I recently took my interest in cryptocurrencies to the next level by building my first ever Ethereum mining rig.It was an exceptionally rewarding and fun experience that I’d like to share.To those thinking of taking the plunge themselves, scroll down to the “Things to keep in mind” section for helpful tips on avoiding the time consuming mistakes I did.Ethereum is currently gaining an immense amount of interest for it’s contributions to the cryptocurrency / decentralization community.There’s many reasons to be excited for the future of Ethereum as-well as its coming applications.Suffice it to say, I couldn’t keep my interest bottle in any longer and decided to get involved.Ethereum will eventually be moving to a “proof of stake”1 confirmation system.No one knows for sure when this switch will happen yet.Some speculate as early as this fall while others think early next year to be more likely.Essentially this means the community will be moving completely away from what we’ve known as traditional mining.

Like ASICs, This will reduce all of our mining rigs to the status of useless—at least for Ethereum.Therefore if you’re thinking of getting into mining I’d recommend doing it quickly as your chances of making money are running out.I’m currently spending about $150 / month in electricity—$100 of that is the cost of the mining rig itself.You probably pay a different rate per kilowatt hour, but it’s important to do the math yourself to see how much overhead you’ll incur overtime.Remember to assume that you’ll be keeping it running 24 hours.In total I spent about $2800 dollars including building materials for the case.As of this writing, I’ve made back $1,084 or 38% of the total cost of investment.At this rate I’m expecting to ROI sometime in September.I wanted my rig to be as future-proof as possible.Those in the Ethereum community know that as the DAG file2 increases, our GPUs will need to have the necessary RAM to cache it.Keeping this in mind I went with 8GB cards which is probably overkill, but I figured it would help in the resell value if I ever decided to liquidate.

I also wanted to generate a decent hash rate which needed a higher-end card.Keeping that in mind, if I were to build a new rig right now I would probably go with something less expensive like an R9 370 to ROI more quickly.Hashrate: 155+ MH/s Revenue: $645.56 per month as of May 22th, 2016 I can’t give enough credit to the folks at gpuShack for creating ethOS.As a new miner, I didn’t want to spend hours of time setting up linux on a spare SSD potentially loosing precious mining time.bitcoin asic poolSo I took a chance and purchased their mining software pre-installed on an SSD which they shipped to me.bitcoin regulation new zealandTo give some background, ethOS is a linux based software specifically designed to mine Ethereum.come aquistare bitcoin

It offers a lot of valuable tools like remote monitoring, remote configuration, and very useful analytics about your rig.I highly recommend them.(An example of what the remote control panel looks like within ethOS) I won’t be going into a step-by-step tutorial on how to construct the case itself.If you’re interesting in building a case like mine, head over to the BitsBeTrippin Youtube channel and follow their guide.I based my case heavily on their design and can attest to its durability and effectiveness.bitcoin aml riskHere are the two videos in particular to checkout: /watch?v=Jnp9Ka8WVpA /watch?v=D5xNrlxsCVs However I would like to share my experience of creating the case to hopefully provide some guidance to newcomers out there.bitcoin euro quotazioniThe materials I used are fairly straight forward.ethereum benchmark

Again, the dimensions and quantities can all be found in the videos listed above.You could construct the entire case using angled aluminum, but I found the wood was much easier to work with.Of course if it caught fire it would pose a higher risk so that’s something to keep in mind.One of the things that surprised me after I finished was how loud everything was.It wasn’t something I considered prior to building so in an attempt to reduce the noise, I put feet on the bottom with soft circle pads.bitcoin bowl game scoreThis helped reduce the rattling quite significantly.tutto sui bitcoinOf course the main source of the noise comes from the fans on the graphic cards spinning at full speed, so be prepared for this.bitcoin wallet manualIf you don’t want a lot of noise, look into water-cooled GPUs or do the opposite of me and keep your rig outside of your living room 🙂 I still believe Ethereum mining is profitable depending on the strategy you utilize.

There’s many variables to keep in mind like electricity cost, building materials, Ethereum price, etc so make sure to do your homework.My recommendation would be to get in as soon as you can.The mining difficulty is rising everyday and will become less profitable as the weeks pass.Building a mining rig is a long-term investment that will take time to pay off.Just be patient and have fun!Immutability is an inseparable characteristic of blockchains.Every blockchain promises immutability.Some implicitly, as in Bitcoin where Satoshi Nakamoto mentions “transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse”.Others explicitly, as in the case of Steem, or most famously, Ethereum.Recent events, namely, several Ethereum hard forks, raised myriad discussions, some of them driven by pillars of the community, making it clear that there is a lack of clarity and consensus about what immutability is.Ethereum classic, which was created in the wake of Ethereum’s DAO hardfork (see details below), based its philosophy around immutability.

Failing to phrase it accurately led to experts, such as Princeton’s associate professor Emin Gün Sirer, criticising Ethereum Classic for repeatedly violating the immutability they brag of.We provide here a more precise definition of immutability.This is an essential step in the development of blockchains, as it is impossible to expect a blockchain to be immutable without first precisely defining this term.As an example, we rephrase Ethereum Classic’s immutability principles in our terminology.We define two types of immutability.Since complete adherence to IoP may result in stagnation of a blockchain, we later on divide its possible violation to four types; some of them may be considered as positive violations of IoP (such as fixing bugs or adding features).The word “immutability” may be misleading, as in practice any change to a blockchain can be made if a large enough consensus is achieved.Hence, what we establish in this text is not a tool to improve blockchains’ security, but rather a concept to improve blockchains designers clarity.

We hope that future white papers will clearly specify which type of immutability they aim for, and which type of immutability, if any, is breached with each fork.But first we begin with some history, explaining the roots of the immutability discussion.In the initial wave of blockchain enthusiasm, people bestowed upon the technology properties it does not have.The fact that a transaction cannot be reversed by a centralized body formed into “transaction cannot be reversed, period” (which is false).The fact that proof of work validity is backed by a mathematical proof turned into “blockchain validity is backed by mathematical proofs” (again, false).Add to this the fact that this futuristic technology was invented by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto (with further development by the equally mysterious Nicolas van Saberhagen or Tom Elvis Jedusor) which made blockchains seem more like science fiction’s Big Dumb Object concept than just another human invention.The implicit Big Dumb Object misconception held as long as there were no major blockchain protocol scandals.

But then came the DAO saga, shattering this comparison.The DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization) was a project run on top of Ethereum’s blockchain.Slock.it, the creator of The DAO, collected around 150 million dollars (in the form of Ethereum) from the public, and let The DAO’s smart contract manage it.The project was Ethereum’s flagship, where Ethereum’s inventor, Vitalik Buterin, proclaimed that in a few months The DAO would turn into a liquid democracy.That’s when things went wrong.The DAO smart contract had a few bugs, and on the morning of the 17th of June 2016, a malicious attacker abused one of them to steal 60 million dollars (in terms of Ether).This hack had nothing to do with Ethereum’s blockchain immutability.The DAO was not a blockchain, but rather a project using Ethereum’s blockchain.The hack was not “cheating” the blockchain, but abusing a bug in The DAO’s code.It was similar to Bitcoin’s infamous Mt.Gox accident: badly written code was abused to hack a system and steal funds from its users.

The thing that destroyed the immutability of Ethereum’s blockchain was the subsequent hard fork.The hard fork introduced irregular transactions, taking the stolen funds from the hacker’s hands.Following the acceptance of the hard fork, Bitcointalk forum was filled with immutability discussions.A Wikipedia war on how to define a blockchain began.Some claimed that immutability was not breached, as the blocks were not changed, but merely irregular transactions were introduced.Others disagreed, claiming that immutability is also about the process, and not only the history.The discussions led to Gavin Wood, Ethereum’s co-founder and the author of Ethereum’s specifications, asking publically, “what does immutability really mean?” The DAO hard fork was different from all others that occurred before.It obviously surprised many, who thought that such a thing was impossible.To understand the root of the surprise, we have to distinguish next between two similar-but-different terms.

There are a few attack vectors on Bitcoin.One is double spending via majority of hash power.If you have 51% of the network’s computational power (in some scenarios, even slightly less), you can make a big transaction, get the reward once it’s mined, and then use your superior computational power to create a new longer chain which doesn’t have this transaction.Bitcoin’s hash power stands at the end of February 2017 at  more than 3,000,000 TH/s, which means that you’ll need at least 215000 units of one of the strongest miner (Antminer S9, 14 TH/s, 2100 dollar a piece), costing around 450 million dollars.That’s before calculating the electricity in, and the fact that this is an upper bound on the miners capabilities.The second attack vector is changing Bitcoin’s protocol.For this you need to write a modified client giving you extra coins, and then convince a large enough portion of the community to use your version.Remembering that it’s a community that has been arguing about block size for more than a year now shows that this way is not practical.

A third attack vector is to brute force hack a private key.But that’s not even physically possible.What you can do is try to guess the private key.But the number of possibilities is so large, which makes it very improbable that you’ll succeed.Actually, it is so improbable to guess a private key that some would argue that Bitcoin private keys are as strong as the laws of nature (which may themselves be high probability events and not really “laws” for all that we know.)It is easy to confuse and project the private key immutability upon all of the other attacking vectors.But in reality, it is just not the case.Blockchains can be hacked, but it’s just extremely hard in general.Though, as the DAO hard fork demonstrated, it may not even be that difficult to do under certain circumstances.Time for the big question, what does immutability mean?In Java or Rust programming languages, for example, Immutability is a design pattern, describing “an object which cannot be modified by the code of the program after it is first assigned a value”.

Is this absolute immutability?The object can be changed from outside the program by the system operator.Actually, the same is true for any centralized system: if the operator controls the memory directly, then nothing is really immutable.In a distributed system this is allegedly solved, since there is no central operator.However, there we encounter a much different problem (the Byzantine Generals’ Problem) : which value is immutable?Each node may store a different value, so exactly which value is it that we want to be immutable?Blockchains solve this problem by defining a method of determining the state of a distributed system at a specific point in time.Intuitively then, immutability may be the expectation that a state cannot be changed after it has been determined by the system, and that the process of determining the state cannot be changed.We define these accurately for blockchains containing the following components (a full formal definition of a blockchain is beyond the scope of this text): This leads us to the following specification of the two types of blockchains defined at the beginning: Immutability of History (IoH): If a block B has height H (i.e., there are H blocks proceeding it) and depth deeper than D (i.e, there are at least D blocks after it) in the main chain at some time T, then the main chain will contain B at any time later than T, and the height of B will always be equal to H. IoH both demands the consensus protocol be safe enough such that if a block reached a certain depth, it would be included in the main chain at all future times, and that the consensus protocol be changed only if it does not influence past states.

In addition it is specified that the height of B is always H in order to make it impossible to add blocks before block B. IoH is what most users understand, intuitively, when they speak of blockchains being immutable.It is this immutability that provides transactions finality.Immutability of Process (IoP): The validation function may not be changed.IoP disqualifies irregular transactions or unexpected blockchain behavior over time.However, since it also disqualifies positive changes, such as improvement of the protocol, it will often be violated.We classify possible violations according to four types.Finally, note that irregular transactions are often equivalent to violating immutability of history.If the blockchain contains a transaction from A to B, and an irregular transaction from B to C is added, it is equivalent to reversing the valid transaction from A to B and adding an irregular transaction from A to C. In the wake of Ethereum’s DAO hard fork, a new coin came to life.

It continued Ethereum’s unforked chain, where the DAO’s money remained in the hands of the hacker.Some of its proponents claim that it is the original and true Ethereum blockchain.The main selling point of Ethereum Classic was its immutability.They phrased their “code of principles” in a declaration of independence publication, but the document certainly had problems phrasing it in a satisfactory manner.While the more technical phrasings were criticised by experts, the human phrasing (“no bailout hardforks”) was incomplete in light of some actions that the community took, namely, not following Ethereum’s example in deleting empty accounts from the blockchain.Using our definition it is easy to phrase “Ethereum Classic’s code of principles” as follows: Ethereum Classic promises to never do a hard fork that violates IoH or a “one-time action” kind of violation to IoP that creates an “irregular transaction”.However, Ethereum Classic allows violation of other principles of IoP, if those improve the system.

If a blockchain were only about immutability, its technical state would have been frozen at launch.But such a governing model would lead to stagnation.A more practical approach, as with defensive democracy, is that a blockchain must guard itself, even against the occasional breach of immutability.What we suggest is not utter immutability, but utter clarity.Specifically, we propose the following rules: In addition, forks which are predefined in the whitepaper (and hence are well-known in advance) should not be considered immutability-breaching.While defining immutability may be seen as a grey task, it is in reality one of the most important things in designing blockchains.Immutability is one of the main qualities that blockchains offer to replace and fix the traditional centralized institutes system.This immutability is saved by the consensus protocol and the community, and hence it must be accurately understood by the creators, managers and users of each blockchain which immutability they aim to achieve.