centers more efficient?

Phil Harvey – CEO and founder of Sabre56, a hosting provider and digital asset project management consultant – remembers the early days of crypto when mining was done in the basement. And, as the sector has scaled up, he’s been working with clients to make their operations more efficient, applying lessons in project planning and implementation learned from a previous career in the military.

Harvey remains intrigued by the possibilities of distributed ledger technology and appreciates that more needs to happen to bring the concept into the mainstream. “We should definitely try to understand its use case better and not be afraid of the change,” he told TechHQ.

Enabling Bitcoin technology

Sabre56 sees itself as an enabler of Bitcoin technology, helping customers to build Bitcoin mining farms by bringing design, project, and cost management expertise to the table. And the company has delivered installations at sites across North America and in the Nordics.

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What’s more, the Dubai headquartered firm has taken things a step further and is establishing hosting facilities of its own. “The plan was always to evolve from being a consultant to practicing what we preach,” Harvey explained.

Speaking with TechHQ it was clear that he wants to change the perception of crypto mining as an activity that’s wasteful of energy and causes damage to the environment. Having people align to standards and run Bitcoin mining operations more professionally will help.

Sabre56 is looking at ways of implementing benchmarks that both itself and others can follow – examining how operations can become more efficient with what they have. As mentioned, there are market forces to consider too, which could end up putting all but the most energy-efficient and well-optimized operations out of business.

Popularity of BTC data centers

The popularity of BTC data centers comes down to the odds of successfully mining Bitcoin. When miners solve the puzzle of finding a low-numbered hash of the next-in-line block of digital cryptocurrency transactions, they are rewarded with a few Bitcoin for their efforts. But the chances of success are incredibly low, so much so that winning the lottery feels like a done deal by comparison.

Bitcoin miners can boost their odds of receiving a reward by running multiple machines and taking trillions of guesses. However, while the chance of success goes up, so does the electricity bill. And when Bitcoin miners shop for hosting facilities for their rigs, one of the major items on their wish list is cheap power.

Last month, Sabre 56 announced that it had been awarded a five-year deal with Bootstrap Energy to provide miner operations at the 300MW Saxet Energy Park in southern Texas, US. The area is home to gigawatts of wind power, and energy management at the site will be designed to pass electricity cost savings onto clients.

Neat and tidy operations: Sabre56-hosted crypto mining facility in Wyoming, US. Image credit: Sabre56.

But it’s not just crypto miners that may benefit from state-of-the-art BTC data centers. Large-scale Bitcoin mining facilities give power companies a buyer of last resort when wind and solar energy generation surges. Rather than having to dump the electricity, energy firms can be confident that crypto miners will be glad of the windfall.

Also, because it’s possible to pause crypto mining operations, BTC data centers can help to buffer the grid. For example, if electricity demand spikes in the neighborhood, the computing processes could, in principle, spin down to reduce the facility’s energy footprint and free up power. And this points to a key operational difference between crypto mining sites and regular data centres, which need to be up 24/7.

In fact, there’s an argument to be made that mining farms motivate energy suppliers to upgrade infrastructure, with everyone benefiting from a more stable power grid. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has reportedly been thinking along these lines, but it’d be wide of the mark to say that everyone is happy to open their arms to crypto miners.

Longer term, excess power could be used to drive electrolyzers and create green hydrogen rather than support blockchain calculations that have less tangible benefits for society. Also, crypto mining is noisy and unpopular with residents looking for peace and quiet. And the objections don’t stop there.

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But when it comes to the energy mix consumed by BTC data centers and other crypto mining operations, there’s evidence that facilities are ahead of the curve compared with local averages. For example, the Bitcoin Mining Council – which claims to represent 43% of the cryptocurrency’s global mining network – writes that the electricity being used comprises a 63.1% sustainable power mix, according to its H1 2023 member survey.

Using Electricity Maps, which visualizes the carbon intensity of electricity being used worldwide, it’s possible to compare crypto mining to electricity consumption in general. For example, at the time of writing, 51% of electricity being consumed in the UK is from renewable sources. In the US, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas is providing 28% renewable power. And the only regions with a sustainable power mix above crypto mining’s 63.1% are Austria; the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Iceland; Germany; Canada; Brazil; Uruguay; plus pockets of the US, such as the City of Tacoma, and sources of Federal Hydropower.

Given the importance of cheap power to the economics of crypto mining and noting that the falling cost of wind and solar are fueling the rise of renewables as the world’s cheapest source of energy, Electricity Maps could just as easily function as a guide on where to site your next BTC data center.

And there are some pioneering examples. We’ve already highlighted Sabre56’s mission to make the sector more efficient. But it’s not the only industry player to recognize where the cryptocurrency sector needs to get to. TeraWulf – a vertically integrated Bitcoin miner – has multiple zero-carbon sites, which target places with an excess supply of energy, not much demand, and limited transmission opportunities.

Its Lake Mariner facility serves as a sink for abundant hydropower and its Nautilus Cryptomine is said to be North America’s first nuclear-powered Bitcoin mining facility.

The company points to the role that BTC data centers can play in giving power firms a guaranteed buyer at the time of energy production, as well as helping to meet other expenses. “That customer adds to the denominator and allows you to amortize the fixed costs of the system over a larger base,” said Nazar Khan, one of TeraWulf’s co-founders and its COO.

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Bitcoin (BTC) has its fans and critics. And to understand what makes this cryptocurrency so polarizing, it’s worth investing a small amount of time in unpacking the concept of money. By doing so, you can appreciate the opportunities and concerns on both sides of the digital coin, as well as gain a perspective on potential BTC trends over the longer term.

Going back centuries, civilizations have purchased goods and services using various means, including exchanging livestock and paying in shells. Fast forward to today, and we have trusted fiat currencies such as the US dollar, EURO, British Pound, and Chinese Yuan.

And while digital payments increasingly dominate, technically – for example, in the case of the British Pound issued by the Bank of England – it is the physical notes and coins that represent the promise of payment from the central bank to the bearer of the currency.

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This begs the question as to why people are so happy to give their money to retail banks and send funds electronically – if those numbers in the various accounts aren’t, strictly speaking, legal tender. And the answer is that those traditional financial services have government backing.

“Making a deposit into a bank or building society account is like giving your trust to that organisation,” writes the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), which monitors banks and building societies in the UK. “You trust that it will look after your money and, when you want to access that money again, it will be there.”

Customers of conventional financial institutions have protection up to a certain value. And while this oversight and government backing is mostly successful in keeping the wheels of traditional finance turning – the promise of payment is only directly tied to the cash in your pocket.

Plus – as wobbles throughout history have shown – if confidence in the ability of the government to control its finances dips, so does the value of that promise to pay the bearer. And when times are shaky, investors reach instead for gold, which has been seen to hold its value during turbulent times.

And this brings the discussion to the idea of cryptocurrency, specifically Bitcoin’s main fork, dubbed Bitcoin Core (BTC), which some advocate has the potential to become a kind of ‘digital gold’.

How does BTC work and what is crypto mining?

The best way to understand crypto mining is to simply look at a block in the BTC blockchain. And there are a couple of key details to focus on. The first is the hash, indicated in the screengrab below by a green arrow, and the second is the so-called ‘nonce’.

Screenshot of BTC details (block #802502) grabbed from Blockchain.com’s explorer page.

A hash digest is a fixed-length code that’s commonly used as an integrity check on digital files. The one-way function generates a unique fingerprint of a file’s contents. And, if the hash function is truly collision-proof, then no two inputs will produce the same output.

For example, if you apply a SHA256 hash (the function used to digest blocks when crypto mining BTC) to the phrase ‘Helloworld’ you get –

5ab92ff2e9e8e609398a36733c057e4903ac6643c646fbd9ab12d0f6234c8daf

But if we re-run the SHA256 hash on ‘Helloworld+1’, the one-way function generates a different code, or fingerprint –

4865d2b4b49f88cc5a721fdc7ff210878f657219d5a768e317134b66a18a4605

And this tells us quickly that the input (which, rather than our simple example, could instead be a GB-sized file and hence enable rapid integrity checks for software such as large operating system updates) has been modified. Also, while the fingerprint is impossible to predict, we can engineer patterns in the output by adding random values to the input.

In our case and sticking with the SHA256 algorithm, if we try ‘Helloworld+1580358748’, we get –

5a0506dd28159d6d8bb1e1e2a3edc4d10e1fa2519193726e9bff6960887a2aa2

And you’ll notice that adding ‘1580358748’ to the list of cryptocurrency transactions comprising BTC block #802502 (plus a hash of the previous block, to secure the blockchain) produces a string of zeros at the front of the hash digest –

00000000000000000001a3c8e6069d5a7d7c7236c91953bfd356794211151b04

Finding a suitable ‘nonce’, which can be added to a block so that its hash has a string of preceding zeros, gets to the heart of bitcoin mining. And although the exercise may sound a little abstract, it gives BTC coins – which are issued to the crypto miner that’s first to solve the challenge for each block – their scarcity.

With the blocks themselves representing sequences of transactions, stamped with an integrity check thanks to the hash functions, we now have the makings of a digital currency. What’s more, if a bad actor wanted to rewrite history and change any of the entries on the digital ledger, the hash would fail to match due to the modified contents.

Plus, coming up with new ‘nonces’ – which is a trial and error process – represents too big a challenge were adversaries to try and cover their tracks.

Digital gold, or not?

Likening BTC to gold serves as a useful comparison in picturing a possible role for future cryptocurrencies. Although, time has yet to pass the same degree of judgement on BTC, with gold having been accepted for thousands of years as a trusted store of value.

“Bitcoin and gold are similar from both a psychological perspective and, especially, as a resource,” write the economists Wolfgang Härdle, Campbell Harvey, and Raphael Reule in a useful discussion paper on ‘Understanding Cryptocurrencies’ [PDF]. “Neither can be created arbitrarily: each must be mined and each has a finite supply (at least on planet Earth)”.

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Similarly, just as it takes energy to extract gold from rock buried underground, it typically requires a vast number of guesses before crypto miners discover a suitable nonce. The probability of an input generating an output with zero as the first digit is 1 in 16 (the hash digest is hexadecimal). But to find 19 leading zeros, as in the hash digest of BTC block #802502, drops that likelihood to just (1/16)¹⁹ – an incredibly small number.

The probability of successfully hashing a new block is many times less than winning a national lottery. But, of course, crypto miners can (sticking with the example of a lottery) buy trillions of tickets per second to boost their chances of hitting upon a valid guess.

Looking at the hash rate for BTC – the number of guesses being made on finding a suitable nonce value – that figure is more than 382 million per second, and it’s measured in units of terahashes (1 trillion guesses).

In the physical world, mining equipment is big and bulky and requires industrial scale power. And the analogy holds for digital crypto mining rigs too. To be competitive, crypto miners need pools of computing hardware that’s been designed specifically for the task.

Units such as Bitmain’s popular S19 model, which is specified as delivering a hashrate of 151 terahashes per second (TH/s) and consumes more than 3kW of power at the wall, are whirring away all over the world (where allowed) to validate BTC transactions on a decentralized digital ledger.

Long-term BTC trends

Critics of such a consensus mechanism, dubbed proof-of-work, point to the power that’s consumed. But, without coming down on either side of the fence, it should be noted that managing traditional currencies consumes energy too. There’s a vast amount of backend services supporting modern banking operations, and it’s the price to pay for running systems that customers trust.

As mentioned, the use of gold goes back thousands of years, which is ages long compared with the not-yet two-decade-old practice of BTC crypto mining. We live in interesting times with ambitious projects to deliver zero-knowledge proof, privacy-preserving World IDs, and the boom in AI.

There’s an element of the unknown when new technologies emerge, and it’s fair to say that cryptocurrencies occupy that space. Parallels with the utility of gold may serve as a guide on how the story of BTC plays out, but time will tell whether Bitcoin has similar appeal, and that clock has only just started ticking.

The post Exploring BTC trends – is Bitcoin entering its industrial phase? appeared first on TechHQ.

Worldcoin, founded by Alex Blania and Sam Altman – who are both still involved – and Max Novendstern, who left the company in 2021, has some lofty ambitions. As CEO of OpenAI, Altman has brought advanced chatbots powered by generative AI into the mainstream. And Blania, Worldcoin’s CEO, brings an intriguing mix of theoretical physics and protocol development skills to the project, which sets its sights on creating the biggest financial and identity network imaginable. However, its popularity encountered a speedbump this week, with Worldcoin going down on Monday 7^th August.

But if Worldcoin being overwhelmed by demand is a measure of the global interest in the project, then Blania and Altman would have reason to view Worldcoin being down as another milestone in their journey. And the end goal is to solve the problem of verified humanness, which tackles the issue of identity in a world where telling the difference between human-generated and machine-made output is getting harder.

Why do we need a World ID?

Picturing a world where conversing with advanced chatbots – such as descendants of OpenAI’s game-changing ChatGPT – is indistinguishable from human interactions, having proof of personhood feels like a smart idea. In principle, interactions could then be labeled as human in origin to help people navigate what is likely to be a very confusing existence as generative AI becomes increasingly lifelike. But that raises the question, how do you verify a human?

Maxed out: Worldcoin was down on Monday 7th August, 2023, and returned minus the capability to claim grants as developers worked to restore services.

Worldcoin’s approach is based on liveness detection, biometrics, and so-called zero-knowledge proofs that allow systems to validate whether something is genuine while preserving the privacy of that information. And privacy-preserving validation of personhood opens the door – Blania and Altman hope – to some radical concepts such as universal basic income (UBI), as signposted in the Worldcoin whitepaper.

In fact, according to that whitepaper, every human is eligible for a share of Worldcoin simply for being human. But distributing those tokens fairly is only possible if users can verify their humanness – asserting that they are real people and different from other real people.

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Conventionally – for example, when interacting with regular institutions – that happens using know-your-customer (KYC) processes such as providing a birth certificate or passport. But the founding team’s concern is that this approach doesn’t scale. There’s also the issue of what happens if you don’t have those documents.

Considering alternative approaches, Worldcoin has opted for biometrics – specifically, iris recognition. And having a digital primitive based on the pattern of a user’s eye opens up the concept to a truly global audience.

Recall that Apple’s Face ID device unlocking feature carries a probability that one person in a million, other than you, could look at the infrared camera and gain access to the smartphone or tablet. And, although that probability sounds small – if you wanted to use that method as a proof of personhood on a global scale for billions of Worldcoin accounts, the risk of fraud would be too high.

A bridge to the real world

Hearing Blania and Altman speak, it’s clear that they can imagine a future where looking at pictures or video, or considering intelligence alone, won’t be sufficient to determine humanness. And they see World ID’s proof of personhood as a bridge to the real world, which is a good time to mention the Worldcoin Orb.

Shoreditch sign-up: it takes just a few minutes for users to download the Worldcoin app, agree to the T&C’s, and verify that they are human by standing in front of a Tools for Humanity Orb, which takes an infrared measurement to determine liveness and performs an iris scan. Image credit: JT.

Last week, when Worldcoin wasn’t down, this author gazed briefly into one of 2000 Orbs that have been produced by Tools For Humanity – a technology company building tools for the Worldcoin project. Custom designed, Worldcoin’s Orbs feature a range of sensors, an iris scanner, and contain local compute that turns images of the colored part of the eye surrounding the pupil into device-signed World IDs.

By presenting a digital World ID, users can assert that they are a unique human who has stood in front of a Worldcoin Orb, and for signing up they receive – depending on where they reside – a nominal amount of Worldcoin tokens. And this goes back to the idea that by offering rewards, users will be incentivized to make the network a success.

However, not everyone is so keen on the idea of a new global currency – notably, the US – and restrictions are in place that stop Worldcoin from issuing tokens to US residents. Also, in Europe, governments appear to share some concerns about the collection of sensitive information.

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For example, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK advises that “Organisations must conduct a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) before starting any processing that is likely to result in high risk, such as processing special category biometric data.” And, “Where they identify high risks that they cannot mitigate, they must consult the ICO.”

However, while the ICO has said in a statement on Worldcoin that it will be making enquiries, the independent body has dodged the question – based on the details of a freedom of information request – as to whether it has asked Worldcoin for a copy of its DPIA.

Worldcoin is processing biometric data, but the processing – the conversion of the iris scan into a unique World ID – takes place locally on the Orb via a neural network embedding. And it’s interesting to note that the hardware, while custom-designed to capture sufficiently high-resolution images capable of preserving uniqueness on a global scale, has been engineered to be resistant to physical attacks.

Blania, who has knowledge of how the Orbs have been engineered, revealed that the units make use of multi-spectral imaging and time-of-flight measurements to confirm that they are looking at real humans. And when proof of personhood takes place, it’s using an iris code that he describes as providing extreme privacy.

The zero-knowledge proofs in the protocol are intended to separate a user’s identity from any requests made to the World App for human verification.

How do I sign up for a World ID?

Practically, users need to book an appointment where they can visit a Worldcoin Orb near them and download the World App on their smartphone. The World App generates a QR code, which – in effect – says that the user is (potentially) the rightful owner of the World ID. And showing the QR code to the Worldcoin Orb initiates the final stage of the enrolment process – proving the person signing up is human.

Under the hood is the generation of key pairs – one pair for the World ID and another for a cryptocurrency wallet. And the zero-knowledge proof rests on whether the digital codes are part of a known set – in other words, proof of inclusion.

Considering use cases, solutions like World ID – and it should be said that there are other projects too, developing proof of personhood tools (Quadrata, Humanbound, and Proof of Humanity are just a few examples) – pave the way for authors to identify content as human-created. And others could use their proof of personhood to endorse human-badged creations.

Real deal: Orb verified users receive a proof of personhood, which can be viewed digitally on the World App and is linked to their World ID.

The Worldcoin project has attempted to design the protocol so that it can be scaled to all of humanity. However, until that backend becomes decentralized – for example, to piggyback on the benefits of federated computing – there will no doubt be growing pains to keep pace with interest in the project. And that’s been seen this week with Worldcoin down, and having to throttle functionality.

At the time of writing, the World App remains at capacity, according to a warning notification displayed on the World ID page of this author’s device.

The post Worldcoin down but not out appeared first on TechHQ.

Graphics processing units (GPUs) are arguably one of the most prized hardware assets in computing. Shareholders lifted GPU maker NVIDIA into the trillion-dollar club when the firm announced ‘surging demand’ for its products and a quarterly revenue outlook of US $11 billion in a recent investor briefing. And the value of GPUs is opening up new ways of utilizing these high-performance chips, which includes decentralized computing – with rewards engineered thanks to a killer crypto app opportunity.

To understand how everything fits together, it’s worth highlighting some of the leading applications for GPUs. NVIDIA, which designs the majority of graphics cards produced globally, was founded in the early 1990s to address the shortcomings of general-purpose computing chips. Regular CPUs, while incredibly flexible programming tools, are less than ideal for processing complex graphics.

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NVIDIA realized that it could accelerate 3D and multimedia tasks by having chips with a smaller, but graphics-specific, instruction set and many more cores – allowing superior parallel processing. Taking NVIDIA’s latest GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card as an example – the GPU has 16384 NVIDIA CUDA cores, whereas a top-end Intel i9 CPU has 24.

Being able to divide up tasks on a huge scale –thanks to the large numbers of cores – enables GPUs to master various use cases. NVIDIA’s trillion-dollar club success was driven by data center and cloud computing demand. More developers are integrating generative AI features into their enterprise applications, as awareness of the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) grows.

And GPUs have turned out to be ideal for training and fine-tuning LLMs, which has buoyed the market for NVIDIA’s products considerably. Meta’s AI Research SuperCluster featured 6,080 GPUs (housed in 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems) in its phase one configuration, and that GPU count is being upped to a massive 22,000 to add extra computing horsepower. Raising the number of available GPUs from 6,080 to 22,000 lifts AI training performance by more than 2.5x, according to Meta’s technical team.

Rendering and why decentralized computing could be a killer crypto app opportunity

But the explosion of interest in generative AI shouldn’t distract from one of the principal uses of GPUs. As the name suggests, graphics cards remain integral to computer-generated visuals, which in 2023 means not just video games, but various forms of entertainment as well as industrial applications.

Rendering – the process of creating 2D images from a 3D model – is used to create increasingly realistic computer graphics that can provide special effects in film and television and digital mock-ups of products and buildings – to give just a couple of examples. Video game visuals have come on leaps and bounds thanks to advances in rendering enabled through GPUs and graphics engines such as Unreal Engine, Unity, Cry Engine, and others used to create big-budget, triple-A titles.

And this brings us to Render Token and other blockchain-based solutions for democratizing access to digital resources such as Golem, which has recently unveiled a GPU computing proof-of-concept. Render Token puts to work idle GPUs by monetizing peer-to-peer processing of computer-generated images using OTOY’s Octane Render. As background, Octane Render has become a valuable software tool for creating digital cinema and other visual assets for clients.

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“Most developers’ GPUs remain idle when they are not rendering their own work, leaving a wealth of potential power waiting to be tapped,” writes the team behind Render Network – distributed GPU rendering on the blockchain. “Once they’ve registered their idle GPUs on the Render Network, these GPU owners become Node Operators and are able to earn RNDR Tokens.”

The full details can be found in a white paper that explains how RNDR – a killer crypto app opportunity – enables GPU owners to receive payment for running rendering jobs on their machines for other users. Users post their rendering jobs on the community portal and receive a quote based on the processing demands of the task and supply of available GPUs on the decentralized computing network.

“Tiny computer, big project? The Render Network is your friend,” comments one of RNDR’s users in a Twitter video.

#OctaneRender revolutionized the way we render, but @OTOY took it even further with @RenderToken.

We asked our #digitalart #NFT community what they like about #RNDR, our #3D cloud rendering network, and what they told us was exactly what we hoped for: more room for creativity! pic.twitter.com/UZbKj5nujh

— The Render Network (@RenderToken) March 25, 2021

To action the job, payment is made (in RNDR) and a smart contract is created between the user and the GPU owner. As well as recording the transaction, the blockchain entry can also be used for digital rights management as the ledger provides a record of the work.

Full details on the GPUs that are supported for hardware owners thinking about offering rendering services and instructions on how to get started can be found on the Render Network Knowledge Base.

Airbnb model at the data center level

Cryptocurrencies aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. And if the hype train over utility tokens such as RNDR leaves you uneasy, there are still other ways to benefit from underutilized GPUs. For example, FluidStack – which was founded by Oxford University students who noticed that machine learning researchers were paying high prices for cloud compute, at the same time as relatively powerful gaming rigs owned by their friends were sat unused 75% of the time – is now applying Airbnb for GPUs at the data center level.

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FluidStack, which today offers access to more than 47,000 GPU servers across six continents, allows data center operators to monetize excess capacity. And customers benefit from more affordable pricing. According to FluidStack, users pay on-demand fees of just US $11.92 per hour compared with US $30 – 40 for equivalent services provided by major cloud vendors.

In terms of requirements, FluidStack lists an example setup of 4x RTX A6000 GPUs, and data center providers must host multiple NVIDIA GPU servers in a secure environment. Also, the Airbnb for GPU provider has a preference for Tier 2+ data centers based on customer needs.

The growing application value of GPUs is leading to new models for accessing compute for rendering and other tasks. And these initiatives are giving hardware owners an incentive to boost the productivity of GPUs rather than have expensive silicon left sitting idle.

The post Decentralized computing – a killer crypto app opportunity? appeared first on TechHQ.

Blockchain is a technology vastly misunderstood by the small fraction of the general public that know it’s something different from cryptocurrency (the most public – and last year at least, the most publicly disastrous – application to run on a blockchain basis). Ronny Tome, founder of the Ducatus blockchain, is advocating for blockchain to be applied in a range of other ways, and for the ways in which it’s already in use to be more widely understood.

In Part 1 of this article, he explained that blockchain has a significant role to play in reducing the level of necessary trust in any number of transactions. We asked him how the technology was already – relatively silently – impacting lives and businesses, and how its use could be expanded to benefit us.

Chains of government.

RT:

Blockchain is already used for many things which people don’t know. I mean, if you’re using your mobile phone, you don’t know the technology behind it. Let’s take banking – banking could be put completely onto the blockchain. And in Dubai in the UAE, they’re starting to put the entire government sector, including the land registry on blockchain.

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A lot of governments and institutions are already starting to use blockchain for data processing, data storage and other things. People don’t know, because nobody talks about it. So again, the whole point of blockchain is that once it’s coded, you don’t have any work with it anymore. So that’s also obviously a challenge because right now, what the blockchain can do in a fully automated way takes the work of multiple people. Once the blockchain is coded, you don’t need those people anymore.

So, as with AI, which is taking over a lot of job roles in, say, copywriting, technology will take over a lot of these roles, with blockchain being used for data processing. But will the normal user of a digital bank know that all this data is stored on a blockchain or not? Probably not. And they don’t need to know – we don’t need to understand the tech behind our tech, as it were. We just need to know the use case and how to actually use it in our day-to-day life.

THQ:

Last year was a bad year in terms of the cryptocurrency side of blockchains – the side most people know. Did that damage public trust in terms of you the reliability of the technology? And if it did, what needs to happen to win that trust back?

The human factor.

RT:

It’s strange the way people think about this. If you think about the incidents that did the most damage, like the Terra Luna and the FTX incidents, those big chaos factors that gave media outlets the chance to make cryptocurrency sound like it’s only for scammers, the issues were down to greedy humans, not the tank. In cryptocurrency, there’s a chance of making a lot of money very quickly. And when people are coming in, they might initially have the right kind of intentions, but when suddenly hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing towards you, a lot of people are tempted to try to find ways of keeping more than they should. And by doing so, they are going to drive the whole project into the ground and will end up in jail.

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THQ:

So what needs to be done?

RT:

I think we need operators, we need businesspeople who are following best practice, who are not blinded by the big money involved. Which means we need people who have experience in the business, putting in place the right kind rules and same principles as we do in other businesses.

We need some standards in place, both to work towards preventing repetitions of 2022, and to educate people so that they know what to look for and see a scam or a bad project in the early stages and not after it’s been operating for two or three years and billions of dollars have disappeared.

It would be useful too if people would stop over-promising on the get-rich-quick potential of cryptocurrency. But we also need proper information about what blockchain is, what cryptocurrency is, what it can do, and what you need to be careful about.

THQ:

So do we need to regulate the industry? Would that help to re-build public trust?

Regulation vs speed.

RT:

Yeah, it definitely needs some kind of regulation. I mean, I don’t know, and nobody knows right now, what the regulation needs to look, but governments are giving it a try. Singapore is regulating, Australia, Japan, even the US, but they’re going one way today and another way next week. Nobody really knows what to do. And the thing is, the decision-making processes in our governments are just far too slow.

They’re making regulations based on what they know in cryptocurrency today. By the time they have brought out the regulations, 6-12 months down the road, cryptocurrency is developing so fast, they’ll be behind the curve. So we need to find different ways of dealing with this. But there should be a set of standards and regulations, where people can move if you step outside of them. And if you try to scam, if you try to cheat, then you’re gonna get hit with the full force of the law, like in every other business would, but you need that bit of freedom to move because governments aren’t able to keep up with this.

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THQ:

We’ve said there are a couple of issues for blockchain, in that people either don’t know that it’s working behind the scenes, or that they conflate it with something else – usually cryptocurrency. So what are the main problems that blockchain needs to overcome to achieve its potential? Is it being more understood? Is it getting more public education about what’s actually happening there? Or is there something beyond that?

The power of the small.

RT:

I think it’s about it being more understood – and being more adopted as well by small and medium businesses.

THQ:

Interesting. Explain?

RT:

The big companies are starting to use blockchain already. But that doesn’t “normalize” it fast enough. To do that, you need to get the restaurant owner or the shop owner on the street to use it and understand it.

You can use blockchain with an application as a second layer on it, a token or a smart contract or an NFT or whatever, to raise funds, to create certain kinds of memberships and loyalty programs, to offer special benefits of discounts or points.

All those things are already in the market anyway, from frequent flyer miles to supermarket loyalty discounts. But whatever you want to do in that way, it can be done and managed on blockchain.

Bonfire of the Accounts.

THQ:

But if they’re doing it already without blockchain, what’s the secret sauce that blockchain can add that makes them need it?

RT:

Efficiency. Blockchain eradicates the trust factor, and it’s highly efficient. Blockchain is for everybody. Imagine selling Product X in your store, and each sale of Product X is recorded on the blockchain. Instead of hiring an accountant and an auditing firm that does an audit once a year, you would actually have all the data available at any moment in time, by just clicking a single button.

How? A smart contract could pull all the sale data from the blockchain and it will be there.

THQ:

Hold the phone! Did you just make accountants redundant?

RT:

Now you’re getting it! And once we get to that level of adoption, then people will be seeing all the different possibilities of blockchain. Right now, you talk to people about blockchain, they think you mean cryptocurrency and they recoil in fear and confusion, and the conversation goes nowhere.

There are millions of possibilities with blockchain, but we need people to get involved and want to do this.

THQ:

OK, so if the turning point, the pivot point is the adoption of the tech by small and medium businesses, apart from the delight that is the Bonfire of the Accounts, how do we get them on board?

An expanding ecosystem.

RT:

Good question. What we’ve done is build an entire ecosystem of blockchains. We started one in 2017 that was based around Bitcoin, then we created a second that was based around Ethereum.

So we started to build an entire ecosystem around our blockchains, from a digital banking app in Europe, to an e-commerce site, to a centralized training exchange. Now we’re building the metaverse (another topic that people don’t understand!). Blockchain plays a big role there too, because all the digital assets inside the metaverse are based on blockchains. We’re building an NFT marketplace. We are actively approaching traditional businesses and we cooperate with them, giving them a lot of sweat equity, giving them something before they invest their money, so they can learn more about how blockchain can benefit them before they part with their money – especially in this economy.

That’s how we’re going about bringing blockchain to the small and medium business community. Roll that sort of ecosystem out across the economy and you might well speed up the understanding and the adoption we need to get much more of the world using blockchains.

The post Blockchain – a matter of trust appeared first on TechHQ.

It’s fair to say that cryptocurrency had a shockingly bad year in 2022. With hackers and thieves lifting prodigious electronic sackfuls of cash from a variety of exchanges, and whole exchanges collapsing into the sand on which they were built due to chronic mismanagement, it was a year that made even some significant adopters wary of dabbling again in what became known as an unstable environment. Blockchain, which the tech world knows is the underpinning technology on which things like cryptocurrency are built, was tarred with the same brush to some effect in the eyes of the wider public, meaning it has some distance of education to run to free itself from the bad odor of cryptocurrency and establish itself as an understood part of the wider business and domestic world.

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The question is how it can do that in a world in which it’s largely a badly misunderstood force, despite already underpinning a lot of existing and developing technological transactions and work?

We sat down with Ronny Tome, who perhaps unsurprisingly is the founder of a well-regarded blockchain named Ducatus. His conviction is that blockchain is – or at least could be – an entirely revolutionary technology across myriad sectors if only there was sufficient understanding and take-up of it.

THQ:

Just once, nice and loud for the people at the back – blockchain is not the same as cryptocurrency, right?

RT:

Right!

The separation of terms.

THQ:

Great. Glad we got that settled. Tell you what – while we’re still on Basic Street, let’s go around the block. What are the differences between blockchain and cryptocurrency, and why should we not confuse the two?

RT:

Blockchain is the underlying technology. It’s very simple. It’s a public ledger. It’s like an Excel sheet where you put in all the transactions that are happening. They are then packaged into blocks. And those blocks are then locked by some form of algorithm. And then comes the next block. So there’s one block after the other. That’s a blockchain.

THQ:

A chain… of blocks. Uncanny.

RT:

It’s just a ledger of data. And due to the technology in which it’s programmed, it’s immutable. So whatever has happened, you cannot change anymore in the future.

Cryptocurrency makes use of that technology. It’s just a small application of the technology, but blockchain can be used for so many more things than just being a payment coin or being a smart contract. So, look at blockchain as the foundation, the underlying technology of all these applications that are happening on top of the blockchain.

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One of them is a cryptocurrency and cryptocurrency now comes in many different flavors and colors. You have payment coins you have smart contracts, you have all different kinds of de-fi products (decentralized financing). Many of the applications of blockchain are not currencies, and many of them are not being used to make any kind of payments. Some of them are used to describe a certain process.

98% of the people can be wrong.

Again, all of this is mostly unknown to, I would say, 98% of the population. For them, it’s all the same. This is the general issue that we have globally with people not understanding what it is and not seeing the real potential. And I believe in many ways, that the government’s purposely not really educating the people about it, because they don’t want them to know.

THQ:

It felt unusually important to get that off our mutual chests.

So – while around 98% of the world’s population see blockchain and hear cryptocurrency, what other things can it do, but more importantly, what are the things it makes more sense to used bitcoin to do, in ways that don’t exist already?

RT:

It makes more sense to use blockchain for things like AI and big data. They’re all using Blockchain now, because it can be a store of data, so it can be a solution for automated accounting purposes. Supply chain management is another big area where blockchain makes more sense.

With the scan of simple QR code, you will know exactly where a product has come from, you’ll know where it’s gone through, you’ll know anything you need to know as far as data management is concerned. Anything with data can be stored in a blockchain and can then, through smart contracts, be managed fully automatically, without any human being able to manipulate it.

People talk about blockchain as a “trustless” technology. That’s a big part of the point – we don’t need to trust anybody once the code is written. If the code is written properly and correctly, then nobody can change the data anymore. It’s going to be inputted automatically into the blocks and into the blockchain. Which means that as soon as I can see that this transaction is in the blockchain, and it’s verified by the verifiers, all of which is perfectly public to see, I don’t need to trust a person, I don’t need to have any doubts. I know this is real.

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The yolk of truth.

THQ:

So problems of fundamental reality are the province of blockchain?

RT:

Yes. Think about it in a domestic setting. When you go into a supermarket and you buy an “organic” egg, how do you know that it’s organic? Apart from the fact that it maybe costs you 50% more? There is no proof, right, you need to trust the shop.

THQ:

Which, given the practices of some suppliers and supermarkets, is a fairly foolish thing to do.

RT:

Exactly. If you put your egg on the blockchain, you could have a QR code there. And that can show you the whole journey, from farm to shelf – you don’t need to trust anybody anymore. It’s there, and you can see it.

THQ:

A slightly bleak, if necessary outlook – but of course, “zero-trust” is understood as a way to ensure cybersecurity, so it makes sense that the less trust there is in a process, the more reliable it is.

RT:

We’re still in a very early stage for all of this. But what we need is for more people and more businesses to get really involved in adopting it, because it will make a lot of things easier and faster.

In Part 2 of this article, we’ll explore what those things are – and what the pathway towards a more blockchain-centric world should look like.

The post The renaissance of blockchain? appeared first on TechHQ.

To fully understand quantum cyber security, we need to get a couple of things straight in our minds.

Firstly, cyber security as it has applied to classical computing will probably be more or less useless in the age of fully-functioning quantum computing.

Why? Because cyber security in the classical computing age depended on a certain levelness of playing field, which quantum computing is expected – at least by those who are prepared to contemplate the worst, just in case it happens – to blow that level playing field to smithereens.

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A long and more complicated explanation of why it will probably do that would tell you about the nature of quantum computing depending not on “bits” as a data storage unit, as in classical computing, but on qubits, which, thanks to the quantum physics principles of quantum superposition and quantum entangling, will allow quantum computers to perform a non-literal gazillion computations per second, cracking the equivalent of any data safe built on classical computing principles in a happy, almost sardonic handful of heartbeats.

For our purposes, it’s a little unfortunate that we need to go a little beyond “quantum computers will have classical cyber security cracked before you can say ‘Please don’t hurt me,’” but rather than dwell on the principles of quantum physics that explain why this will happen, we need to delve a little into how it will happen.

Only by knowing how classical computing systems can be cracked by quantum computers will we get an inkling as to how what’s known as post-quantum cryptography – the basis of what we currently understand about the cyber security that will apply in a world of quantum computing – is expected (or rather, forecast) to work.

The full extent of quantum cyber security is likely to extend far beyond these basics, to the same extent that classical cyber security extends significantly beyond the cracking of the public-key security systems used by most organizations to encrypt the secrets that hold the classical computing world together.

The main threats.

Let’s break some of this down.

The particular cyber security threats that are introduced by quantum computers include:

1. The so-called “Harvest now, decrypt later” model of hacking.

This is a nefarious process where bad actors gather encrypted data now, because the gathering is comparatively easy, while the decryption is where most of the world’s cyber security money has gone.

Imagine the cave of untold wealth and riches in the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Bad actors will keep adding to their store of treasures, but (in a suitably quantum fashion), the treasures are made of lead until the right words are spoken – the “Open sesame!” that turns them all into their precious, sparkling selves.

Quantum computing is the “Open sesame!” that allows all the gathered data treasures to be decrypted – and then the world has a cyber security nightmare on its hands.

2. The defeat of asymmetric cyber security.

This is the threat we’ve mentioned – cyber security in classical computing depends on a number of asymmetric public-key algorithms, like RSA, Diffie-Hellman (DH), and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) algorithms. Everything from banks and financial markets to the security underpinning the internet itself goes “blip” if these algorithms are compromised.

It’s extremely unlikely that any of those algorithms can withstand the development of million-qubit quantum computers (which are currently forecast by the likes of IBM to be a reality by 2030). So… that focuses the mind.

3. The big blockchain crunch.

Blockchain has not exactly shown itself especially resilient to attack even under the classical computing model in recent years, with some major data breaches and cyber-heists rocking the security of what was once thought to be, for instance, the “future of money.”

But that’s relatively small potatoes compared to what happens when we reach the point of a million-qubit quantum computer. Blockchains are already especially vulnerable to breaches in the public-key security of individual users. Quantum computing could relatively easily figure out private keys from available public-key data, and a recent study from Deloitte showed that around a quarter of all Bitcoin, and over 60% of all Ether (the Bitcoin-equivalent from Ethereum) exists in places where the public-key of users is available somewhere on the blockchain.

Bye bye, cryptocurrency – you were fun while you lasted…

These then are the main threats arising from the relatively imminently-forecast development of a million-qubit quantum computer (anywhere from 2027-2030 on leading current estimates).

The million-qubit question.

Why a million-qubit version? Because, like many things in the quantum universe, qubits are notoriously unstable, and you need around a million-qubit version to reliably do all the things that people are currently scared they’ll do, while fighting an ongoing battle against the noisy environment in which they exist.

So – how do we create and deploy effective quantum cyber security?

Potentially scarily, just a handful of heartbeats away from the million-qubit threshold, no-one’s entirely sure.

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There are plenty of researchers and plenty of companies that are developing approaches that could work against a million-qubit quantum computer, but the truth is that until one exists and the exact nature and level of its public-key-crushing capabilities exists, there’s a degree of fighting phantoms involved in the quantum cyber security business.

Themes and variations.

Most of the more serious contenders on which it’s thought post-quantum cryptography (safe secret-keepers in the world of quantum computers) could be built involve different variants on some of the existing public-key cryptographic algorithms that currently keep the world’s secrets safe.

In particular, keep an eye on NTRU lattice-based cryptography – funding and research is busily being poured into that potential version of post-quantum cryptography by the European Commission, and at the moment, it’s standing up better to testing than, for instance, the likes of multivariate cryptography.

Code-based cryptography is also gathering interest in Europe, in particular something called the McEliece signature. Whether that signature will have long-term usefulness in the post-quantum world remains to be seen, because almost every time researchers try to make it more stable and robust, it actually gets weaker because of the introduction of stronger structure.

We know. This is the world of quantum logic – it pays to leave your presuppositions behind.

There are also options that tweak existing cryptographic procedures to meet the needs of the million-qubit quantum cyber security threat.

Supersingular elliptic curve isogeny cryptography is a heck of a name for a version of the elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key which is widely used in classical computing cyber security. As such, it could prove to be a relatively safe, relatively easy upgrade – at least compared with a paradigm shift to a whole new form of as-yet-insufficiently-tested cryptography.

And then there are symmetric keys – which would in a sense wipe out the big threat of asymmetric security breaches, by the very nature of being symmetric. Again, symmetric keys are at least expected to be resistant to the safe-cracking potential of the million-qubit quantum computer, so they’ve been seriously suggested as a more or less like-for-like replacement that would involve millennium bug levels of hassle, but then might shift the entire battleground when it comes to post-quantum cryptographic algorithm-breaking.

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The cyber security arms race.

It’s fair to say that work on quantum cyber security is likely to intensify with every year that passes en route to the notional threshold point in 2030 – two years from now, contenders to deliver that quantum cyber security may be much more clearly defined and delineated.

For now, quantum cyber security is worth taking seriously, if not perhaps as hysterically as the worst-case scenario threats would immediately suggest.

The post Quantum cyber security appeared first on TechHQ.

Tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have a strong grip on today’s internet. It’s a centralized model that puts considerable power in the hands of a few large cloud operators. And the arrangement has changed the way that software is deployed and where data is stored. Users enjoy many benefits, but it’s not the utopian vision of the internet that many hoped for. Web3 has the potential to change that, but developers will need blockchain security tools to safeguard its long-term success.

What is Web3?

Web3 is a decentralized approach to managing information on the internet. It puts users back in control of their data and enables them to profit from their efforts – for example, through micropayments or other digital rewards. Web3 comes with a host of practical features enabled by blockchain that bring the concept of digital currency to new applications. And there are many reasons to move towards a decentralized way of doing things on the web.

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Having information assets centralized in the cloud is problematic when the arrangement concentrates data into a big target for bad actors. The number of data breaches suffered by firms highlights that current defenses are inadequate and points to the merits of shifting to a different model. Web3 decentralizes information held on digital ledgers and makes it much harder for adversaries to block access to company data and hold firms to ransom.

Blocks of data, chained together, can be digitally signed to link entries to real-world stakeholders. And because their integrity is bound up in so-called hash functions, which convert digital data into unique codes, any attempt to manipulate entries means that numbers no longer add up. For example, changing just one letter in a novel would produce a completely different hash value, which highlights just how effective these functions are at providing an integrity check.

Blockchains also make it possible to write smart contracts – for example, software that pays a commission to its original authors whenever a license is activated using digital currency. Tokenizing data transactions paves the way for device owners to offer spare computing or data storage capacity to other users and receive income. And changes in the method used by nodes on the network to reach consensus mean that blockchain’s energy footprint has been significantly reduced.

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Additions to a digital ledger need to be verified, and one way of doing that was to solve complex mathematical puzzles – an approach dubbed proof-of-work. Such schemes make it hard for one actor to dominate and control the decision-making process, because the amount of hardware required is prohibitive. But the approach is energy intensive and disruptive – for example, the popularity of Bitcoin mining pushed up the price of GPUs and diverted energy from more useful endeavors. Today, consensus is more commonly reached via proof-of-stake, where committees on the network risk losing the bulk of their rewards should they be tempted to rig the vote.

Another complaint against the use of blockchains is processing speed. In their original configuration, where each node has to be aware of the entire blockchain, systems are slow. In the time it takes for mainstream payments services such as Mastercard and Visa to process tens of thousands of transactions, early cryptocurrency systems would have written just a handful of entries to their decentralized digital ledgers.

But ecosystems such as Near – one of a multitude of modern blockchain platforms supporting decentralized app developers – are borrowing techniques used to streamline the operation of giant databases. Breaking blocks into smaller chunks known as shards reduces the workload of individual nodes and makes protocols more scalable. Nodes don’t need to process and store the blockchain in its entirety, but can instead be responsible for just a section of it. And they can reach out across the peer-to-peer network to other shards when they need more details to complete a task.

Blockchain security tools

However, as Web3 infrastructure becomes more accomplished – and popular as a result – it grows as a target for bad actors. Decentralized peer-to-peer networks may be more resilient to attacks, but that’s not to say that security can be put on the back burner. Fortunately, developers can draw upon an increasing number of blockchain security tools to find and fix vulnerabilities in the apps that they are creating.

Just as you would use static code analysis to support the development of secure software designed for today’s web, users can benefit from tools that reach into the Web3 domain too. For example, Semgrep’s static analysis security tool features rules for smart contracts to warn decentralized finance providers of vulnerabilities that may be sitting in development code. The firm also has an open source software scanning engine that can alert Web3 teams to issues arising from third-party integrations.

Consensys provides smart contract testing for customers to help developers make sure that apps are ready for launch. Other smart contract auditors include Certik. And AnChain.AI has introduced what it claims is the world’s first Web3 security operations center. Halborn, which completed USD 90 million Series A funding in July 2022, is a Web3 security firm that works with clients using distributed ledger technology in areas such as finance, application and game development.

Organizations wanting to learn more about how to benefit safely from decentralized finance opportunities, as well as trace and understand blockchain activity in more detail, can reach out to a number of experts. This list includes Chainalysis and Ciphertrace. Over time, blockchain security tools will make Web3 a safer place to do business. But if companies do find themselves caught out, it’s good to know that expertise is available to explore suspicious activities and help trace stolen funds.

The post Blockchain security tools safeguard Web3 success appeared first on TechHQ.

The New York Times has revealed the real cost of the digital race for Bitcoin. The news outlet identified 34 large-scale Bitcoin mines in the United States that each put immense pressure on the power grid, and profit from doing so.

After Winter Storm Uri knocked out power plants across the state of Texas, tens of thousands of homes were left in darkness. By the end of February 14, 2021, nearly 40 people had died. At the same time, just outside Austin, computers were using enough electricity to power roughly 6,500 homes as they raced to earn Bitcoin.

Performing trillions of calculations a second, the computers kept running until just after midnight, when the state’s power grid operator ordered them to shut off. Over the next four days, Bitcoin company Bitdeer made more than $18 million for not operating. In return for keeping its computers offline, the state paid Bitdeer an average of $175,000 an hour.

For a business to profit from Bitcoin mining, it can require as much electricity as a small city. A computer guesses an elusive combination of numbers that Bitcoin’s algorithm will accept about every ten minutes, winning enough Bitcoin to be worth (at current prices) $170,000. The operations of these companies can create costs including higher electricity bills and carbon pollution, that impact everyone around them.

China, which was the site of most Bitcoin mining until June 2021, drove out Bitcoin operations citing their power use, among other reasons. The amount of electricity that Bitcoin mines are using in America, which soon became the industry’s global leader, and its effect on energy markets and the environment have been unclear.

Each of the 34 Bitcoin mining operations identified by the Times uses at least 30,000 times as much power as the average US home, consuming a collective total of 3,900 megawatts of electricity. According to the publication, it’s as though another New York City’s worth of homes were draining the nation’s power supply.

The Mawson Infrastructure Group mine in Midland, Penn., uses more than twice the power of the nearby Pittsburgh airport.

The additional power use in America causes as much carbon pollution as adding 3.5 million gas-powered cars to the country’s roads, according to WattTime. Bitcoin operations tend to market themselves as environmentally friendly, setting up in areas rich with renewable energy. Ultimately, their power needs are too great to be satisfied by these sources alone.

WattTime found that coal and natural gas plants meet 85% of the demand that Bitcoin operations add to their grids. In Texas, where 10 of the 34 mines are connected to the state’s grid, the increased demand has raised electricity bills for power customers by 5%.

Can Bitcoin operations’ power use be compared to hospitals?

In interviews and statements heard by the Times, many Bitcoin companies argue that they are no different from other large power users, like hospitals and factories, except for their willingness to shut off quickly to benefit the grid. Even though hospitals arguably have enough human benefit to warrant use of large amounts of power, there would be severe consequences if they reduced their power usage as routinely or dramatically as Bitcoin operators are able.

Bitcoin mining facilities’ ability to shut off almost instantly not only allows them to save money, but even to make money by manipulating the US power markets: they can avoid fees charged during peak demand, resell their energy at a premium when prices spike and even, as in Texas in 2021, be paid to turn off.

In practice, even though Bitcoin companies are paid by the grid to promise to power down if necessary to prevent blackouts, they are rarely asked to do so. As such, they earn extra money for operating as normal. In Texas, five operations have made a collective $60 million from the program since 2020. Bitdeer’s 2021 windfall came as a result of such an agreement.

Several companies are being paid through these agreements a majority of the time they operate. Most years, they are asked to turn off for only a few hours, at which point they are paid even more. “Ironically, when people are paying the most for their power, or losing it altogether, the miners are making money selling energy back to Texans at rates 100 times what they paid,” said Ed Hirs, who teaches energy economics at the University of Houston.

Alongside hospitals, industries including metals and plastics manufacturing also need a lot of electricity, causing pollution and raising power prices. Manufacturing might not save lives but it does at least bring jobs to an area. Bitcoin mines tend to employ only a few dozen people once constructed, spurring less local economic development.

Bitcoin operations’ financial benefit goes almost exclusively to their owners and operators. In 2021, the year Bitcoin’s price peaked, 20 executives at five publicly-traded Bitcoin companies together received nearly $16 million in salary and over $630 million in stock options.

Essentially, as well as the repercussions of such huge power usage, Bitcoin mining benefits only a very few, while the masses suffer the impact of carbon emissions and raised prices. Although Bitcoin’s value has dropped, seeing two of the largest United States-based companies file for bankruptcy, new mines continue opening across the country.

It’s not as though are aren’t options for operating cryptocurrency with less electricity: Ethereum, second-most popular cryptocurrency, switched its algorithm to cut the amount of electricity needed to power its network by 99%. Bitcoin advocates oppose changing its algorithm because proof-of-work has been resistant to attacks for longer and at a greater scale than any other approach to virtual currency stake creation.

Like centers for the development of Artificial Intelligence, cooling the masses of computers used in Bitcoin mining also drains power supplies.

Source: WattTime analysis, New York Times research Power levels are as of March 9 and based on information from each company or its most recent prior public statement. Fossil fuel percentages do not include energy imported from other states, the type of which is unknown; that results in low numbers for the Merkle Standard mine in Usk, Wash., and the Atlas Power mine in Butte, Mont.

Despite claims from the president of the Texas Blockchain Council, Lee Bratcher, that the industry incentivizes the development of renewable and natural gas plants, Dr. Jenkins at Princeton says that Bitcoin operations are more likely to keep fossil fuel plants in business than lead to more renewable energy. In New York, a gas-powered plant was able to reopen due to a sharp increase in power demand emanating from Bitcoin mining.

To round off: Bitcoin mining uses huge amounts of power, to the detriment of both the planet and communities near mining plants. It doesn’t just reduce job opportunities, but actively worsens local economies for the profit of a few individuals.

There’s a Bitdeer mine in an old aluminium smelter just outside Rockdale, where two of the largest mines (for fuel, not cryptocurrency) in the country operate. When the industrial plant where Bitdeer now operates shut down, “it just cut the legs out from under [the] community,” said city manager Barabara Holly.

At a time when everyone is making sacrifices for the good of the planet — or should be — it’s time that huge operations are held accountable. Without any widespread, material benefit Bitcoin mining is perhaps one of the first things that should go.

For the full report and data, read the New York Times article here.

The post Bitcoin mining costs to communities and the environment appeared first on TechHQ.

Receiving payments for goods or services can turn out to be more challenging than anticipated, even when the payer and payee are in the same country. And when transactions come from overseas, the difficulties faced by firms in receiving funds from clients can become harder still. Getting confirmation that the cheque is in the post isn’t necessarily cause for celebration if it takes weeks for the money to arrive and incurs unwelcome fees that dig into sales profits. To hit revenue targets, companies must determine the best way to receive international payments.

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Firms need to be sure that remittance is sent securely, is timely (nobody likes waiting weeks to get paid), and incurs minimal fees. For company earnings to rise, firms need to focus on their operations and make sure that the wheels are turning efficiently across all departments. It’s one thing to optimize warehouse operations and streamline the supply chain for customers, but if money for those goods doesn’t arrive in company accounts on time, firms will put a burden on their future growth opportunities.

The good news is that we live in a digital age, which makes it a whole lot easier to answer the question – what’s the best way to receive international payments? Websites such as Monito make it straightforward for companies to compare international money transfers and make savings. In Monito’s case, the money transfer comparison website gives company payments teams the opportunity to examine over 200 options to receive international payments. And the payments information provided includes not just fees and exchange rate information, but also trust and credibility, service and quality, and customer satisfaction ratings.

Cross-border considerations

Digital platforms simplify the process of scaling and future-proofing international payments. Tipalti enables users to send cross-border payments to 196 countries in 120 currencies via multiple payment methods, with FX solutions, multi-subsidiary, multi-language, and global tax capabilities, according to its website. And there’s no reason why payees need to wait until the invoicing stage to start thinking about the best way to receive international payments. Firms can start the remittance conversation much earlier in negotiations with clients – for example, by asking what international payments platforms they typically use.

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Trust and credibility are important attributes to consider, particularly as the sums of money that firms are looking to receive from their overseas customers increases. Companies could suffer large financial losses if the money doesn’t turn up. Does the payments provider have a customer service team to help with queries, or do payers and payees have to make do with a chatbot to try and unravel any potential payment puzzles? But there will also be costs to consider. All operations have overheads, and that includes international payments providers. Payments providers will charge for their services, either directly through a fee of some description or by adding a markup to the foreign exchange rate. And rather than focus on the size of the fee, a better strategy could be to determine what benefits that additional cost brings in terms of receiving international payments.

Exiap, which is owned by Wise (formerly TransferWise), is another smart comparison engine primed with information on sending money internationally, which can help to establish the likely fees and current foreign exchange rates. The money transfer comparison website highlights the common ways of receiving money from overseas, including having funds deposited into a regular bank account – for example, through a wire transfer. Another option is to have the payment sent to a mobile wallet. But before we dig further into those options, it’s worth talking about foreign currency.

Multi-currency account

Ideally, the best way to receive international payments would be one that is free, fast, and predictable. We’ve already touched on where some of the costs originate for transferring money internationally, and woven into these are foreign exchange rates. Firms that regularly receive, as well as make, international payments, may wish to investigate the potential benefits of having a multicurrency account. For example, Wise gives businesses the option of setting up an account in any of 10 currencies. Having access to the local currency can help to manage money transfer costs. And there are other wins, too, such as being able to send and receive funds more quickly.

Lastly, there are integration considerations. Going down the payments platform route could simplify payments tracking as systems are often compatible with accounting software such as Xero, Quickbooks, FreeAgent, and other products. And on the payer’s side this could help with making multiple international payments – for example, rather than enter details payment by payment, the entire batch could be uploaded in the form of a spreadsheet. It returns our discussion on the best way to receive international payments, back to the topic of fees – what additional benefits do those charges bring? If they equate to long-term operational savings then the price is likely worth paying, but if they’re being kept high to support costly legacy systems, perhaps not.

The post What’s the best way to receive international payments? appeared first on TechHQ.