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Once generated, this is incredibly easy for other miners and clients to verify. Even if one transaction were to change, the hash would be completely different, signalling fraud. Hashing makes fraud easy to spot. But proof-of-work as a process is also a big deterrent to attacking the chain.
Miners are incentivised to do this work on the main Ethereum chain. There is little incentive for a subset of miners to start their own chain — it undermines the system. Blockchains rely on having a single state as a source of truth. And users will always choose the longest or "heaviest" chain. The objective of proof-of-work is to extend the chain. The longest chain is most believable as the valid one because it's had the most computational work done.
Within Ethereum's PoW system, it's nearly impossible to create new blocks that erase transactions, create fake ones, or maintain a second chain. That's because a malicious miner would need to always solve the block nonce faster than everyone else. You'd need a lot of computing power to be able to do this amount of "work".
And the energy spent might even outweigh the gains you'd make in an attack. Proof-of-work is also responsible for issuing new currency into the system and incentivizing miners to do the work. Miners who successfully create a block get rewarded with two freshly minted ETH but no longer receive all the transaction fees, as the base fee gets burned, while the tip and block reward goes to the miner.
A miner may also get 1. Uncle blocks are valid blocks created by a miner practically at the same time as another miner mined the successful block. Uncle blocks usually happen due to network latency. A transaction has "finality" on Ethereum when it's part of a block that can't change.
Because miners work in a decentralized way, two valid blocks can get mined at the same time. This creates a temporary fork. Eventually, one of these chains will become the accepted chain after a subsequent block has been mined and added, making it longer. But to complicate things further, transactions rejected on the temporary fork may have been included in the accepted chain. This means it could get reversed.
So finality refers to the time you should wait before considering a transaction irreversible. For Ethereum, the recommended time is six blocks or just over 1 minute. After six blocks, you can say with relative confidence that the transaction was successful. You can wait longer for even greater assurances.
Finality is something to bear in mind when designing dapps. It would be a poor user experience to misrepresent transaction information to your users, especially if the transaction is of high value. Remember, this timing doesn't include the wait times for having a transaction picked up by a miner. A major criticism of proof-of-work is the amount of energy output required to keep the network safe.
To maintain security and decentralization, Ethereum on proof-of-work consumes At a high level, proof-of-stake has the same end goal as proof-of-work: to help the decentralized network reach consensus securely. But it has some differences in process and personnel:. More on proof-of-stake. If you're an expert on the topic and want to contribute, edit this page and sprinkle it with your wisdom. You'll be credited and you'll be helping the Ethereum community!
Use this flexible documentation template. Ask us in the content channel on our Discord server. Skip to main content. Help update this page. Translate page. See English. No bugs here! Don't show again. What is ether ETH? Whenever a node wishes to include a new transaction in the blockchain, it sends a copy of the transaction to each of its peers, who then send a copy to each of their peers, and so on.
In this way, it propagates throughout the network. Certain nodes, called miners, maintain a list of all of these new transactions and use them to create new blocks, which they then send to the rest of the network. Whenever a node receives a block, it checks the validity of the block and of all of the transactions therein and, if it finds the block to be valid, adds it to its blockchain and executes all of those transactions.
Since block creation and broadcasting are permissionless, a node may receive multiple blocks competing to be the successor to a particular block. The node keeps track of all of the valid chains that result from this and regularly drops the shortest one: According to the Ethereum protocol, the longest of multiple competing chains is to be considered the canonical one.
Ether ETH is the cryptocurrency generated by the Ethereum protocol as a reward to miners in a proof-of-work system for adding blocks to the blockchain. It is the only currency accepted to pay for transaction fees, which also go to miners. The block-addition reward together with the transaction fees provide the incentive to miners to keep the blockchain growing i. Therefore, ETH is fundamental to the operation of the network.
Ether is listed on exchanges under the currency code ETH. The shift to Ethereum 2. There are two types of accounts on Ethereum: user accounts also known as externally-owned accounts and contracts. Both types have an ETH balance, may send ETH to any account, may call any public function of a contract or create a new contract, and are identified on the blockchain and in the state by an account address.
User accounts are the only type of account that may create transactions. For a transaction to be valid, it must be signed using the sending account's private key, the character hexadecimal string from which the account's address is derived. Importantly, this algorithm allows one to derive the signer's address from the signature without knowing the private key. Contracts are the only type of account that has associated code a set of functions and variable declarations and contract storage the values of the variables at any given time.
A contract function may take arguments and may have return values. In addition to control flow statements, the body of a function may include instructions to send ETH, read from and write to the contract's storage, create temporary storage memory that vanishes at the end of the function, perform arithmetic and hashing operations, call the contract's own functions, call public functions of other contracts, create new contracts, and query information about the current transaction or the blockchain.
Ethereum addresses are composed of the prefix " 0x " a common identifier for hexadecimal concatenated with the rightmost 20 bytes of the Keccak hash of the ECDSA public key the curve used is the so-called secpk1. In hexadecimal, two digits represent a byte, and so addresses contain 40 hexadecimal digits, e.
Contract addresses are in the same format, however, they are determined by sender and creation transaction nonce. It includes a stack , memory, gas balance see below , program counter , and the persistent storage for all accounts including contract code. When a transaction calls a contract's function, the arguments in the call are added to the stack and the EVM translates the contract's bytecode into stack operations. The EVM is isolated from the other files and processes on the node's computer to ensure that for a given pre-transaction state and transaction, every node produces the same post-transaction state, thereby enabling network consensus.
Gas is a unit of account within the EVM used in the calculation of a transaction fee, which is the amount of ETH a transaction's sender must pay to the miner who includes the transaction in the blockchain. Each type of operation which may be performed by the EVM is hardcoded with a certain gas cost, which is intended to be roughly proportional to the amount of resources computation and storage a node must expend to perform that operation.
When a sender creates a transaction, the sender must specify a gas limit and gas price. The gas limit is the maximum amount of gas the sender is willing to use in the transaction, and the gas price is the amount of ETH the sender wishes to pay to the miner per unit of gas used. The higher the gas price , the more incentive a miner has to include the transaction in their block, and thus the quicker the transaction will be included in the blockchain.
The sender buys the full amount of gas i. If at any point the transaction does not have enough gas to perform the next operation, the transaction is reverted but the sender still pays for the gas used. This fee mechanism is designed to mitigate transaction spam, prevent infinite loops during contract execution, and provide for a market-based allocation of network resources. Our governance is inherently social, people who are more connected in the community have more power, a kind of soft power.
The difficulty bomb is an Ethereum protocol feature that causes the difficulty of mining a block to increase exponentially over time after a certain block is reached, with the intended purpose being to incentivize upgrades to the protocol and prevent miners from having too much control over upgrades. As the protocol is upgraded, the difficulty bomb is typically pushed further out in time.
The protocol has included a difficulty bomb from the beginning, and the bomb has been pushed back several times. Bitcoin's primary use case is as a store of value and a digital currency. Ether can also be used as a digital currency and store of value, but the Ethereum network also makes it possible to create and run decentralized applications and smart contracts. Blocks are validated approximately every 12 seconds on Ethereum as opposed to approximately every 10 minutes on Bitcoin.
Additionally, Bitcoin has a fixed supply of 21,, coins, whereas Ether has no supply cap. The EVM's instruction set is Turing-complete. Ethereum's smart contracts are written in high-level programming languages and then compiled down to EVM bytecode and deployed to the Ethereum blockchain. They can be written in Solidity a language library with similarities to C and JavaScript , Serpent similar to Python , but deprecated , Yul an intermediate language that can compile to various different backends — EVM 1.
There was also [ when? One issue related to using smart contracts on a public blockchain is that bugs, including security holes, are visible to all but cannot be fixed quickly. There is ongoing research on how to use formal verification to express and prove non-trivial properties. A Microsoft Research report noted that writing solid smart contracts can be extremely difficult in practice, using The DAO hack to illustrate this problem.
The report discussed tools that Microsoft had developed for verifying contracts, and noted that a large-scale analysis of published contracts is likely to uncover widespread vulnerabilities. The report also stated that it is possible to verify the equivalence of a Solidity program and the EVM code.
Ethereum also allows for the creation of unique and indivisible tokens, called non-fungible tokens NFTs. Decentralized finance DeFi is a use case of Ethereum. Ethereum-based software and networks, independent from the public Ethereum chain , are being tested by enterprise software companies. Ethereum-based permissioned blockchain variants are used and being investigated for various projects:.
In Ethereum, all smart contracts are stored publicly on every node of the blockchain, which has costs. Being a blockchain means it is secure by design ; it is an example of a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. Every new transaction is recorded on a new block, which is connected to previous and future blocks in a chain. The downside is that performance issues arise because every node calculates all the smart contracts in real-time.
As of January [update] , the Ethereum protocol could process about 25 transactions per second. In comparison, the Visa payment platform processes 45, payments per second. This has led some to question the scalability of Ethereum. Ethereum engineers have been working on sharding the calculations, and the next step Ethereum 2 was presented at Ethereum's Devcon 3 in November Ethereum's blockchain uses Merkle trees for security reasons, to improve scalability, and to optimize transaction hashing.
The network has faced congestion problems, such as in in relation to Cryptokitties. Like other crypto currencies, Ethereum faces criticism about its environmental impact. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Open-source blockchain computing platform. On social governance. Main article: Non-fungible token. Main article: Decentralized finance. Retrieved 30 September Financial Times. Archived from the original on 14 August Retrieved 14 August The Wall Street Journal.
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It's because of a growing DAG file. What is a DAG file? This is a specially formed file that is loaded into the memory of the video card. Therefore it is better to have memory with a margin. Now the size of the DAG file is 4. Some more space in the memory of the video card is occupied by Windows. Therefore, it is not recommended to take cards with 5 gigabytes of video memory - they will turn off soon.
The second criterion is performance or hash rate. It shows how many cryptographic operations the card makes per second. This parameter can be found in the table of the best GPUs for mining. It can be bypassed, but it will require additional configuration steps. Moreover, they consume quite a lot of energy.
Pay special attention to the PSU. You should not save on it, even if only one video card is involved in the Ethereum mining. Any modern CPU will do. The processor power does not matter for Ethereum mining. Any with support for multiple GPUs. If there are not enough PCI-e ports, the cards can be connected through risers. Mining is done using a special application - a miner.
There are several of them and each has its own features. For example, some miners only work on Nvidia cards and some only on AMD cards. In addition, they often give different profits. All the most popular miners are already built into Kryptex. In addition, the hardware bencmark system selects the optimal miner for each of GPUs. To find the most profitable miner, you need to download, configure and run them all.
It can be quite difficult to do it manually. Kryptex does it all automatically. Choosing a mining pool is not an easy task. You can focus on the capacity, the size of the commission and the minimum payments. Let's move on to the most important thing - mining. To do this, you need to configure and run the miner. The first step is to create a configuration file for the miner you will mine on.
A config file is a. All miners work in the command line interface, so it's more convenient to run them this way. Full descriptions of all commands can be found in the Phoenixminer documentation. Once you have started mining, you can overclock your video card.
If done correctly, it is safe. This increases the hash rate and your profit. Usually an Afterburner app is used for overclocking. It allows you to adjust the frequencies of the core, memory, set the power consumption limit and fan speed.
Ethereum depends mainly on the video memory frequency and usually does not use the video card core at full thrust. Sybil attacks are when one user or group pretends to be many users. Resistance to this type of attack is essential for a decentralized blockchain and enables miners and validators to be rewarded equally based on resources put in.
Proof-of-work and proof-of-stake protect against this by making users expend a lot of energy or put up a lot of collateral. These protections are an economic deterrent to Sybil attacks. A chain selection rule is used to decide which chain is the "correct" chain. Ethereum and Bitcoin currently use the "longest chain" rule, which means that whichever blockchain is the longest will be the one the rest of the nodes accept as valid and work with.
For proof-of-work chains, the longest chain is determined by the chain's total cumulative proof-of-work difficulty. The combination of proof-of-work and longest chain rule is known as "Nakamoto Consensus. The Beacon Chain uses a consensus mechanism called Casper the Friendly Finality Gadget , which is proof-of-stake based. Know of a community resource that helped you? Edit this page and add it! If you're an expert on the topic and want to contribute, edit this page and sprinkle it with your wisdom.
You'll be credited and you'll be helping the Ethereum community! Use this flexible documentation template. Ask us in the content channel on our Discord server. Skip to main content. Help update this page. Translate page.
See English. No bugs here! Don't show again. What is ether ETH? Use Ethereum. Search away! This page is incomplete and we'd love your help. Edit this page and add anything that you think might be useful to others. Consensus mechanisms. Last edit : , Invalid DateTime. See contributors Edit page. Help us with this page If you're an expert on the topic and want to contribute, edit this page and sprinkle it with your wisdom.
Use this flexible documentation template Questions? Ask us in the content channel on our Discord server Edit page. Did this page help answer your question? Yes No. Previous Networks.