The new Nvidia RTX 3080 and AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics cards are tough to find in stores right now, so if you’ve been looking for one of these video game-ready GPUs then I have some good news.

Cryptomining communities on forums like /r/crypto can help with that! They buy up all the available units before anyone even adds an aftermarket card into their cart — but how?

Why is there such demand when stocks seem limited at any given time anyways? Well it just might be because cryptocurrency enthusiasts need powerful hardware components more than most people do (think processing power).

Crypto-miners are pushing the crypto mining craze to new heights. With an average sale price of roughly $1,250 (about £910 / AU$1,620) for a recent analysis indicates that as many 50 thousand RTX 3000 series graphics cards have been sold on eBay and StockX — with gamers becoming increasingly frustrated by their lack in availability — this has led some individuals who want nothing more than profit from cryptocurrency trading into purchasing these powerful laptops used only mathematically dig up Ethereum or Bitcoin using’s them during downtime while they figure out how much money can really change hands over something so abstractly different at even just one day each time its monthly pay cycle rolls around again.

If you’ve been following the cryptocurrency scene, it’s no surprise that this would be an article about graphics cards.

But why are they so important?

Simple: greed and markets. And while there may seem to be some complex computer math behind all of blockchain technology- something which has caused many people in computing circles shake their head at its complexity or even dismiss out-of metal foil!, what actually goes into mining bitcoins isn’t really complicated either when boiled down on paper.

What is cryptomining?

Cryptomining is a process where solving difficult math puzzles results in the creation of cryptocurrency. The RTX 3080 card has been popular (more info inside this link: https://www.neogamr.net/best-rtx-3080/) because it’s used for mining crypto-currency and without this technology, there would be no such thing as blockchain or digital currency!

The process for creating a bitcoin is simple. First you assemble the digital information into blocks that all have a timestamp and transaction counts, then through something called “hash function” which produces virtually unique 64 hexadecimal strings based off this input from what was entered in order with minimal variation possible at all because of how mathmatically complex they are to create!

You may be wondering how you can get involved with Bitcoin mining. To start, invest some money into ASIC chips that are specifically made to mine bitcoins at higher speeds and count on it getting exponentially more difficult as time goes by!

I don’t think any of us would like to be in your shoes when it comes time for you to solve this puzzle. You have no way of knowing whether or not the information given as input yields an output without running through SHA-256, so there is literally nothing stopping anyone from trying over and over again with different guesses until they find something that works!

For the SHA-256 hash function used by Bitcoin, there are 1 million possible outputs you could create. Somewhere in all that many guesses is a vanishingly small number of values which will unlock the block!

Multiplied by a thousand or so seconds, the time it would take to mine one Bitcoin with your standard 1.0 GHz processor is well over ten years! But wait… there might be some hope yet in sight if you have enough memory and graphics processing capabilities for this task — although not much else will help either because even trying out other algorithms takes up resources from just running through possible solutions without finding an answer first (and let’s face it: when was the last time someone actually GREEDILY WANTED TO KNOW EVERYTHING?).

The more people that are working on a project, the faster they can finish it. A factory full of employees could create hundreds cars before even one auto-builder has made their way through creating just one vehicle from start to finish! Replace “cars” with guesses and analogies in this case: two minds vs digital chips — there’s no contest here as you see your processor running circles around an entire workforce trying desperately but failing miserably at producing anything worthwhile inside those walls called ‘the company’.

Graphics cards are critical for mining cryptocurrencies but why?

It’s no wonder that CPUs are not meant for the kind of work needed in a factory. The design of these processors is more suited towards management, but if someone wants to make their own assembly line with them- it would be very costly and time consuming.

The GPU is the workhorse of modern computing. Thanks to its parallel architecture, a single graphics card can be used in place or multiple CPUs and drastically cut down time needed for calculations that would otherwise take up duovigintillion (nice) seconds per task on average with just one machine alone!
The trend among cryptocurrency miners has been to use single tower cases with multiple graphics cards stringing together in the backroom. Recently, mobile RTX 3000 series laptops have started being used for mining operations as well because of their efficiency and power-to-weight ratio compared with traditional desktop computers which are too bulky when it comes down to just running crypto algorithms on your laptop.

It’s been worse than ever for graphics card supply issues because of the recent cryptocurrency volatility

Cryptocurrencies are reaching all-time highs and it’s not surprising given the rise of laptops for cryptocurrency mining. This is because mobile GPUs like those found within a laptop can put out as much computing power as desktop graphics cards, which means individuals may be trying their luck with scrypt based coins instead!

The GeForce RTX series has been generating a lot of hype lately, and it’s easy to see why. If you bought one card for $1,250 (on average), then as long as the price hasn’t dropped below that yet — or gone up even higher than what we’re seeing now- your investment should pay off with profit after just ONE Bitcoin at its peak value!

There is an arms race brewing in cryptocurrency mining, and you can profit from it by investing into graphics cards. All of this doesn’t factor the cost electricity needed to run RTX 3080s — which is substantial- so profitability at any given time will be fluctuating for these coins as new algorithms are created with greater processing power every day incentivizing those who invest early on before prices go up even higher due to demand caused not only by increased popularity but also shortages because they’re hard (and expensive) to comeby nowadays!

Cryptocurrency mining is gaining momentum with the recent release of several powerful graphics cards. The extraordinary demand for these products coincide in an upsurge seen by cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin, which has led them to become increasingly expensive over time-a trend not without precedent when looking back on this generation’s history before it all went digital (pun intended).

Cryptocurrency prices are on the rise, but some say they will crash any minute. It’s unclear how much longer this trend of volatility will continue for crypto-currency users and gamers alike; however if you’re looking to buy your next GPU card soon don’t worry too much because it just may not be as difficult finding one in stock with all these recent factors coming into play that could alleviate pressure put on suppliers by high demand.

MSI is already working on an RTX 3060 designed exclusively for cryptominers, and it’s likely that we’ll see similar offerings from other manufacturers as well. However it remains to be seen if these cards will have the demand necessary in order allow gamers like myself who want a taste of this new technology too grab one before they’re gone forever!

Development Updates towards Alderaan mainnet

The main focus over the course of the last two months has been on extensive testing on the Alderaan release. A handful of release candidates were made and tested thoroughly on testnets and the Ethereum mainnet. There are still a couple of minor bugs that the team wants to fix before the next release candidate is released. The Raiden Wizard is also getting a refactoring and is being updated to work on the mainnet too. The goal of the Raiden Wizard is to provide users with a tool that makes it easy to get started with Raiden.

Alderaan will be the first integrated mainnet release coming with a service layer (monitoring and pathfinding service) together with new features (channel withdrawal, source routing, mediation fees).

General Updates

• Raiden Client: The main focus over the last two months has been testing. The team has carried out extensive testing using the scenario player where the goal was to get at least three “all green” runs in a row, before making a new release candidate to begin testing manually. A handful of release candidates have been released since then as a result of having three green scenario runs consecutively. A significant amount of time has been spent on manually testing Raiden on the testnets and once the team was confident on the testnets, testing was moved to the Ethereum mainnet. The current goal is to run all the scenarios on the mainnet too. However, this requires some adjustments to the scenario player in order to make sure that funds can securely be recovered after a scenario has run.
  The team is currently also fighting a couple of bugs caused by block pruning on the Ethereum mainnet clients. This problem did not show up during testing on the testnets, since they have far less transactions and events to filter for, but only showed up once mainnet testing started. Lastly, the Client Team has started a reiteration of the Raiden Wizard, in order to make the onboarding experience and ease of use for Raiden as seamless as possible. All releases can be found on the Raiden client release page.
• Raiden light client: The light client has seen two very productive months. Efforts have mainly been focused on implementing functionality for the light clients to be able to receive transfers, participate in mediation and to make transfers faster by using WebRTC as the transport layer. Take a look here for a full overview of recent changes.
• Raiden Trust: The Raiden Trust has announced its first grantee. Congratulations to PISA for receiving the first Raiden Trust grant. Together with the announcement of the first grant, it was also announced that 16m RDN tokens will be moved from the Raiden Multisig to the Raiden Trust Multisig. You can, at any time, apply for a Raiden Trust grant! Find all details about grant applications and guidelines here.
• Raiden WebUI: The Raiden WebUI is currently undergoing a redesign with the goal of making interaction with and understanding of Raiden easy and straightforward.
• Weekly development updates: u/BOR4 and u/Mat7ias have as always put in an amazing effort and continued to consistently create the weekly updates about Raiden. As always, if you are interested in more detailed development updates, please make sure to follow the weekly updates on development progress and other activities posted on Reddit by u/BOR4 or u/Mat7ias with the [GIT] label.

Events

• March 3rd-5th: We attended EthCC in Paris. On Thursday the 5th, Jacob and Kelsos did a Raiden light client workshop.
• March 22nd: Jacob presented Raiden at ETHVR0. Follow this link to see the full meetup.
• April 4th: We presented at Noncon. Presentation available here.

What’s up next?

• The entire Raiden team is working heads down to get the next mainnet release (Alderaan) out as soon as possible and we hope to be able to share some good news regarding this in the near future.
• We are planning to participate in a bunch of hackathons as soon as Alderaan is released.
• Please make sure to follow our Twitter feed for more announcements on upcoming events.

Join our team!

Looking for a new challenge? If you want to be part of an open ecosystem right at the technological frontier and happen to be as excited about payment channel networks as we are, please have a look at the open positions and apply or feel free to refer somebody.

All the best,
The Raiden Team

Make sure to stay up to date by following us on Twitter and Medium and joining the conversations on Reddit and Gitter!

The Raiden project is led by brainbot labs Est.

Disclaimer: Please note, that even though we do our best to ensure the quality and accuracy of the information provided, this publication may contain views and opinions, errors and omissions for which the content creator(s) and any represented organization cannot be held liable.

The wording and concepts regarding financial terminology (e.g. “payments”, “checks”, “currency”, “transfer” [of value]) are exclusively used in an exemplary way to describe technological principles and do not necessarily conform to the real world or legal equivalents of these terms and concepts.

TL;DR

With “Raiddit” it is possible to do 100,000 transactions (and many more) in a short amount of time. There is no limit or set amount of time that it takes to do 100,000 transactions, since the solution scales linearly. The more users, the higher the throughput. On top of that, Raiddit does so in a fully decentralized, low latency and off-chain manner with minimal blockchain interaction, thus keeping throughput high and prices low. For a detailed explanation of the solution and a video that fulfills the demo requirements from Reddit, take a look at the dedicated website and the open source Raiddit repository.

Key properties and features of “Raiddit” in a nutshell:

• low latency
• cheap transfers
• high throughput that scales linearly with increase of the user base
• off-chain minting
• off-chain burning
• lightweight in-browser solution possible via the Raiden light client

Introduction

The Raiden team has been hard at work over the course of the last month in order to make a proof of concept and demo for the Reddit Scaling Bake-Off. For a detailed overview of the challenge and the requirements, you can take a look at the official Reddit post. Raiddit is a payment channel solution based on a modified version of Raiden. To understand how Raiden and payment channels work in general, this website is a good place to start. Due to the fact that fast and cheap token transfers is the core value proposition of Raiden, we never worried about Raiden struggling to process 100k transactions. Some of the other requirements were a bit more difficult to solve with vanilla Raiden, so we had to come up with ways to fulfill the requirements for on-boarding users very cost efficiently as well as minimizing the on-chain actions and costs related to burning tokens. However, the biggest challenge lies in the fact that Reddit users (although we all like to spend a lot of time there) cannot be expected to be online all the time. This problem is inevitably hard to solve in a system that is designed to rely on local states between two parties.

Below, we provide a brief overview of our solution and the results we achieved.

The Demo

To show that our solution works, we’ve created a small demo video. In the demo we are simulating a network with only 100 nodes. We do this, since it makes it easier to demonstrate how the protocol works if we do it from one central point in order to collect data to show. Raiddit itself is a decentralized protocol that scales linearly, so the throughput increases with the amount of nodes participating. With 100 nodes we get ~25 transactions per second. If the number of nodes is increased to one million, the number of transactions per second will be in the ballpark of 250,000 transactions per second. In Raiddit burning works in the same way as transfers so burning scales similar to transfers. If it’s not clear by now, we will make it perfectly clear: Raiddit scales linearly — the more users, the more transactions per second!

Fulfilling the Requirements

As all requirements are already listed and explained in the official Reddit post, we won’t spend time going over them in detail here. Rather we will take a high level look at how our solution tries to solve each of the requirements. As already mentioned, check out the Raiddit website to read an in-depth explanation!

Scalability

As can be seen in the demo, the scalability part of the challenge posed no problem to Raiddit. What’s really cool about how this solution is implemented is that it scales linearly. So the more people participating in the setup, the more transactions can be performed.

We did have to make one fundamental change though — traditional Raiden requires users to deposit funds on-chain in order to make sure that counter parties can be paid out at the end of a channel life cycle. This is costly and slow since it relies on on-chain transactions. To circumvent this, we decided to use virtual channels where Reddit issues claims that represent tokens and the distribution thereof. Because of this, no tokens are being minted on-chain as part of a channel opening. If we combine this with virtual channels, we arrive at a situation where channels can be opened without performing a single on-chain transaction and thus making the system scale very well in regards to minting and on-boarding. At the same time, the price will be kept to a minimum.

This leads us to burning of tokens. Burning happens by having both parties in a channel agree on decreasing the total deposit of one of the participants. This is done by having both participants sign a message that updates the state of their channel and thus leaving less total tokens in the channel left over to be paid out on-chain if/when the channel is eventually closed. The system currently works in the same way for subscriptions, but could in the future be expanded to have a special field that specifies exactly what a burn proof is intended for, i.e. a subscription, a cool tag next to your name or some Reddit gold.

Decentralization

Since Raiddit builds on top of Raiden and aims to stay true to the vision of Ethereum and Web3, it is decentralized by default and no single centralized point of failure exists in the system. Claims are indeed distributed with Reddit being a centralized point, but this is in accordance with how the current community points system works. We are very satisfied with the level of decentralization in our solution and the fact that the users have full control at any point in time.

Usability

Following a decentralized design also means that users are responsible for their end of the state. That is obviously not always the most convenient and user-friendly approach. In theory it is possible to store the local state anywhere and encrypt it to keep it private. However, the focus during the last month has been on other challenges rather than solving this particular requirement. Transactions complete in seconds and can be considered finalized when completed since the receiver will have an always claimable on-chain proof from its counter party.

We have put a lot of effort into changing the original design of Raiden in order to make Raiddit as cheap as possible for the end user. It is completely free for users to open channels and send payment with Raiddit and Reddit can pay for the gas fees related to closing the channels, should they desire to do so. This low cost approach comes at the price of introducing some amount of trust and centralization to the protocol, as Reddit is expected to generate the claims that represent tokens in the system.

Interoperability

Active development of the Raiden project has been ongoing for more than 4.5 years and Raiden has been live on the Ethereum mainnet since December 2018. During this time we have kept on making the protocol more and more stable and robust. From the very beginning we’ve focused on making a simple API that is easy for users to interact with without understanding the complex architecture and code that makes Raiden work. The same goes for our documentation and we have spent a significant amount of time during the Reddit challenge to focus on creating documentation that makes it easy for users and other projects to understand how Raiddit works and how to use it.

Interacting with the Raiddit API is just like interacting with any other API and it is straightforward for third party applications to do so in a permissionless way. By only having to interact with an API, developers can build on top of our solution in whichever programming language and whatever existing infrastructure they want.

Security

Due to the architecture of Raiden and thereby also Raiddit, the system is very resistant to forging, manipulating and censoring of transactions and balances. The messages exchanged between parties in Raiddit are called balance proofs. These messages represent the amount of tokens that one party owes the other party and this amount is always monotonically increasing. This means that it’s always most profitable to submit the most recent balance proof for both parties, since they represent the highest amounts of tokens to be paid out. In the same way, since the Ethereum blockchain by definition is permissionless and Raiddit gives users full control over their funds as well, there is nothing stopping users from settling their channels and leaving the system in order to get their tokens paid out on-chain. As already described, users have full control over their funds with Raiddit and no third parties hold anything in escrow at any point in time. This means that after the initial community points claim has been received by Reddit, even Reddit can go offline and users are still able to claim their tokens on-chain.

Other considerations

As already mentioned, Reddit is still required to sign the token claims. Reddit is however not required to submit any transactions to the blockchain themselves in order for virtual minting to take place. As soon as Reddit has signed and distributed the claims they have no control over the tokens and they can at any point in time be claimed on-chain.

Naturally, our solution is open source and so is the underlying technology that it’s built on! Links to the modified repositories used for Raiddit, can be found here:

• Client: https://github.com/raiden-network/raiden/tree/raiddit
• Services: https://github.com/raiden-network/raiden-services/tree/raiddit
• Scenario-player: https://github.com/raiden-network/scenario-player/tree/raiddit
• Contracts: https://github.com/raiden-network/raiden-contracts/tree/raiddit

Our solution is fully decentralized and local consensus between nodes is required to achieve this. However, being decentralized and having local consensus comes at the cost of not being able to transfer to or via offline nodes. This is because there is no one who the sender can get consensus with. At least not without relying on trusted third parties and undermining the censorship resistance of the protocol.

Closing words

We believe that our solution lays a great foundation for a system that can scale in the range that is expected for a user base the size of Reddit’s. More specifically, we think payment channel networks are especially well suited, because of their low latency, cheap off-chain transfers and because the network’s throughput increases with the number of users.

Work still remains to be done for this solution to be production ready, but we hope that it serves as a good showcase to Reddit and other people interested in how Ethereum will scale for mass adoption. To us, this challenge has been a good way to battle test our own protocol and find out where it shines and where improvements are to be made.

The Raiden team

Make sure to stay up to date by following us on Twitter and Medium and joining the conversations on Reddit and Gitter!

The Raiden project is led by brainbot labs Est.

Disclaimer: Please note, that even though we do our best to ensure the quality and accuracy of the information provided, this publication may contain views and opinions, errors and omissions for which the content creator(s) and any represented organization cannot be held liable.

The wording and concepts regarding financial terminology (e.g. “payments”, “checks”, “currency”, “transfer” [of value]) are exclusively used in an exemplary way to describe technological principles and do not necessarily conform to the real world or legal equivalents of these terms and concepts.

The wording and concepts regarding financial terminology (e.g. “payments”, “checks”, “currency”, “transfer” [of value]) are exclusively used in an exemplary way to describe technological principles and do not necessarily conform to the real world or legal equivalents of these terms and concepts.