ViaBTC | Stabilizing Mining Profits With Unrivaled Technical Capabilities
In 2008, the financial tsunami caused by the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States swept the world, leading to a sharp depreciation of many currencies except the US dollar and triggering a panic worldwide. Against this backdrop, a person under the pseudonym of “Satoshi Nakamoto” proposed a new electronic payment system called “Bitcoin”.
As time went by, more and more people realized the considerable value behind Bitcoin (BTC) and joined in the rush for BTC output (also known as “mining”). Compared with “BTC speculation”, mining is a less risky approach to get BTC. However, as mining becomes increasingly harder, most miners resort to the dedicated protocol of a mining pool and connect their mining machines to the server of the mining pool which will overcome the challenges posed by the BTC network one by one. This approach allows miners with a smaller hashrate to yield some profits.
As some veteran miners have found, the returns sometimes differ greatly even if they use the machines with the same hashrate to mine in different pools. These miners may attribute it to the different fees charged by mining pools, which turns out to be a negligible factor. Actually, the technical strength of a mining pool matters the most. After all, in the rush for mining, being a millisecond behind may cost miners a block reward. As a leading global crypto mining pool, ViaBTC boasts an elite R&D team. With its strong technical capabilities, ViaBTC has optimized the transmission process of the BTC network through multiple steps to ensure stabler mining benefits for its miners.
The self-developed BTC client to optimize the transmission process of the BTC network
Haipo Yang, the founder of ViaBTC and a pioneer of the crypto industry, first learned about BTC and open-source software in 2011. In 2016, he committed himself to the development of ViaBTC Pool after two months of intensive coding efforts. To improve the efficiency of the mining pool, ViaBTC also optimized bitpeer and blockmaster, showcasing its sophisticated design of underlying technical architecture.
Optimization 1: Multiple bitpeers are deployed to accelerate the broadcast of blocks in the BTC network. Bitpeer can be seen as a simplified BTC node which is capable of performing part of peer-to-peer (P2P) functions. When bitpeer notices a block update of the connected node, it will prompt jobmaster to start mining empty blocks immediately.
Optimization 2: To accelerate the block broadcast, blockmaster can process blocks into “thin blocks”. In principle, it will eliminate the transaction information other than the transaction hash (transaction details can be queried from the node through the transaction hash) from block transactions (coinbase transactions excluded), thus greatly reducing the block size. In this way, the transmission of thin blocks over the BTC network will be accelerated.
Nodes deployed all over the world to accelerate the broadcast and transmission of blocks
We all know when a stone is dropped into a lake, it will create a circular ripple that travels outward. The BTC network is built on the peer-to-peer network architecture. In other words, when miners identify a new block, they also need to create a circular ripple that travels outward. More specifically, it will first broadcast to the neighboring nodes. After being validated, these nodes will further broadcast to their neighboring nodes until all nodes of the network have validated the block. If the miners are too far away from the nodes which are eligible for broadcast, it may lead to delays and make the mining efforts end in vain.
To solve these problems, the ViaBTC team has deployed nodes all over the world to match miners with the nearest node, which minimizes delays, accelerates the broadcast and transmission of blocks and also reduces orphan blocks.
The tutorial on the miner agent server to lower the rejection rate
The process goes like this: the mining pool assigns tasks to the miners connected to the mining machines, the mining machines submit the computation results to the mining pool, and in the end, the mining pool does the statistical work and distributes rewards. The large number of mining machines that big miners have, if directly connected to the Stratum URL, could lead to an unstable network and may keep working on the previous task which has been changed already, resulting in a waste of hashrate.
To solve this problem, ViaBTC provides the miner agent server for big miners. With this service, the mining pool will first deliver tasks to the miner agent server, and miners get the task from such server. The miner agent server, which is just like a logistics hub between the mining pool and the miner, could significantly improve the mining stability and thus earn miners more income.
From the self-developed Bitcoin client through the multiple nodes deployed across the globe to the detailed tutorial on the miner agent server, ViaBTC is giving full play to its technical edge and providing safe and stable one-stop mining services for miners. With continuous efforts to optimize products and services and innovate technologies, ViaBTC will drive the progress of the blockchain industry while bringing more professional, more efficient, safer, and stabler crypto mining services to miners.
