Sunday, February 24, 2019

Weekly Bulletin (Feb 24, 2019)

CoinSheet #245

Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.
— Peter Drucker (1909-2005)

Weekly Bulletin

Hello folks,

Hope you've all had a great week.

Let's get right into it.

Bitmain announces next generation 7nm ASIC chip

Last week Bitmain announced its next generation 7nm ASIC chip for SHA256 mining.

The new BM1397 chip requires lower power and can offer an energy consumption to computing ratio as low as 30J/TH. This is a 28.6 percent improvement in power efficiency in comparison with Bitmain's previous 7nm chip, the BM1391.

A 28.6 percent improvement in efficiency.

If you're interested in what I think about this, you can read a previous letter titled Miner centralization is a meme.

TL;DR - The whole "China mining centralization" thing isn't the impending doom it's made out to be.

I think shifts in economic pressure will inevitably lead to a re-decentralization of mining.

And a concentrated mining network doesn't mean that Bitcoin is centralized.

Samsung Galaxy S10 will include private crypto key storage

As you've probably heard by now, Samsung's new Galaxy S10 will include some sort of private key storage.

Now then, I'm not going to say that this is some government psy-op to steal your private keys.

But what I will say is that you probably shouldn't store your private keys on a device that engineered to collect as much of your data as possible.

At least not yet.

Vortex@theonevortex

One day #bitcoin full nodes will be as common place as an internet router is today. The software will either be baked into the router itself, or your operating system. End users don't need to know how http/smtp/ssl works, the same will be true for btc and full node software.

Vortex@theonevortex

This ubiquity will also carry over into key management. There will be specific airgapped chips within nearly all devices to ensure the keys of that device are safe. There will be a need for devices and machines to send/receive bitcoin so the demand will drive this reality.

Nathaniel Whittemore@nlw

18/ @theonevortex pointed to the Samsung news as demonstrative of an inevitable push towards the normalization of Bitcoin infrastructure, arguing Bitcoin nodes will be baked into OS/hardware & chips for key management will be built into devices

Vortex@theonevortex

The normalization of bitcoin infrastructure.

I like the sound of that.

Until then, just think of the bitcoin deflation with all them lost phones.

Ethereum Constantinople / St. Petersburg upgrade

Here's a link to the announcement.

The Ethereum network will be undergoing a scheduled upgrade at block number 7,280,000, which is predicted to occur on Thursday, February 28, 2019. The exact date is subject to change depending on block times between now and then and could be activated 1-2 days before or after. A countdown timer can be seen at https://amberdata.io/blocks/7280000. You can monitor the network upgrade in real time at http://forkmon.ethdevops.io/.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm not particularly interested in all the technical talk about what this upgrade entails.

And most likely, neither are you.

What I'm interested in is that Constantinople will reduce the ETH block rewards from 3 to 2, decreasing new ETH supply.

Assuming all else remain equal (i.e., the complexity of what they're working on doesn't get any less complex), in the long run, this is decidedly bullish.