Daily: Bitmain gets REKT by Monero / Lightning Mainnet

Hey everyone and welcome to Box Mining. So today I wasn't really gonna do a video but I saw two bits of news that were outright hilarious. So I really wanted to share that with you guys. One relates to Monero and how Bitmain wants to make a Monero style miner. So this for the Crypto Knight algorithm and something really stupid happened with them. So I'm gonna cover that and also I'm gonna talk about the new Lightning Network. So Lightning's launching their main net for Bitcoin and I'll talk a little bit about what that means, their funding and how they envision it. I do want to say that everything covered here is my personal opinion and not financial advice. So let's start off with the Antminer X3. So this is for the hashing algorithm Crypto Knight. So the biggest kind of cryptocurrency that uses Crypto Knight is Monero. So Bitmain is very smart here. Yet again they chose to name this miner the Crypto Knight miner and not a Monero. This is very different from say their Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash miners or even Litecoin miners which explicitly named the coin at hand. Here in this case they have these walloping claims. So this is 220 kilo hashes per second. So if you compare that and it costs around $3,000 and you compare that with say a normal mining unit say a graphics GPU the maybe Vega 64. The Vega 64 only really does 1.8 kilo hashes per second so it's 1.8 kilo hashes per second so it's 1.8 kilo hashes. So the Antminer is pretty much a hundred times a little bit more than a hundred times stronger than the AMD processor. So why not buy this? Well for one important reason is because these are called ASICs. They're a specialized design circuitry that's really only good for one thing which is 2.5. Crypto Knight. The problem is that Crypto Knight. The Crypto Knight is 1.5. The problem with that is that Monero didn't really want to be ASIC compatible. They don't like the idea of ASICs because ASICs kind of move towards the idea of centralization. This is because ASICs are so specialized and they go through the productions of scale which means the large manufacturers of ASICs have a large control and they can pump these out at a cheaper price. And this is why Bitmain has been dominating the ASIC industry especially for Bitcoin and Litecoin. So what Monero team wanted to do is that they want to propose a change. In fact they are going to do this. Not that they don't want to do this. They are going to change their algorithm to be slightly different. By changing that they will render this kind of absolute the Adminer X3 to be completely useless for Monero. So you can still mine Crypto Knight with it. The other coins that use Crypto Knight for example maybe Electronium or Digibyte. But you can't mine Monero which is the biggest currency. It has the biggest reward for mining. So by doing so they curb the use of ASICs. They want to do a slight alteration to the algorithm twice a year. So that makes it even harder for ASICs to develop because ASICs must be done and cater to one specific algorithm. And by changing that they basically render any ASICs that are produced useless. So if you do it twice a year that makes developing and producing this almost nearly impossible. So that's what Monero is trying to do right now. And this is why a lot of people on Reddit have been calling this the doorstopper business for Bitmain. They're basically making these units. And because other coins that use Crypto Knight have such a smart market cap and smaller reward. And even if you have higher hash rate. The other coins the difficulty will go up so much that you're practically going to share that reward with everyone using these Adminers. And that's why I guess they're dropping the cost. But even that a lot of people are saying well that's not enough. We don't know how many units these Bitmain's producing. And if you're sharing the reward between a lot of people it might be the case that the Adminer X3 is going to be absolutely useless. So this is the running joke on Reddit now. And this is why people are warning against buying even a 3k version of the X3. Basically they tried to drop the price down to $3,000 from I think $12,000. And even that's not enough. And if any of the other coins are also going to copy Monero and change the algorithm. That means there's even less coins and this will be even more useless. Next up on some happy news we have Lightning. So Lightning is a scaling solution for Bitcoin. They're off-chain scaling and they promise instant transactions at very small fees. They raised $2.5 million from prominent figures such as Twitter CEO Jack Dorsley, the PayPal CEO David Sachs, and Robin Hood co-founder Vlad Tenev. So a lot of people are very interested in it and into Lightning. In terms of what they have released is they released their main net for developer use only. So basically it's the final, almost the final version, but it's so hard to use. It's mostly a foundation of user SaaS wise for developers only now. And they'll be in the future that we see Lightning compatible, very friendly wallets that we can use and start to, that normal people can start to use and that then they can push for adoption. They also have a few features such as fault tolerance, which I think is quite important for something like the Lightning wallet. Overall, the Lightning network is really dividing the Bitcoin community. Some believe that Lightning is going to solve all the scaling issues because the Lightning wallet can kind of view it as your current wallet or even the wallet in your pocket. Basically, this is for spare change that you use and you want fast transaction and mass adoption. Whilst if you want to really store your Bitcoin, you can store that on the blockchain itself. So you don't want to use the Lightning for that. You want to put it in the normal Bitcoin address and that would be a much safer way of storing things. So it's kind of like a current and your saving account in your bank, just having two addresses, but for two different functions. Well, right now, what some people that doubt the Lightning network says is never going to scale up to the way the grand vision is going to go up for. Whilst others really believe that this is going to solve exactly that. It's going to solve the scaling issue on Bitcoin because you can almost infinitely scale on Lightning. You can open more and more channels and communicate with each other. I want to do a new video covering the idea of the Lightning network and describe it in a little bit more detail. But you definitely need to know that this is going to come up and this is one of the kind of promising ways that Bitcoin is going to scale. There's also variants of Lightning. It's called Raiden on Ethereum and Trinity on NEO. So you can look into that and this whole idea there. So guys, thank you so much for watching this video. What do you guys think of this whole Bitmain thing? Because Bitmain made this new miner and the Monero community basically rejected it. So I'd love to hear your comment on that below. I'd love to see what you think about mining and the future of ASIC resistant mining. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. Remember to click that subscribe button down below to subscribe to this channel and check out my Instagram. I'm also going to travel to San Francisco very soon to attend Game Developers Conference. This is where game developers gather together to talk about new ideas. And I really want to see how blockchain is going to affect that. If they're going to consider blockchain or if they have some cool game modes that will use blockchain technology. Because I feel like that's going to be important. We don't want infinite CryptoKitty clones. We want some new game times that we can really use. And I think that's going to be really interesting for our whole community. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.