Mine Cryptocurrencies Sooner (Part 1)

By Raymond Nijssen, Vice President and Chief Technologist, Achronix, Mar. 05, 2019 – 

Cryptocurrency mining is the process of computing a new cryptocurrency unit based on all the previously found ones. The concept of cryptocurrency is nearly universally recognized by the publicity of the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be a broadly democratic currency vehicle not controlled by any one entity, such as banks, governments, or small groups of companies. Much of a cryptocurrency's acceptance and trustworthiness is based on that proposition. However, with Bitcoin, that is not how it unfolded. Instead, Bitcoin quickly became virtually monopolized by a small number of entities located in an even smaller number of geographies. This outcome is the result of particular properties that govern how Bitcoin mining works:

• Bitcoin is designed to be computationally intensive, requiring huge amounts of power. Entities with access to the lowest cost power have a huge advantage.
• Rewards are given to early adopters who build the fastest mining hardware in ASICs on the latest technology nodes, leaving all other contenders at a huge disadvantage.

The extent to which these unforeseen developments affect the validity of Bitcoin as a truly democratized, trusted cryptocurrency has been a topic of debate among experts. In response, developers have devised several new cryptocurrencies, which, by design, are mathematically proven to be impervious to the techniques that allowed Bitcoin to become largely monopolized.