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Bitcoin mining.

Started by Bitcoin, Feb 14, 2021, 08:32 am

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Bitcoin


500 GPU Cryptocurrency Mining Center - Walkthrough|8:33

Bitcoin

Dogecoin:
Dogecoin is a well-known cryptocurrency that can be mined utilizing a PC. Billy Markus, a programmer who based on an efficient cryptocurrency that can store value. Clearly, the internet adored the scheme and Dogecoin is of now holding an extraordinary 34th place on coinmarketcap.com list of coins with greatest market caps. It uses a scrypt hashing algorithm and strategies on issuing 100 billion coins. To start mining Dogecoin, first, download the official desktop wallet from the Dogecoin website.
Dogecoin can be mined by either using your CPU or by expanding your mining power with an AMD/NVIDIA graphic card. The best mining software to use when mining Dogecoin using GPU's is CGminer, CudaMiner, and GUIminer. To CPU mine Dogecoin you can make use of CPU miner.
It is possible to join a mining pool for better returns and CoinEx and MultiPool are high-quality choices.
Feathercoin (FTC):
Feathercoin is a substitute option for Bitcoin, the most popular currency. This currency existed in 2013 amidst having little exchanging volume. Feathercoin utilizes NeoScrypt and GPU's can help to extract it.
Aeon is the most CPU friendly due to cryptonite-light Pow. This narrows the CPU versus GPU performance gap significantly. You get a three times hash rate development on CPU in comparison to the GPU in contrast to regular (Monero style) cryptonite PoW. It doesn't appear infested by ASIC yet, at slightest not as deficient as others.
Monero:
Monero is recognized as the most progressive privacy coin out there. Based on a proof-of-work hashing algorithm known as CryptoNight , which is outlined with specific details that make it hard for Monero mining using ASIC's to function well. In turn, it is simple to mine Monero on your PC.
To mine with your PC, all you need is download Monero mining software and install it. Utilizing just the computers processing power, you can produce new Monero coins. However, you can increase your profits by purchasing a graphics card that will enhance your computing power so that you can mine considerably more Monero, AMD graphic card can run this errand although Nvidia cards work also. Regularly utilized Monero mining software is MultiMiner and GUIminer. You can store your Monero coins on the official Monero desktop wallet.
Electroneum (ETN):
The construction of ETN is its own blockchain that originates from Bitcoin. It aims at capturing the mobile games online gambling market. Currently, simply utilize mobile devices for quick transactions and easy payments.
Vertcoin:
This coin is a relatively new altcoin that a Lyra2RE proof-of-work algorithm for verification of transactions. Vertcoin also was ASIC resistant due to the design. Meaning it's designed is to resist the creation and development of specific hardware for mining purposes by a wide range of quarrying operations. The miner is a graphical user interface (GUI) miner which facilitates mining for both CPU and GPU users. It has two mining pools based on your computing power. If you have less than two graphics cards then you ought to pick Network 2; if you have more you should pick Network 1. Vertcoin supports AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards.
The crypto profitability information displayed depends on a statistic using the hash values entered. Therefore, before deciding what scrypt coin to mine, you should visit one of the previously mentioned websites. Your individual profitability may still vary as the calculator has no account for difficulty and exchange rate fluctuation, stale/reject/orphan rate, pool efficiency, and charges.
Everything considered mining on commercial hardware will not net you so much profit as you might expect. Overheating is a major feature of laptops when mining, therefore they aren't suitable. Even users who are utilizing 4-GPU mining rigs struggle to reach around 10 dollars of profit per day. Buying 4 AMD RX 580 is a huge investment and only a few people are keen or able to make it.
However, many more people are making investments in this kind of money, with some regularly thousands of dollars into buying of mining hardware. Even the most advanced mining hardware could net you about 50 dollars per day. While in some places it is serious money, it is basically the daily minimum wage in most developed western countries. Mining should be a backup option that can slowly drip funds into your wallet and give you some extra money. Think of it as 'gathering gold dust' rather than collecting full sized gold nuggets. Just make sure you research the cryptocurrency you wish to mine; for every Dogecoin or Litecoin, there is an exit scam waiting to dump their developer bags onto its network.
Posts Tagged ' Bitcoin Scrypt pools '
Bitcoin Scrypt (BTCS) Scrypt based cryptocoin.
Bitcoin Scrypt (BTCS) has been developed and designed using the Scrypt mining algorithm to help keep it decentralized and not become centralized with the use of specialized and expensive ASIC mining hardware. This version of Bitcoin can be mined using your GPU meaning everyone in the community at least has a fair chance to mine this coin.
Block Explorer / Crawler - http://blocks.btc2.pw/
SPECIFICATIONS.
Scrypt Algorithm Difficulty re-targets nTargetTimespan = 120 / nTargetSpacing = 120 / nInterval = nTargetTimespan / nTargetSpacing 50 coins per block 21 million total coins.
DOWNLOADS - Windows.
Source Code - at GitHub.
PORTS.
RPC Port: 30200 P2P Port: 30201.
What is merged mining - Bitcoin & Namecoin - Litecoin & Dogecoin?
Merged mining is the process of allowing two different crypto currencies based on the same algorithm to be mined simultaneously.
This allows low hash powered crypto currencies to increase the hashing power behind their network by bootstrapping onto more popular crypto currencies.
Two of the best examples of this are scrypt mining of both litecoin and dogecoin, as well as namecoin and bitcoin with sha-256.
This is quite a complex process. All the transactions for both networks are ordered and their merkle trees hashed out. The two blockchains are classified as the parent and the auxiliary blockchain. The Auxilary blockchains merkle root is inserted into the extra nonce section of the parent blockchain - i.e. Bitcoin or Litecoin with Dogecoin and Namecoin as the auxiliary chain.
As the information of one chain's set of hashes has been incorporated into a superfluous part of the other blockchain then a proof of work can be considered to have been achieved if a solution with a specific difficulty has been performed.

Bitcoin

In the case of Bitcoin and Namecoin, the difficulty is lower for Namecoin as there is less network power on that chain - i.e. the number of zeroes in the hash is less. The problem with this is that if a relatively large pool in the Bitcoin network switched to merge mining it could take a very large portion of the namecoin hashing power.
There are three scenarios:
1. The merged miner finds a solution where the difficulty is too low to provide a valid hash and proof of work for either chain. 2. The merged miner finds a solution where the proof of work has been achieved for the auxiliary chain, but not for the parent chain. 3. The merged miner finds a solution for that is greater than the difficulty requirements for both the parent and the auxiliary blockchains.
In case 1 nothing happens and the merged miner inserts a new nonce value and rehashes. In case two the miner has found a solution for the Namecoin network and propagates its solution throughout that network, if mining in conjunction with Bitcoin. In case three solutions have been found for both of the chains and so a all the required information for confirmations is propagated to dedicated miners of both networks and the merged miner has won both Bitcoin and Namecoin or Dogecoin and Litecoin.
Merged mining bitcoin.
There is no need for new or better mining hardware. The same mining infrastructure miners use for Bitcoin can be simultaneously used to mine rsk .
rsk boosts the Bitcoin network through the execution of more complex transactions that can be paid using Bitcoin. Thus, helping the Bitcoin ECOSystem grow and contributing to its long term sustainability.
Thanks to Merged mining, rsk is the most secure Smart Contract Platform and one of the most secure blockchains in the world.
Participate in rsk Merged Mining Economy.
Use our out of the box merged mining pools. Said pools are just the most popular pools with its functionality extended to do merged mining. Our experts developed the plugins and, after extensive testing, guarantee that Bitcoin operation is not affected by merged mining in any means. BTCPoolEloipoolstratum-miningCKPool.
Follow our merged mining implementation guide and extend your pool.
rsk is the Most Profitable Bitcoin Merged Mined Platform.
* Statistics correspond to April 2020.
** Coin prices used in calculations are from the 28th Apr 2020.
All the information displayed in the table above is the result of an analysis done by our experts. If you believe that something is not correct, please contact us.
Support Bitcoin Leadership.
rsk helps the Bitcoin ECOSystem grow in the following areas.
rsk platform boosts the Bitcoin network thanks to its smart contract capabilities. Smart contracts enable much more complex use cases like off chain transactions. These transactions significantly increase the revenue of the network and are the key to provide scalability to the Bitcoin ECOSystem.
Bitcoin network is leveraged by rsk platform since it allows to host multiple use cases focused on Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Stable Assets, Digital Identities (reputation), Loyalty Programs, Traceability, Social Impact and many more.
Different domain specific blockchains can be connected by bridges. rsk built the first productive bridge to be connected with Bitcoin, allowing the use of bitcoins to pay for the execution of smart contracts. By providing cutting-edge technology to build bridges between different blockchains and Bitcoin, rsk expands the possible uses of bitcoin.
The Growth of Bitcoin Merge Mining.
Abstract: In this report we examine merge mining on the Bitcoin blockchain. In the last year or so, on average each Bitcoin block mined contains around two commitment hashes from other blockchains somewhere in the coinbase transaction, indicating that most miners are conducting multiple forms of merge mining. Currently over 90% of the Bitcoin hashrate appears to be engaging in merge mining of one type or another. There has been considerable growth in merge mining over the last few years and this may be of limited concern to some, due to the small potential security risks and increased mining centralisation pressure. Most of these risks could be mitigated away by blind merge mining, if these newer schemes are adopted.

Bitcoin

What is merge mining?
Merged mining, sometimes called auxiliary proof of work, is the process of mining two or more chains at the same time. Essentially the same proof of work can be used as assurance on multiple systems. This involves a parent chain and a child chain, when the child chain essentially inherits some of the security characteristics of the parent. We first talked about this concept in our 2017 piece " The Litecoin vs. Dogecoin hash-rate wars of 2014 and implications for Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash ".
This report will focus on situations where Bitcoin is the parent chain and a commitment hash from another chain is located somewhere inside the Bitcoin blockchain. In these cases no change is required to Bitcoin, which does not need to be aware of the other system. However, the other chain needs to be structured to accept and receive the Bitcoin block header as evidence of the work. Miners can then receive two types of rewards for producing valid blocks, the normal Bitcoin reward and a reward for mining on the alternative chain.
Regular vs blind merge mining.
It is also important to explain and identify two theoretical types of merge mining: regular merge mining and blind merge mining. Regular merge mining is conducted by Bitcoin miners, while blind merge mining can normally be conducted by anyone, who then pays Bitcoin miners in fees.
Characteristics of regular vs blind merge mining.
Who conducts the mining?
The activity is conducted by Bitcoin miners.
Miners are incentivised to check the validity of blocks in both chains.
Miners typically only check the validity of blocks in the parent chain and are not concerned about the child chain.
Miners are rewarded in the native token of each chain.
Miners are rewarded in Bitcoin for the work and do not lose any rewards if there is an issue on the child chain.
Blind merge mining is often thought of as superior to regular merge mining from a security perspective, as blind merge mining can prevent risks from the child chain impacting the parent. For example, in some systems a bug or issue in the child chain could cause a cessation of block production or a blockchain re-organisation in the parent chain. Another potential problem with regular merge mining is that validation costs in a child chain could be prohibitively expensive (for example, due to large block sizes), which could cause mining centralisation in the parent chain. Unfortunately, as far as we are aware, currently merged mining is primarily conducted the regular way, and blind merge mining is relatively rare.
Examples of blind merge mining systems include two competing proposals: an earlier proposal from Paul Sztorc's (who identified many of the theoretical problems with merge mining), BIP301, and a more recent upgraded proposal , which avoids a "specific" softfork, from Ruben Somsen. Veriblock can also be considered as a blind merge mining scheme, although its usage of Bitcoin blockspace makes the mechanism somewhat controversial.
In this report, we are interested in the regular merge mining. Cases where the alternative chain commitment hash is inside the block header or coinbase transaction and not just in any transaction. The reason we have chosen to do this is because looking for evidence of hashes of alternative chains in the coinbase transaction is far easier than looking in all transactions. In addition to this regular merge mining may be more significant from a security point of view, as we explained above. Therefore the prevalence of regular merge mining may be interesting.
Where is the commitment hash located?
As for where the miners include these hashes from alternative chains, they must be in a specific location to avoid any doubt over which commitment is the true one. There is limited choice available for such commitments, the block header space is pretty much all used up and therefore the coinbase transaction is used. We have identified two spaces within the coinbase transaction for the alternative chain commitments:
As an OP_Return coinbase output In the coinbase scriptsig.
In this report we have attempted to assess the prevalence of merge mining in these two parts of the coinbase transaction over time.
Coinbase outputs.
We scanned the entire blockchain history, from 2009 to October 2020 and counted the frequency of zero value outputs in the coinbase transaction, almost all of these are OP_Return outputs. As Figure 1 below illustrates, the prevalence of these outputs has accelerated dramatically in recent years. In 2020 YTD, on average there are 2.3 OP_Return outputs in each Bitcoin coinbase transaction, while prior to 2017 the number was effectively zero.
As we explained back in March 2018 , the SegWit upgrade works by adding the merkle root of the witness merkle tree in the coinbase transaction. This commitment is very similar to many of the commitments for alternative merge mined chains, as they both use OP_Return outputs. SegWit is therefore included in the chart below and adoption has reached almost 100%. SegWit cannot really be considered an alternative chain, however from 2018 onwards, even excluding SegWit, OP_Return outputs have become increasingly prevalent in the coinbase transaction. This may indicate that regular merge mining is becoming increasingly popular.
Figure 1 - Number of zero value outputs in the Bitcoin coinbase transaction (Average over 1,000 block periods)
(Source: BitMEX Research)
As the chart illustrates, with the exception of SegWit, we have identified the RSK blockchain as the primary cause of this growth and highlighted it in red. We were able to identify these due to the presence of an RSK related tag in the output. At some point in 2019 other OP_Return outputs started emerging, however we have not yet been able to identify and tag these projects. In Figure 2 below, we look at adoption of RSK in more detail. The chart shows how adoption of the RSK chain among Bitcoin miners is now at the 40% to 50% level.
Figure 2 - Proportion of Bitcoin blocks with an RSK commitment in the coinbase transaction (Average over 1,000 block periods)
As Figure 3 below illustrates, the frequency of these OP_Return outputs is not uniform across mining pools, with some pools adopting the merge mining and others not. For example, HuoBi and Binance have very low adoption of RSK, however their coinbase outputs contain extra OP_Returns, presumably from other projects. On the other hand, SlushPool has very high adoption of RSK at 88%, but not many other OP_Return outputs. Recently the Binance pool appears to have adopted RSK and therefore RSK merge mining is set to increase further.
Figure 3 - Average number of zero value outputs in the Bitcoin coinbase transaction by mining pool (Data since block 500,000)
(Source: BitMEX Research) (Note: Mining pools ordered by the number of blocks found. Mining pool determined using data from ForkMonitor )


Bitcoin

About the Company
Bybit welcome bonusThe Bybit cryptocurrency broker platform is operated by the Bybit Fintech Limited which is registered on the British Virgin Islands, with headquarters in Singapore. The company was launched in March 2018, making it still a fairly young player on the crypto market.

The company has about 90 employees, all of whom joined within a year. The development team created the trading platform in just over half a year, knowing that the system had to be as close to perfect as can be.

This is because no mistakes are allowed to happen when traders with high stakes risk a lot of money on a derivatives trading platform, not even in the area of cryptocurrency. As Bybit is focused on the more experienced traders, the platform has grown in a short time to become a well-known name on this highly competitive market.

Experienced traders are especially charmed by the platform's high speed performance. According to Bybit's own statements they can handle 100,000 transactions per second. This has the advantage that you lose as little money as possible when trading, which can otherwise happen on overloaded platforms. With it's high technical standard, the platform is ready for the future. Due to the ever increasing popularity of crypto trading all brokers will become busier and busier, which means that many transactions per second are no superfluous luxury.

Bybit Review - Trading Interface

Especially in terms of functionalities, Bybit distinguishes itself from the rest. This way you can trade on margin on the platform. With some cryptocurrencies it's even possible to use leverage of up to 1:100. This means that you would only have to deposit 0.01 BTC to be able to open a 1 BTC position. With leverage you can still make a lot of profit with only a small investment, but you can also lose your margin just as quickly. With leverage of 1:100 this is certainly the case which is why professional traders usually never use it to that extend. With this amount of leverage the liquidation price will just be too close to your entry, so it's hard not to get liquidated in that case.

In fact, most pro traders use a formula that calculates the position size based on their stake in relation to the amount they are willing to lose in one trade. Leverage in general is a functionality for the more experienced trader, and high leverage is rather for the gambler.

The fact that Bybit is especially suitable for experienced traders doesn't mean that there is no support available. If you have any questions, you can contact them 24/7 via a live chat on the website. The live chat is fully in English as Bybit is not offered in other languages. It is even possible to ask questions to their CEO on Twitter. So Bybit is a very open platform, a fact that makes them seem trustworthy and reliable, more than many other trading sites.

In summer 2019, the platform already counts 100 thousand registered users, with new sign ups coming in every day. Currently Bybit is one of the most popular alternatives to BitMEX.


Products offered by Bybit - Altcoin Trading Pairs
Bybit offers perpetual crypto derivative contracts on Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, and Ripple against USD. It means that by performing a trade, you are not buying an underlying asset, but enter an agreement with the seller for the future price of a given asset.

In order to trade any of the products offered by this platform, you will have to deposit either BTC, ETH, EOS, or XRP, after which Bybit will calculate your available margin, shown in USD.

This margin can be used to enter a short or long position on every currency pair available: BTC/USD, ETH/USD, EOS/USD, and XRP/USD with a maximum leverage of x100.

Bybit Trading Pairs With Leverage:
BTC/USD: 1:100
ETH/USD: 1:50
EOS/USD: 1:50
XRP/USD: 1:50

Signup on Bybit - No KYC / ID Verification
short signup
Bonuses
Creating an account on Bybit is very easy and that's mainly because Bybit doesn't need too much data from traders. What you'll notice with a lot of brokers and exchanges, is that you have to verify some data before you can start. This is especially with traditional regulated brokers, but also with a range of new cryptocurrency brokers.

With Bybit you don't have to do this. Only an email address is sufficient for Bybit. If you signup with your mobile you need to fill in your country, phone number and password.

After activating your account via e-mail you can get started right away. It might give you a bit of a strange feeling, but actually a specialized cryptocurrency broker doesn't need anything else from you. You can read below why Bybit doesn't need your bank details.


Demo Mode
Bybit is offering a testnet trading account, so new users can check out the trading platform safely before trading with real money. This is a great feature we always appreciate with Bitcoin brokers. Right on their trading interface you find the Testnet link on the right side.

In the illustration you see where you find the testnet link. Btw, this is the night mode which is preferred by many traders who are used to dark charts:

Bybit Review: Demo Account

At the bottom of the page you can change the day or night mode, depending on whether you prefer a white or a black interface.


Bybit Welcome Bonuses
One of the cool things about Bybit is that they grant you money in the form of bonuses. Users get a $10 signup bonus and another $50 on their first deposit, so $60 in total. However, a minimum deposit of 0.2BTC is required for this deposit bonus.

In order to get the $10 sign up bonus there is a tiny task you need to do which is following Bybit's official on Twitter and retweeting the Welcome Bonus Tweet. You'll find the details in your account in the bonus section. By the way, this credit cannot be withdrawn, but must be used for trading on the platform. But that goes without saying.


Restrictions
For legal reasons there are certain countries or regions that cannot be served by Bybit. Unfortunately, those are the USA, Québec (Canada), Cuba, Singapore, Crimea, Sevastopol, Syria, Iran, Sudan, China and North Korea. So if you live in one of those countries, unfortunately you're not allowed to trade on Bybit.


How does Bybit work?

It is good to know in advance that you can only use cryptocurrency to access Bybit. So you can't execute trades with USD or Euros to convert them into Bitcoin, for example.

If you want to start using Bybit and you don't have any cryptocurrency yet, then you'll first have to go to an exchange to buy Bitcoin or one of the other cryptocurrencies accepted for deposit on Bybit.

With Bybit you can make trades like you might know from BitMEX. At Bybit it is possible to deposit BTC, ETH, EOS or XRP in order to start trading. So it isn't possible to directly deposit fiat money such as USD, EUR, GBP etc. If you don't have cryptocurrency yet, you can buy some from CoinMama, BitPanda, LocalBitcoins, Coinbase or another exchange of your choice. The term you have to look for is spot trading, other than CFD trading. Spot trading means you actually exchange one foreign currency against another, so you actually purchase a currency (or, in our case: cryptocurrency). At CFD trading you only trade price differences of 2 currencies, but you only keep one type of asset. The amount of this asset will get enhanced or reduced, depending on the success or failure of your trades.

For each trade in Bybit you can set a leverage and you can indicate whether you want to go long or short. Each trade on Bybit happens through two parties. One party is the maker. A maker places an order in the order book for the future. So a maker will also make sure that the trading platform has money in its hands and will provide liquidity within the broker. A maker receives a reward for this. You can read more about this below. The other party is the taker, who places an order equal to that of the maker. So in short - a maker creates the order book and a taker takes a transaction out of the order book.


Here are the leverage details for BTC and ETH positions:

BTC leverage:
BTC leverage details

ETH leverage:
ETH leverage details


Protection From Market Manipulation
The broker is protected from market manipulation by using a dual price mechanism. This means that the price at which traders can be liquidated depends on the mark price. The mark price is an average price of certain large exchanges.


Deposit and Withdrawal
Minimum Amounts:
There is no minimum deposit for BTC, ETH, EOS and XRP. So on this crypto margin broker you can even trade with tiny amounts, which is a good idea if your are a margin trading beginner. But they do have minimum withdrawal amounts you might need to know - however, even those are really low:

Bitcoin: 0.002BTC
Ethereum: 0.02ETH
EOS: 0.2EOS
Ripple: 20XRP
Maximum Withdrawal:
The maximum amount you can cash out at once is 10 BTC. Withdrawals are processed manually 3 times a day. So you could withdraw 30 Bitcoin per day in total.


Trading Fees
We've just been talking about makers and takers. As a taker you pay a 0.075% fee of your total trading amount to Bybit. As a maker you will receive a 0.025% discount on that amount. If you have closed all your trades and for example you want to withdraw your Bitcoin from your account to your own wallet, you'll pay the small transaction fee that goes to the BTC miners.

Bybit itself doesn't charge any fees on deposits and withdrawals. The current mining fees on deposits and withdrawals are stated here.

Trading Fees

Critics of Bybit
Bybit suffers from the same kind of critics as other exchanges operating under the same business model. First of all, the exchange itself doesn't require you to go through the KYC process, and because of the regulatory reasons, U.S citizens are not accepted. What is more, Bybit is not as liquid as some bigger exchanges, which might lead to some problems if you are planning to trade bigger positions.

As the platform operates only on crypto deposits that are the base for your margin, combining that with a maximum leverage of x100 might lead to some unforeseen consequences. Traders entering a heavily leveraged long position might get quickly liquidated, as the value of the available margin decreases, with the underlying asset increases in the value at the same time.

Funding Fees
Bybit has the same funding fee standard most competitors use: Every 8 hours there is a point where open positions get charged the so called funding fee. This fee gets directly exchanges between traders, so it's nothing the broker will earn. The fee is dynamically calculated and depending on market conditions it's either longs pay shorts or the other way round. The time intervals are 8:00 UTC, 16:00 UTC, 0:00 UTC. Funding fees only affect positions being held over those time stamps. If you close a positions one minute before or open a new one right afterwards, you're not affected.


Our Verdict on Bybit
Bybit is seen by many traders as a robust and reliable platform. So there is no need to be discouraged by the missing verification process. In fact, anonymous (KYC-free) trading is what many traders prefer so they specifically look for crypto brokers with no KYC.

Bybit offers good support for users and it is available around the clock. The possibility to ask the CEO of the company questions via his own Twitter account shows that it is a transparent company. That's what we like to see in the crypto world.

The platform is made for experienced traders. As with many other platforms, it is possible to first get acquainted with the system via a demo environment. So you can take a look around to see what the dashboard looks like before you really start. A function we didn't expect, but certainly a pleasant surprise.

Bybit is a cryptocurrency derivative exchange that launched its services at the end of 2018.

The exchange gives traders the ability to trade Cryptocurrency perpetual contracts with up to 100:1 leverage. In their short time in operation, the exchange has managed to build up sizable liquidity.

However, can such a new exchange really be trusted?

In this Bybit review, we will give you everything you need to know about the exchange. We will also give you some top tips when it comes to trading crypto futures.

Get $190 BONUS!*
*On deposits of 0.2 BTC or More
Overview
Page Contents 👉 [show]

Bybit is P2P cryptocurrency futures exchange that is based in Singapore. The exchange operates under Bybit Fintech Limited which is a company that is registered in the British Virgin Islands.

In their about us page, the exchange claims that they have a team which is comprised of experts in blockchain technology and finance. For example, their technology team has people who hail from Morgan Stanley, Tencent etc. You can check them out on linkedin.

The primary product offered on the exchange is perpetual futures products with 100:1 leverage. This means that they are trying to compete with established exchanges such as BitMEX and Deribit which have similar non-expiry futures products.

While there are many similarities between the exchanges, there are some unique features that Bybit have included that could make them attractive. We will touch on these features when we cover their trading technology.

The exchange is open to most traders around the world and the website has been translated into English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese and recently n. However, there are some jurisdictions that they do not operate in and these include the likes of the USA, Syria, and the Canadian province of Quebec.

Is Bybit Safe?
This is one of the most important questions that any exchange user will have. This is especially true when it comes to a new exchange with no established security track record to turn to.

As such, when we look into the safety of an exchange, we are interested in their security policies as it pertains to their coin management, user security tools and of course risk management.

Exchange Security

To counter the threat posed by hackers, Bybit operates a secure cold storage solution. This means that they store the bulk of their crypto reserves, and all of the clients' funds, in offline wallets that are stored in a secure "air-gapped" location.

There is only a small portion of their own coins that are kept in their "hot wallets" in order to service the needs of traders when it comes to withdrawals. Moreover, if they ever need to move funds from cold storage, they need to use a multi-signature address scheme.

Multi-signature means that the exchange will need more than one key in order to sign a transaction from one wallet to another. This prevents the risk posed by having a single individual manage all the funds on the exchange.

Encrypted Communication

Bybit SSL Encryption
Go for Green with Padlock
In order to prevent the risk posed by online snoops and phishing attacks, the Bybit website has full SSL encryption. This means that all passwords and address information that you send them will be encrypted.

This is also helpful in order to spot a phishing site. If you are on a website that looks like it could be that of Bybit but it does not have a secure padlock in the browser, it is an immediate indication that you are on a phishing site and you should leave immediately.

Insurance Fund

In order to manage the risk posed by shortfalls in futures contract settlement, Bybit operates what they call their "insurance fund".

Essentially, this fund will be used in the case that a trader gets liquidated at level that is below their "bankruptcy price". The latter is the price at which the trader's initial margin has been completely depleted.

Bybit Insurance Fund
Amount of Bitcoin Currently in Insurance Fund
Without the fund there would be a shortfall whereby the counterparty to the trade would not be made whole. It is essentially an insurance policy that will protect traders in the case that Bybit is not able to liquidate the position at bankruptcy price or better.

These funds are replenished with the initial margin that liquidated traders have at the outset of their trade. The difference between the price at which the trader is liquidated and the bankruptcy price is how much will be sent to, or taken from, the insurance fund.

Two Factor Authentication

While exchange side protection is one thing, in most cases the biggest threat to a trader's security is themselves. That is why Bybit has included a number of tools that will help protect your account from a hacker with your password.

Google Authenticator App
2FA with Google Authenticator Application
One of the most important tools that they have included is two factor authentication. This means that you will have to use your phone in order to authenticate into your account or send transactions. You have to enable google authenticator before you are allowed to withdraw any coins.

Bybit Leverage
Given that Bybit is a leveraged exchange, it means that they allow crypto margin trades. Traders will only have put up a small percentage of the initial position as collateral for their trades.

This means that if you have a leverage of 100x you will be required to put up a margin of 1% of the initial notional amount of the trade. So, if the notional on a 10BTC contract is $36,000, you will have to put up $360 in initial margin.

Major Pro 💯: With Bybit, leverage is freely adjustable, meaning that it can be changed even after opening a position, which is something that cannot be done on other exchanges.
What is surprising about the perpetual contracts on Bybit is their size. Each contract is only worth 1USD which is much smaller than the contracts on other exchanges. Below is all the other specifics of their BTCUSD contract.

BTCUSD Contract Bybit
BTCUSD Contract Specifics at Bybit
They have pretty much the same terms on their ETHUSD contracts and you can find more information about that here. This is different from other exchanges such as BitMEX which, contrary to Bybit, does not offer a 100x leverage product for ETH yet.

Bybit also offers futures contracts on Ripple (XRP) and EOS. However, these contracts have lower leverage levels with a max leverage of 25x. This is actually quite interesting as we have not seen EOS futures contracts at other exchanges. This could give Bybit a competitive advantage.

While Bybit does offer 100x leverage on their contracts, this is not constant. If you are a large trader and are entering sizable positions then they will bring down the leverage that you can achieve on your contract.

This protects the exchange from the risk posed by large positions. Below is the table of the BTCUSD risk limits. You can find the ETHUSD, EOSUSD and XRPUSD risk limits on this page.

Position Value Maintenance Margin Initial Margin Max Leverage
150 BTC 0.5% 1.00% 100
450 BTC 0.5% 2.00% 50
750 BTC 2.5% 3.00% 33
1,050 BTC 3.5% 4.00% 25
1,350 BTC 4.5% 5.00% 20
1,500 BTC 5.0% 5.50% 18
As you can see, the maintenance margin is constant at 0.5% for all contract sizes. However, for larger positions, they will increase the minimum initial margin requirement such that there is a much greater shortfall between the liquidation level and the bankruptcy level.

Liquidation

Liquidation is what happens when you have nearly depleted your initial margin and the mark price hits the "liquidation price". In this instance, the trader will be liquidated with the rest of their margin, if any, being sent the Bybit insurance fund.

ADL ⚙️: Bybit operates an Auto Deleveraging system. Essentially, this happens when a position can't be liquidated at a price that is better than the bankruptcy price and the insurance fund cannot cover it. The ADL system will automatically deleverage a position of an opposing trader that is selected according to their defined criteria. You can read more about the ADL here.
While there are many traders who may be upset by a liquidation, it is an important risk management tool in a futures exchange. However, Bybit has a number of tools that will help traders avoid the risk of liquidation. These include the following:

Dual Price Mechanism: In order to prevent the risk of market manipulation on the exchange, Bybit will use a dual price mechanism as the contract reference price. This is composed of the "Mark Price" which triggers liquidation and the "Last Traded Price" which is used to calculate the price at which the position is closed. The former is a global Bitcoin price whereas the latter is the current Bybit market price. Using external pricing inputs reduces singular exchange manipulation.
Auto Margin Replenishment: If you want to make sure that your position will always have adequate levels of margin then you can set it to auto-replenish. This means that whenever your margin is close to being depleted, it will draw on your funds to keep your position open
Stop Loss: This forms part of the order options that we talk about below. Having effective stop losses on your positions will ensure that it never gets down to the liquidation level.
Mark / Spot Price 📈: For those interested, the Mark price is derived from the Spot price. The spot price is a Bitcoin price index that represents the global price. It is comprised of prices on Bitstamp, Coinbase Pro and Kraken. The Mark price is the spot price index plus a decaying funding basis rate
Bybit Fees
Trading fees are an important criteria for us because of obvious reasons. This is especially true when it comes to a futures exchange where you are paying fees on positions that are much larger than your margin.

Bybit operates what is called a "maker-taker" fee model. This means that they will charge traders a fee if they take liquidity off their books and they will give them a rebate if they provide liquidity to the exchange.

Confused ❓: If you place an order and it gets executed immediately you are taking liquidity off the books. This is most of the time through a market order. However, if you place a limit order that is away from the current price you are making liquidity and this will get you the maker rebate.
Below are the fees that you will pay for the futures contracts on the exchange. They are the same as BitMEX for BTC but slightly above for ETH (as they propose higher leverage for it) and are below other exchanges such as Huobi.

Contract Maker Rebate Taker Fees Funding Rate Funding Rate Interval
BTCUSD -0.0250% 0.0750% -0.0447% every 8 hours
ETHUSD -0.0250% 0.0750% -0.0447% every 8 hours
EOSUSD -0.0250% 0.0750% 0.0100% every 8 hours
XRPUSD -0.0250% 0.0750% 0.0100% every 8 hours
BTCUSDT -0.0250% 0.0750% 0.0100% every 8 hours
The other fees that you will see when you open the trade is the funding rate. This is analogous to an "overnight" rate and it is a financing charge. Given that margin trading is based on "borrowing" positions, you will either pay a financing charge or be receiving it. However, on the contrary of the transaction fees, these fees are directly exchanged between traders and not Bybit.

The funding rate is determined by market conditions and interest rates. This means that it is not fixed and will vary on a daily basis. You will be able to see the funding rate that will apply under the position details when you open your trade.

In terms of deposit/withdrawal fees, Bybit does not charge you anything on this. However, when you are withdrawing your coins you may incur a miner or "network" fee due to the blockchain mining. This is usually quite small though.

Finally, you have a relatively small $5 fee that you will have to pay on any Asset exchange orders for exchanging physical crypto at spot. We explain that below.

Bybit Registration
If you have decided that you would like to give Bybit a go then you will have to create an account. In order to do this, they will require either an email or phone number, and a password. If you have been given a referral code then you can use this (more on this below).

Once you have registered, Bybit will send you a confirmation code that you will need to use to confirm your email/phone number. This is only valid for 5 minutes so make sure that you do it right after creating the account.

Privacy Hawks 🕶️: Something that many traders may appreciate is the fact that Bybit is a fully anonymous exchange. They do not require you to complete KYC before you can trade. This is great for those privacy hawks who are worried about the risks of certain data breaches.
Once you have confirmed your account and logged back in then you could be offered a deposit bonus. These are a great way to augment your trading funds initially. We give you all these details further below.

Deposit / Withdrawal
Bybit is as crypto only exchange. This means that you cannot fund your account in fiat currency. While this may be annoying for some, you can easily convert your fiat currency into Bitcoin on a number of exchanges such as Bitstamp or Kraken.

In order to deposit crypto you will need to generate a wallet address and initiate a transaction into the wallet. You can do this by heading over to your "Assets" section in the header. This will present your wallet balances where you will select "deposit" and it will bring up the BTC / ETH address.

Wallet Deposit Bybit
Generating your wallet deposit address
Once you have the address, you can initiate the transaction. It will not be instantaneous as the transaction still has to be propagated through the network and confirmed by the Miners.

Confirmations ⛓️: Bybit is quite unique amoung exchanges in that they require only 1 blockchain confirmation to credit your account. You can monitor the progress on a blockchain explorer.
Withdrawals are just as easy...

You will hit the withdrawal button on the applicable asset. It will ask for your wallet address as well as to confirm the transaction through 2FA. You will also be given information on the miner fee that will be applied to the transaction.

Bybit processes withdrawal 3 times a day at 0800, 1600, 2400 (all in UTC time). There are withdrawal limits that are set on the accounts although these are not too restrictive. Below are the min / max limits:

Bitcoin: 0.002BTC / 10BTC
Etherem: 0.02ETH / 200ETH
Ripple: 20XRP / 100,000XRP
Eos: 0.2EOS / 10,000EOS
In order to make sure that they always have funds available on their hot wallet, Bybit also has limits on daily withdrawals in total from the exchange. These are set to 100BTC and 10,000ETH. If this limit is reached, you will have to wait for Bybit to replenish it from their cold wallet.

Asset Exchange

This is a new feature that was recently added to Bybit which basically allows traders to exchange their current pyshical crypto holdings in the spot market.

Essentially, traders currently have four different cryptocurrencies that they are allowed to trade. Asset Exchange will allow traders to take advantage of quick price changes in the market to exchange one coin for another.

Bybit Asset Swap
Asset Swap Feature at Bybit (Converting BTC)
When they are conducting a Asset Swap, they are not doing so directly with Bybit or with the other traders on an "order book". Their order is essentially getting routed out to other spot crypto exchanges to be executed.

This will ensure fairness as they will be getting the best market price that Bybit can garner. There are limits that apply to the Asset Swap feature which you can find on their websit.

Bybit Trading Platform
One of the most important things for the margin trader is to have an effective trading platform with advanced technology. This is especially true when you are trading with a great degree of leverage.

So, how does Bybit stack up?

The trading platform seems to be relatively well laid out and intuitive. At the top you can toggle between your wallets, and account management. You can also switch between the BTC and ETH futures markets.

Looking at the standard interface, you have the chart and market depth on the left (you can toggle between). Then in the middle you have the order book and the last trades. On the right you have the order forms as well as the contract details.

Bybit User Interface
User Interface of the Bybit Trading Platform
Scrolling down from the main interface you have other important trading information. This includes things such as the current market activity and your assets.

Something that we really liked about their interface is that it is customizable and modular. You can detach some of the modules, resize them, and move them around such that they are in your chosen position.

For Night Owls 🦉: Bybit also offers a night mode that makes reading everything much easier in a dark environment. This can be accessed at the bottom right of the exchange page, next to the languages.
For those seasoned traders among you, you will have noticed that Bybit uses tradingview charting technology. This third-party charting package is well known in the industry for having the most functionality and features.

With tradingview charts, the budding technical analysts among you can easily lay your studies and follow the important trendlines. It is also in use on a number of other platforms so it is relatively easy for you to adapt if you do move somewhere else.

Top Tip 💯: You can switch out the Tradingview price charts for the market liquidity charts. These are helpful for the trader to determine market sentiment (bullish / bearish)
You will also notice that in your current position / order bar, you have the "ADL ranking" indicator. This will show you where you currently are positioned for potential deleveraging in the case that the ADL is triggered. As mentioned above, this is done to manage risk.

Something that Bybit appears to be quite proud of is their order matching engine. They claim that this trading engine is able to execute a total of 100,000 transactions per second per contract. So for every new asset they will add, their matching engine will have a dedicated 100,000 transactions per second for that asset only.

Why does this matter?

Well, faster order execution means that there the risk of slippage and trading errors is greatly reduced. Moreover, with an asset that moves as quickly as bitcoin it is really important to be able to match both sides of the order book almost instantaneously.

Order Functionality

Bybit appears to have pretty advanced order functionality on the platform. This is great as it allows you to not only customise your entry levels but it also allows you to manage your risk on the exit levels.

Bybit Order Form
Bybit Order Functionality
When you are placing your order, you will see the following order form. At the top of the form you can switch between the order types. Below that you adjust the leverage, price and quantity. There is also information on the contract specifics.

There are three order types that you can place on the Bybit platform. These are outlined below:

Market Order: This is an order that is placed at the prevailing market price. It will place the order at the "bid" if it is a sell or at the "ask" if it is a buy.
Limit Order: This is an order that is placed at a chosen level that may be away from the market. The order is open for the order life which we cover below.
Conditional Order: This is an order that will become either a market or limit order once certain price levels are reached. When placing the trade, you will define the trigger price along with the direction, quantity, and leverage.
Stop Losses 🛑: When trading with leverage, stop losses are essential. There are 3 different ways in which you can set up a stop-loss at Bybit. These are covered in detail on this page
As mentioned, with the Limit order and the Conditional limit order, the order will have a certain order life. This is for how long the order will remain open until it is "killed". There are three order life options at Bybit:

Good-Till-Cancelled (GTC): This is an order that will remain open until you decide to close it.
Immediate-or-Cancel (IOC):: This order is designed to be filled immediately and at the best price. If there are any portions that are unfilled then this portion will be cancelled. This means that this order type allows for partial order execution.
Fill or Kill (FOK): This order is designed to be filled at the best price in entirety or not at all. This is quite similar to the IOC order except that it does not allow the execution of any partial orders.
On top of all these orders, you also have some optionality around how these orders are executed. For example, with your Limit and Conditional orders you can set them as a "Post Only". This will ensure that when the order it will be done as a "market maker" and you will receive the maker fee.

On top of this, you have the option of making your limit order a "Reduce Only" order. This basically means that the order will only execute if it was going to reduce your position. If the order were to increase the position, it would be amended down or cancelled.

You also have a similar order parameter on the Conditional order. This is called "Close on Trigger" and it can be used in conjunction with your conditional stop losses. It will ensure your stops reduce your position and don't increase it.

One more handy tool that you may want to check out is their position calculator. You may have seen similar tools at other exchanges like BitMEX et al.

Bybit Position Calculator
Position Calculator at Bybit
This let's you calculate your your Profit / Loss and ROE on target levels. It can also be used to determine your liquidation levels.


Bitcoin

Inverse vs. USDT Contract
Before you can trade on Bybit you have to understand a very important distinction between the two types of perpetual contracts they have on offer. They differ according to what margin is used.

For the USDT contract, the underlying margin used is Tether. You can think of this as analogous to a contract that has USD as a base currency (given that Tether is a stablecoin). So, the dollar value of your collateral will remain the same.

However, when it comes to the inverse contract, the underlying cryptocurrency itself is used as margin. So, if you are trading BTC/ETH/EOS/XRP as the base currency then your margin will be in this as well. So for example, for ETHUSD contracts you will have ETH as the margin.

The inverse contract is slightly more risky than the USDT contract. This is because not only do you have exposure to the actual market but you will also have exposure through your underlying collateral. So, keeping with our example, if you are long Ethereum and the price falls not only will your position deteriorate but you will also see the USD value of your collateral falling.

If you are going to be trading anything other than Bitcoin then it will have to be an inverse perpetual. You will also have to make sure that you have the coin in question before you can actually trade it.

It is also important to note that although the margin required is in the coin in question, it is still quoted in USD. Each inverse perpetual contract is 1 USD in value. This is a pretty neat feature as it allows you to trade contracts as little as 1 USD. This is in contrast to the USDT contract that is written on 1 BTC.

Isolated & Cross Margin

Something else that you may notice when you are trading BTCUSDT on the Bybit platform is that you have two options around how the margin is apportioned in the account. These are isolated and cross margin.

When you select Isolated margin, the margin that you have on the trade is applicable to only that position. It does not take into account the equity levels and positions PnL that you have on other orders for the same trading pair. So, even if you are in profit on some other trade, it has no bearing on whether you are likely to get liquidated (and vice versa).

However, when you have selected to cross margin it means that all available balances will be combined in order to prevent a liquidation. So, if you have other positions that are open for the corresponding trading pair then these will be included in a calculation of margin levels before liquidation occurs.

Note ✍️: When you select to cross margin, you cannot manually select the margin level. The initial margin is set in accordance with the maximum leverage limit for said pair. So, if you are trading BTCUSDT, this would be 100x or 0.1% initial margin.
Which is better?

Honestly, we would suggest that you rather use Isolated Margin. Not only does it allow you to adjust the margin but it also means that you have full control of your risk on a particular position. If you are trading the inverse perpetual swaps then the isolated margin is set by default.

Market Analytics Data
Something else that we found pretty neat was their market data section and particularly their advanced data section. This contained some really handy graphs and charts that could help inform your trading.

You can also pull up some of these charts and download the data. This could either be as an image, vector file or as a csv. Here you can see an example of us doing that with the rolling volatility chart.

Bybit Analytics Data
Some of the Charts For Bybit Data
Here is a list of the data that you are able to download as well as what it means:

Price Moving Averages: This has the price of Bitcoin along with the a number of moving average indicators of different time frames.
Monthly Price Range Takes a look at monthly highs and lows in the price. It allows you to observe the range the asset traded in.
Rolling Volatility The realised volatililty over the past 30 days compared to the average for the period. Gives you a sense of how much the price swinged in a give period.
BTC Daily Realised Volatility Looking at what the realised volatility was like over a certain period of time
There is also a host of other data that you can examine in these tabs. That includes information on the specific index price, funding data and the insurance fund. You should also note the weights that are used to calculate the spot price.

Testnet
For those traders that would like to try the platform out in demo mode, they can make use of the Bybit testnet. Demo accounts are a great way to get a sense of how the orders work before depositing funds.

You can access their testnet on testnet.Bybit.com. In order to fund your account you will have to get coins from the testnet faucet. They have outlined exactly how this is done in this handy guide.

We must admit that we were quite surprised at the amount of work that was required in order to access these testnet funds. When you unlock these funds, you are only getting minor amounts of Bitcoin as the faucet has a release rate of 0.01BTC per hour.

Other platforms such as IQ Option provide demo funds the moment that you open the account. These come with no strings attached and give you a realistic balance to trade with ($10,000).

Bybit Mobile Apps
For those traders that are on the go, you will no doubt want to keep track of your open positions. This is why Bybit has developed their mobile applications. It's available in iOS and Android and appears to be quite functional.

In fact, it has most of the same functionality of the desktop version. You have advanced charting and order management all easily accessible through the navigation pain. You can also set a whole host of price levels to be sent as push notifications.

You also have those advanced order forms that you see on the main exchange. This is not something that we have seen at other exchanges and brokers. Most of the time the order functionality is stripped down - so top marks here.

Bybit App
Bybit Mobile App Screenshots
The app is listed in both the iTunes store as well as Google Play. There are over 10,000 Android installs although we can't see the iOS installs. The reviews in the iTunes store appear to be quite positive where they are slightly more polarized in the Play Store.

So, should you consider the Bybit App?

Well, it is no doubt quite functional but we always prefer to use web and PC based trading. This is because you can never really replicate the effectiveness of PC trading on a mobile device. You can't easily study charts and monitor numerous markets at the same time. You should ideally only be using it at times when you are away from your desk and need to monitor your positions.

Bybit Customer Support
Given that Bybit is a new exchange, there is not that much in the way of previous trader experience with their customer support. However, we did try reach out to their customer support lines to get an idea of typical response times.

In terms of support options, you have a zendesk live chat function that is available on their platform. This is available 24/7 and is offered in all the languages that they have translated their website into.

Bybit Live Chat Zendesk
Zendesk Live chat function
You can also reach out to them via email on support@Bybit.com for customer support or it@Bybit.com if your query is more technical in nature. Unfortunately, there is no phone support or direct telephone line into the exchange.

We tested out the live chat function and we were able to get a support agent almost immediately. Email support took a bit longer but was similarly helpful.

Social Channels 📱: If you are struggling to get a response through these channels then you can always reach out on their social media. They have a Telegram Channel for more direct questions. You can always Tweet them a ticket number if you prefer.
Of course, if your question is more routine in nature and not specific to your account then you can always make use of their extensive help section. This includes their FAQ resources as well as other helpful guides that could help your trading.

API
Those developers among you will be happy to know that Bybit has a pretty robust API. This will allow you to code algorithms and bots in order to manage the trading programmatically.

You can get all of the technical documents about how to interact with the API from their GitHub. If you would like to make use of the API then you will have to generate an API key. This can be done in the "API management" section of the exchange.

Bybit API Key
Generating the Bybit API Key
Here, you can generate a new key that will be used to access the API. You will also have to decide what permissions you want to give the API (read, write or withdraw). Read allows you to monitor prices, write allows you to place trades and withdraw will allow your bot to process a withdrawal (not advisable).

You may also want to bind the API to your IP address. This will prevent anyone from placing trades in your account should your API key be compromised. Either way, you will want be very careful when dealing with your API key.

For example, we would advise against the use of third-party trading bots. Many of this have questionable returns and when they have access to your API keys they can manipulate markets to their own advantage.

Bybit Reward's Hub
These are actually some pretty neat sweeteners that Bybit has thrown into the mix.

Essentially, there is a number of opportunities for new users to earn some free BTC to trade with. For example, if your first deposit on the platform is over 0.05BTC then you will get an added $5. If it is over 0.5BTC then they will throw you $50. If you deposit more than 1BTC in total you will get an additional $20.

Bybit Rewards
Get Your Bybit Rewards!
There is also opportunity for you to do simple tasks to earn a little more BTC. For example, if you merely register and join their social media channels then you will earn $5. Simply use their Take Profit and Stop Loss orders and you bag another $5. Trade for more than 10 days and you earn another $5. Heck, even taking a short customer survey can get you $5.

These additional funds could be a great way for you to augment your account balance. Also, if you were already planning on joining Bybit and trading there, these can be viewed as free trading funds.

Of course, there are "house rules" that come with this bonus. For example, you cannot withdraw these funds and they can only be used as margin in your account. Moreover, when you withdraw these profits you forfeit your bonus.

T&Cs 📜: We encourage you to read their bonus terms and conditions for more information. and to avoid any confusion
Bybit Referral / Affiliate Program
If you have been using Bybit and have been relatively impressed with the product then you can always refer others to the platform.

There are two ways in which you can do this. Perhaps the easiest to start is through the referral program. For each referred user you send which deposits 0.2BTC with Bybit, you will get a $10 trading bonus.

If you want to take part in the referral program then you will need to get your code. You can either do this as a unique code that your referrals will use on signup or you can give them your referral link. You can share this link online or on your social media channels.

Bybit Referral Link
Getting Your Bybit Referral Link
This can be relatively attractive if you can refer friends making a small amount of one time deposits but if you are looking to refer many more traders who usually do large trading volumes then you are perhaps better suited to signup for the Bybit affiliate program.

This will reward you with a percentage of trading profits that are generated by your traders. This is set at up to 30% of the trading commission that your referrals generate. This is more than the 20% commission that they give at BitMEX.

Moreover, this affiliate structure has different tiers to it. Not only will you get 30% of the commissions that your direct referral generates but you will also get 10% on their affiliate commissions.

Note ✍️: You have to apply to be an affiliate at Bybit. This is in order to verify that you will be promoting their services in a legitimate way. You can register for this here.
You cannot take part in both the referral program and the affiliate program so you have to choose wisely amoung the two.

Trading Competitions
One more thing that we found really quite interesting about the Bybit exchange is their trading competitions. These are held on an ad-hoc basis and they allow traders to go head to head.

A number of these have already been held this year but some of the most exciting that we have seen is their "are you a master" trading competition. This ran from April to May and Bybit was giving away up to $6,200 in BTC to their traders.

Local Competitions 🌎: To targt those traders who speak a specific language or are in a specific region, Bybit has local competitions. They have recently run the Korea & Japan competition
Another really interesting competition that was run in August of 2019 was their EOS global trading competition. This involved several teams battling it out for up to $60k in prizes. Team captains were chosen and they could build a team of between 10 - 200 members.

Of course, Bybit is not just holding these competitions to be charitable. These competitions encourage trading volume on their platform which gets them fees. So you should take that into account when funding to trade on these.

Areas for Improvement
While we were generally impressed with Bybit, there are a few things that we think warrant improvement and deserve mention.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, they have a limited offer when it comes to cryptocurrency assets. While they plan do plan to release more assets in the coming months, currently you can only trade 4 crypto assets. This could make it difficult for them to compete with the larger crypto exchanges which are starting to offer leveraged trading.

We also think it would be more beneficial to the trader if they were slightly more generous with their testnet funds. The faucet funds that are released are too small to get a proper sense of the trading parameters.

Lastly, although their futures instruments are some of the best in the industry, they still don't offer any option type contracts. This means that they cannot accommodate traders who would like to trade these type of derivative instruments. Perhaps this is something that they could eventually release.

Conclusion
We have found Bybit to be user friendly exchange with strong technology, reasonable fees and a relatively intuitive user interface. We are also glad to see that they have also developed an insurance fund to manage market risk.

They are well positioned to offer an alternative to the status quo in the crypto derivatives market. In fact, the order book liquidity on Bybit has recently exceeded that of Deribit.

While there were things that we thought warranted improvement, these are relatively easy to implement. The exchange is still new and there is no doubt many improvements are in their pipeline.

So, should you use Bybit?

We encourage you to do your own research but on the face of it, Bybit appears to be an attractive exchange that ticks most of our boxes.

Bitcoin


TOMRA Mining Test Center, Germany|2:06

Bitcoin

Merge mining in the coinbase scriptsig.
The other location for the commitment hash is the coinbase scriptsig, the specification for this type of merge mining is outlined here . This scheme describes a methodology for embedding a merkle root of multiple alternative chain commitments into the coinbase scriptsig. This system therefore saves blockspace by avoiding the need for multiple commitment hashes in the event of multiple merged mined chains. Namecoin, the first merged mined coin and the first alternative coin after Bitcoin, uses this scheme.
As above, we scanned the entire Bitcoin blockchain from 2009 to October 2020, looking for evidence for this type of merge mining. As Figure 4 below illustrates, based on our analysis, merge mining using this scheme appears to have started towards the end of 2011. Adoption then picked up quite quickly towards around 75% of the hashrate, before falling to near zero in the 2016 period. Since then adoption of this merge mining scheme has picked up again and now stands at around 85%.
Figure 4 - Proportion of Bitcoin blocks with auxiliary proof of work in the coinbase scriptsig (Average over 1,000 block periods)
As for the significant changes in the popularity of this merge mining scheme across Bitcoin's history, we are unable to provide concise explanations. It may relate to various software bugs in Namecoin which may have caused declines in adoption by the miners in various periods or by changes in the popularity of various mining pools over time. Figure 5 below shows the price of Namecoin over the period, which seems to correlate with usage of this merge mining scheme to some extent, this may also partly explain the changes in adoption by the Bitcoin miners. The recovery in 2017 may therefore be driven by the ICO price bubble, combined with the release of Namecoin Core, which is based on current Bitcoin Core (rather than a very old version of Bitcoin), which may have made merge mining easier.
Figure 5 - Namecoin price (US$)
As Figure 6 below illustrates, in the last few years most of the mining pools have adopted this merge mining scheme. The only significant outliers among the major pools are Antpool, which at 71% has lower adoption than its peers and BitFury, which never seemed to adopt the scheme.
Figure 6 - Percentage of merge mining commitments in the coinbase scriptsig (Data since block 500,000)
We were surprised to discover how popular merge mining has become among Bitcoin miners in recent years. In particular how miners are not only using one scheme, but adopting multiple systems and potentially using multiple pieces of software, which could in theory go wrong and cause issues. Each coinbase transaction contains commitment hashes to many alternative blockchain systems, sometimes as many as four or five. Given the high level of adoption among Bitcoin miners, this could cause additional security concerns to some. For example, complex or resource intensive merge mining schemes, which miners may need to run in order to remain economically competitive, could increase mining centralisation pressure. In addition to this, it is possible that bugs or chain re-organisations in these alternative blockchains could cause issues for the main chain, however, as long as software systems are implemented well, this risk should be minimal.
The blind merge mining schemes mentioned above appear to mitigate away most of these security risks and therefore adoption of these newer systems may be desirable. However, it is unclear if there is any significant incentive to upgrade to these blind systems. At least for now, we have seen no evidence these alternative merge mined chains make up a significant proportion of block rewards, therefore it is likely the security risks associated with merge mining are somewhat limited in practise. At the same time we have not seen any evidence that merge mining is causing problems for Bitcoin. However, it is worth carefully monitoring the situation, in our view.
Merged Mining On the Bitcoin Blockchain: What Is The Hype About?
On Nov. 2, 2020, a report by BitMEX highlighted the growing trend of merged mining on the Bitcoin blockchain. The exchange noted that about 90% of the BTC hash rate currently engages in the mining method.
The surprising popularity in merged mining in recent years means that BTC miners are not only using one scheme but adopting multiple systems and potentially using numerous pieces of software.
The merged mining process essentially incorporates a practice of using the work done for a parent blockchain on other child blockchains by implementing auxiliary proof-of-work (AuxPoW).
It also enables several projects to leverage existing computational resources on one resilient network other than running disjointed systems for separate blockchains.
The auxiliary proof-of-work applies as assurance on multiple systems, where the child chain inherits some of the parent chain's security characteristics.
Typically, there are two theoretical types of merged mining, namely regular and blind. Bitcoin miners are involved with regular merged mining, where the network incentivizes them to check the validity of blocks in both chains and get rewards in the native token of each chain.
On the other hand, any individual with computing resources can conduct blind merged mining; these third party agents are rewarded in BTC for the work and then pay transaction fees in BTC to the miners.
Benefits of Merged Mining.
Merged mining is quickly turning into one of the most discussed topics among stakeholders in the Bitcoin network. The practice holds great potential in helping the BTC blockchain scale more sustainably .
It can help reduce competition for miners among Blockchain projects by enabling them to deploy the same resources to diverse projects.
Furthermore, the practice could help mitigate the risk of a 51% attack in new blockchains, which can entice BTC miners with the lure of extra revenue.
It thus benefits miners on the Bitcoin network serving as the parent chain while also rewarding the miners that secure the network. It also offers a win-win scenario for the auxiliary chains that tap the established BTC network to drive their projects' success.
Interestingly, Bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto had outlined the idea of the mining method in a post on BitcoinTalk many years ago, proving that the inventor was way ahead of his time.
It Could Increase Mining Rewards.
In a July 2019 report , Binance Research examined the Dogecoin project, hailed as one of the most prominent merged mining examples.
The blockchain project integrated merged mining with Litecoin in 2014, resulting in a 1,500% spike in the coin's mining hash rate. As of July 2019, Dogecoin derived almost 90% of its total hash rate from LTC mining pools.
The Binance report noted that this mining could increase mining rewards following block reward halvings in both the BTC and LTC networks.
One potential shortcoming of merged mining, as per the Binance report, is that miners may not be incentivized to support the child blockchain due to additional operations expenses.
Merged mining simply means the process of mining two or more cryptocurrencies concurrently using the same mining resources without impacting on the overall mining performance on the Blockchain of either coin. Merged mining is one of the burning topics among stakeholders in the Bitcoin ECOSystem because it could potentially solve some of the biggest scalability challenges of the cryptocurrency.
Interestingly, Satoshi Nakamoto had earlier outlined the idea of merged mining about a decade ago in a post on BitcoinTalk. In his words, " I think it would be possible for BitDNS to be a completely separate network and separate blockchain, yet share CPU power with Bitcoin. The only overlap is to make it so miners can search for proof-of-work for both networks simultaneously ."
Satoshi was a person way ahead of the times and now the Blockchain industry is starting to experiment with the idea. This piece examines the core features of merged mining to establish its potential impact in helping the Bitcoin network scale sustainably from a trader and investor POV.Here's how Merged mining potentially improves the Bitcoin network.
Merged mining allows blockchain projects to leverage existing computational resources on a single robust and resilient network instead of running small fragmented networks in silos for individual projects. The biggest security concern surrounding Blockchain technology especially in projects running the Proof-of-Work consensus is the risk of the 51% attack.
A 51% attack occurs when a malicious player succeeds in owning enough hashing power that gives them the ability to control a Blockchain. Blockchains are typically run on decentralized nodes but the decentralization could be lost in an instant if someone manages to control more than half of the nodes in a network.
Smaller blockchains are always at risk of such attacks and the risk often posses the classic chicken and egg dilemma for innovators. Investors won't back a small blockchain because it is at risk of chain integrity attacks and the lack of investor funding makes it add to invest in resources that make the network ECOSystem attractive enough for other stakeholders such as developers and miners.
With merge mining, smaller blockchain projects use an Auxiliary Proof-of-Work in which each Blockchain trusts the other Blockchain's work and accept such work in the confirmation of transactions, verification of data, and mining new blocks. Hence, either the parent chain or the auxiliary chain can solve the cryptographic problem to find a solution and add the block depending on the difficulty level at which the miner solves the hash.
Blockchain projects can attract Bitcoin miners with the lure of additional revenue streams without an increase in operational costs. The Bitcoin miners will in exchange deploy their mining resources to securing the auxiliary chains to provide the new projects. In the final analysis, merge mining provides a win-win-win situation for the Bitcoin network serving as the parent chain, the miners that secure the network, and the auxiliary chains that piggybacking on an established network to drive the success of their project.
Potential downsides to merged mining.
One of the major criticisms of merged mining is that it could expose the parent Blockchain to bloat from the auxiliary chains. Even though parent chains are technical independent of auxiliary chains, parent chains will still need to run the coin daemons of the auxiliary chains in the background. Hence, if such chains become abandoned (as some crypto projects eventually are), the parent chain might be bloated by the outdated and buggy chains taking up disk space, CPU cycles, bandwidth, and memory space.
Secondly, while merged mining doesn't necessarily require additional computing power, it requires more maintenance effort because mining pools need to deal with 2X more connections and 2X more distribution channels. Hence, there's always the risk that miners will go rogue if the vision of the network is not properly aligned with the incentive for miners.
Does Merged mining move the needle for Bitcoin traders and investors?
From a cryptocurrency trading or investment standpoint, merged mining doesn't provide any direct utilitarian value. Bitcoin traders and investors typically do not have any reasons to be concerned with technical details such as Bitcoin mining fees, Latency, Maximum Throughput or Cost per Confirmed Transaction.
Nonetheless, your understanding of how merged mining works when combined with other information such as the long-term scalability of Bitcoin could help you form a more informed opinion about the prospects of cryptocurrencies in the grand scheme of things.
Also, traders and investors need to understand that some crypto companies might overemphasize their merged mining with Bitcoin in the future. They'll leverage every available resource possible to suggest that they are endorsed by Bitcoin just to hype their project and pump the price of their tokens.
For instance, Dogecoin has integrated merged mining with Litecoin over the last few years. Yet, the merged mining hasn't done anything to save the Dogecoin token from falling more than 50% in the last one year whereas Litecoin has only lost 2.69% in the same period as seen in the chart above. Merged mining doesn't require any activity from the parent chain; in fact, it doesn't even require the knowledge of the parent chain.
Hence, the performance of the coin of an auxiliary chain should be analyzed in terms of its market fundamentals, technical analysis, and tokenomics because the performance of the token of the main chain doesn't have much effect on the performance of the tokens on the auxiliary chains.
Merged mining reduces the competition for miners among Blockchain projects by allowing miners to deploy the same resources to different projects. Also, it could mitigate the risk of a 51% attack in new fledging blockchains and further enhance the development of new crypto projects that are moving the world closer towards the mass-market adoption of cryptocurrencies. From a trading standpoint, the announcement of a decision to pursue merged mining could make the price of a token jump even though such a bounce may not necessarily be sustained.

Bitcoin

What is Merged Mining: Mine Two Cryptos at the Same Time.
What is merged mining?
Merged mining is a process of mining two cryptocurrencies with a same algorithm simultaneously. This allows the miner to direct his hashing power into mining two cryptocurrencies at once, resulting in higher hash rates for both of them. As the miner contributes to the total hash rate of both blockchains, he contributes to making both networks more secure.
How Does Merged Mining Increase Security.
In short, a cryptocurrency can suffer from a 51% attack. A 51% attack is an event where outside malicious players find an exploit or collect enough hashing power to take over a blockchain. Such attacks aren't a problem with big cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The hash rate these major coins clock is so high that it's impossible for one single entity (or even a group of them) to band together and perform a 51% attack against their network.
With a smaller currency, these attacks become a real issue. A coin that has low hash rate can be taken over with not that much hash power. If the malicious player manages to take over such a network, he can exploit it and make it "dance to his tune". With such a takeover, the attacker can censor certain transactions, exclude other miners from reaping mining rewards or perform double spending (a digital equivalent of counterfeit).
Merged mining allows miners to borrow their hash power to these weaker cryptocurrencies. With this process, also known as Auxiliary Proof-of-Work , both cryptocurrencies can at the same time enjoy the benefits of having their hash rate increased, benefits which include the increased security. This method was first used by Namecoin in 2011, with Bitcoin as the parent cryptocurrency.
How Does Merged Mining Work.
The process of setting up and performing merged mining is somewhat complicated. To start with merged mining, you will need to find two cryptocurrencies that have the same hashing algorithms. SHA-256, Scrypt, Equihash are just some of the most popular PoW algorithms out there currently used by major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Zcash, etc. Popular merged mining pairings include:
Bitcoin and Namecoin Litecoin and Dogecoin Bitcoin and Elastos.
More technically speaking, Auxiliary Proof-of-Work (POW) is the relationship between two blockchains where one trusts the other's work and accepts AuxPOW blocks. The process itself has two blockchains and each of them has its own name:
The Auxiliary blockchain is the one that will be accepting the work of the other blockchain. Therefore, the auxiliary chain will need to go through additional development and adjustments before it becomes ready to take part in merged mining.
The Parent blockchain will be the one where actual mining will be performed. In this relationship, only the auxiliary blockchain needs to be aware of the "auxiliary PoW logic"; the parent blockchain has valid blocks so it doesn't need to be aware of said logic.
First step of the process of merged mining requires assembling a transaction set (a block) for both blockchains. Both chains have different difficulty levels, where the parent chain levels are usually much higher than the auxiliary chain. For the parent chain, there is almost no difference between a block mined the regular way and a block mined as part of a merged coin mining process. That's why there is no need to modify the code of the daemon (also called full-node, or client) of the parent blockchain. For the auxiliary chain, a block mined the normal way (i.e a regular block ) will be accepted with the original code. However, a block mined as a part of a merged coin mining process (i.e a modified block ) will require a modification of the code of the AUX daemon.
The key to understand merged mining is that a modified block in the AUX chain will not look valid to an AUX daemon that only knows how to process regular blocks. To accept a modified block, the AUX daemon must rely on some API calls to the PRT chain. The AUX daemon needs to make sure that:
the modified block contains a hash of a valid block on the PRT chain this PRT valid block itself contains a hash to the current AUX block header.
The auxiliary blockchains Merkle root is inserted into the extra nonce section of the parent blockchain - i.e. Bitcoin or Litecoin with Dogecoin and Namecoin as the auxiliary chain. In simpler terms, the parent chain contains the standard transactions plus a transaction with the hash that connects to the auxiliary chain block. Since the information of one chain's set of hashes has been incorporated into a part of the other blockchain then the proof of work can be achieved if a solution with a specific difficulty has been performed.
From here, the mining can begin. Two scenarios can unfold:
The parent chain can find the solution and add the block.
If a miner solves the hash at the parent difficulty level, a parent block is assembled and sent to the parent network. The auxiliary hash does nothing and the parent network ignores it. The parent hash that was solved has a higher difficulty; as you also mine on the auxiliary chain, you will assemble an auxiliary block and receive mining rewards in auxiliary blockchain coins as well.
The auxiliary chain can find the solution and add the block.
If a miner solves the hash at the auxiliary difficulty level, a auxiliary block is assembled. It includes the auxiliary transaction set, the auxiliary block header, the parent block header and the hash of the rest of the transactions in the parent block. This entire "mess" is then submitted to the auxiliary system. The auxiliary system, supporting merged mining, accepts this as proof of work because it contains work that must have been done after the block header and auxiliary transaction set was built. As a reward for his work, the miner receives auxiliary chain coins.
In short, blocks will be produced on both chains if the parent chain hash is solved; on the other hand, single block will be produced on the auxiliary chain if the auxiliary chain hash is solved. The two hash chains remain fully independent. The parent chain elements that go in the auxiliary chain block are basically ignored and only used to validate the proof of work. The bloat of the auxiliary chain network is minimal and is represented in some blocks on it having an extra block header and an extra hash added to them.
There are many positive things that come with merge mining:
Increased auxiliary blockchain security attracts additional investors.
Tying themselves to a parent chain gives auxiliary chains access to extra hash power that keeps them safe from 51% attacks. A safer coin is immediately more attractive to potential investors. Perhaps the best example of this was seen with Dogecoin, whose market capitalization almost doubled after the coin announced a switch to merge mining with Litecoin.
Computing power and electricity is saved, profitability is increased.
Merge mining is a process where a miner solves two hash functions simultaneously. A miner is motivated to use his resources to mine as much coin as possible. Having two coins mined for the price of one power/electricity expenditure helps miners save up resources while providing the same amounts of hash power to both networks. It also gives them an ability to earn more for doing the same work, which is always a bonus and a good motivator to get into merge mining.
The parent chain doesn't suffer.
No additional work is added to the parent chain. It only needs to deal with the auxiliary chain hashes that are added through the connecting transaction, which requires a miniscule amount of resources.
Lesser competition.
Coins have to compete for miners. When a miner decides he wants to mine one cryptocurrency, other currencies lose out. Even when you have a dominant/lesser cryptocurrency in terms of hashrate, there is still a small chance that one will lose out to the other. Merged mining eliminates this possibility by making it so that each coin can thrive on its own merits and not have to compete for miners to survive.
Some people don't agree with merge mining though as it isn't completely free of costs. To start performing merge mining the miner will need to purchase and manage extra bandwidth and storage. This isn't a problem for major mining pools that have the resources to expand their networks; however smaller operators might struggle to manage more chains at once. There is also the problem of the auxiliary chain having to perform a hard fork to become merge mining capable.
Merge mining increases the already large risk of mining centralization, as large mining pools group together to share profits from it while running high-end supercomputers against which regular individuals cannot compete with their commercial-grade hardware.
Merge mining exacerbates this issue, as the additional investment required to set it up means that fewer and fewer independent nodes are capable of adjusting to it. Additionally, with the increase of external hash power that comes with merged mining, mining difficulty increases and mining payouts become smaller for the auxiliary chain-focused individual nodes. In the long run, these nodes will drop out, leaving the mining centralized among the few powerful mining pools.
There are many projects out there that have embarked on the merge mining adventure, looking to secure their chains and potentially attract additional interest for their coins that way. Namecoin was one of the first ones to do so. This Bitcoin fork decided to stay on the SHA 256 algorithm which enabled the mining connection in the first place. Dogecoin was the next major cryptocurrency to take this route.
The decision to enable merge mining with Litecoin was quite controversial, as some parts of the community were against it. You can find the original Reddit discussion thread here. Lesser known projects like FantomCoin and Elastos have also embarked on merge mining routes, looking to benefit from being mined alongside Monero and Bitcoin respectively. Ultimately, merge mining has its positives and negatives and it remains a popular method of protecting a young vulnerable currency from early pains like 51% attacks.

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BITCOIN MINING ATTACK! Shadow Mining, Chain Reorg, Difficulty and 51% Attack - Programmer explains|10:56

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We should expect to see more projects embrace it in the near future.
RSK: The Most Profitable Merged Mining Platform on Bitcoin.
The idea behind the creation of RSK is to give Bitcoin´s blockchain, smart contract functionalities .
It is one of the most interesting platforms to develop smart contracts as it combines Bitcoin´s network security with the ease of use of Solidity. To power its system, Rootstock uses merged mining. Wondering what merged mining is all about? Let´s get started!
Brief Overview of Proof-of-Work.
Let's quickly summarize proof-of-work (POW) before going any further.
The miners solve cryptographic puzzles to "mine" a block in order to add to the blockchain. This process requires an immense amount of energy and computational usage. The puzzles have been designed in a way that makes it hard and taxing on the system. When a miner solves the puzzle, they present their block to the network for verification.
Mining in Bitcoin's ECOSystem is a tough process. This is why miners pool their resources and hashrate together to create "mining pools." Mining pools follow the client-server architecture where the miners (the clients) connect to the poolserver (the server). The poolserver runs one of the mining pool server software. Some common softwares are CKpool, BTCpool, and Eloipool.
If you want to gain a more in-depth look into POW then check out this guide . For now, let's get deeper into merged mining.
Merged mining is a mechanism that allows different cryptocurrencies, that use the same algorithm, to be mined together. So, in this case, since both Bitcoin and RSK are based on the SHA-256 algorithm, they can be mined together via merged mining. The two biggest advantages of merged mining are:
Greatly reducing the investment costs for miners since they won't need to buy brand new equipment. Cryptocurrencies with lower hashrate can gain additional hashing power by piggybacking off a cryptocurrency with higher hashrate. Miners can also earn extra rewards by maintaining the secondary chain.
Namecoin was the first cryptocurrency to merge-mine with Bitcoin. Let's see an overview of how the merge-mining process works:
The block id from the secondary blockchain is embedded in the block of the primary blockchain. This block id is the cryptographic hash of a block in the secondary chain. This secondary block hash is prefixed by a merge-mining "tag." This tag is can be some short descriptive text or magic bytes. To avoid confusion, a block in the primary chain cannot be associated with more than one block of the secondary chain. To ensure the overall security of merged mining, it must be more difficult to create a primary-blockchain block that can be associated with two blocks from the same secondary blockchain than to mine two different primary-blockchain blocks, one for each association, at the difficulty of the secondary blockchain.
In RSK-Bitcoin case, the RSK block difficulty compares to 70-bit security, while Bitcoin difficulty compares to 74 bits.
Bitcoin mining pools usually include a reference to RSK's block in every mining job they deliver to the miners. Every time the miners find a solution, it is compared to both the Bitcoin and RSK difficulties. Following that, there are three possible outcomes:
The solution satisfies Bitcoin network difficulty. The block is assembled and sent to the network. The Bitcoin network will also propagate RSK's merged mining reference. Since the RSK difficulty is lower than Bitcoin, this solution will work for RSK. The solution satisfies RSK but not Bitcoin. The solution will be submitted to the RSK network and not to the Bitcoin network. The solution doesn't satisfy any of the difficulty requirements .
Whatever be the case, the solution that is finally submitted to RSK allows the node to build an SPV proof. If the proof is valid, it is included as part of the block that will be sent to the network.
Looking deeper into Merged Mining.
A bitcoin header works like a POW proxy in merged mining. The RSK blockchain interprets the POW of the Bitcoin block header. It searches for the tag within the block to know which RSK chain block is supposed to be linked to it. Also, keep in mind that the RSK blockchain doesn't need a full Bitcoin block to validate the POW of the Bitcoin header and associate it with the corresponding RSK header. A simple SPV proof will be enough to establish this relationship. We will explore SPV proofs more in a bit. For now, let's get a better understanding of the RSK tag.
The current format of the RSK tag is: RSKBLOCK:RskBlockHeaderHash.
"RSKBLOCK:" is an ASCII string consisting of the bytes: 52 53 4b 42 4c 4f 43 4b 3a. RskBlockHeaderHash is the Keccak hash digest of the RSK Block header in binary format, without the merged mining fields, which are filled after the PoW is solved.
While not mandatory, an RSK tag should be included after the OP_RETURN OP_PUSHDATA1 opcodes in an output script. This helps prevent spamming the Bitcoin UTXO.
The RskBlockHeaderHash is created by the standard RSK node (rskj daemon). The poolserver plugin polls the rskj daemon and maintains the latest RskBlockHeaderHash value to provide to the poolserver.
Along with these, the following additional restrictions may apply:
The number of bytes following the RskBlockHeaderHash, up to the end of the coinbase transaction, must be lower than or equal to 128 bytes. The binary string "RSKBLOCK:" (52 53 4b 42 4c 4f 43 4b 3a) must not be included in the trailing raw bytes. If the RSK tag is located in a non-last output script, then there may be some chance of it appearing in the bytes of the next output. This is why it is highly recommended to use the last output script for the RSK tag. If the RSK tag is located in the coinbase field, then there is a chance that "RSKBLOCK:" may appear in the coinbase field.
What are SPV proofs?
As mentioned above, the association between the secondary RSK blockchain and the primary Bitcoin blockchain can be established by an SPV proof. SPV proof mainly comprises of Merkle tree membership proofs.
The blue boxes represent the information that is included in the SPV proof and transmitted along the RSK block. Due to the restrictions placed by the trailing bytes, RSK full node will be creating a compressed version of the SPV proof which will consist of:
The Bitcoin block header (80 bytes). A Merkle Branch to the Coinbase transaction (approximately 320 bytes). A mid-state of SHA-256 consuming the head of the coinbase transaction (32 bytes). A 64-byte aligned chunk consists of a trail of the coinbase transaction and the RSK tag (max 169 bytes). Presently, the maximum size of an SPV merge-mining proof is 780 bytes.
The poolserver software can send to the rskj daemon the full block or this SPV proof. If rskj receives a block, it will parse it and extract the necessary fields to build the SPV proof.
Merged Mining Difficulty.
Before going further, let's understand what difficulty means and why this concept was introduced in the first place. Bitcoin, as you may know, has a hard cap of 21 million coins. As more miners entered the space, it needed to do something to prevent them from pumping all the coins out into the ECOSystem.
To prevent the supply of bitcoins from going out of hand and to make it a more sustainable model, Satoshi Nakamoto integrated difficulty mechanism. As more and more blocks get mined, the difficulty of the cryptographic puzzles increases exponentially. Basically, the more bitcoins you mine out, the more difficult the process of mining becomes.
Now that you know what it means consider this - the difficulty of the RSK chain is much lower than the difficulty of Bitcoin. Internally, the difficulty is translated into a "target," which is inversely proportional to the difficulty. The target is a 256-bit unsigned integer.
Approximate targets for merged mined blockchain, on the same day. RSK has a higher target because blocks are 20 times more frequent.
This is the reason why a block header that solves the RSK POW puzzle may not be accepted by the Bitcoin network, since it may not satisfy its difficulty. So, the question to ask here is, how can a mining pool detect an RSK block if they are always looking out for a Bitcoin block? Well, it turns out that the miners are always looking to solve blocks at lower difficulty anyway. These intermediate, low difficulty blocks are called "shares" and are required by the poolserver for accounting. Many miners in the pools will actively create more shares between real solutions to provide higher granularity for accounting miners' contributions.
Here are some more things to keep in mind about shares:
The shares are transmitted to the poolserver pretty regularly. The server can accordingly split future earnings between the involved miners, depending upon their hashing contribution. The difficulty of the Bitcoin blocks can sometimes drop, depending on the overall hashing power of the system. This is why a share is transmitted within the system because it may be the solution to the current Bitcoin POW puzzle. If the share's hash digest is lower than Bitcoin's current target, then it gets forwarded to the bitcoind daemon, which spreads it over the network. Different secondary blockchains may have different difficulties. This is why a merged mined capable poolserver must compare the target of the share to all the targets of the secondary blockchains that it supports. So if the share satisfies RSK's target then the corresponding block is deemed valid to the RSK network.

Bitcoin

RSK Merged Mining Security.
A rational miner in RSK's merged mining mechanism will need to conduct only 2^69 operations (the current difficulty of RSK). An irrational attacker will need to compute as much as 2^80 hash operations in less than 30 seconds to inflict any sort of damage to the system. In order to conduct this attack, this irrational attacker will have to invest in 2000 times more hardware than the rational miner. The investment would amount to around five trillion dollars.
However, there is one more thing to consider here. The attacker can only produce one or more blocks that share the POW for the same RSK block height. If that's the case, then it's just a waste of 5 trillion dollars at the end of the day.
Hypothetical SHA256 vulnerability.
RSK uses a non-standard cryptographic trick to compress the generation transaction. RSK only transmits the tail instead of the full transaction by hashing from the midstate of the Merkle-Damgård construction. However, this trick assumes the SHA256 algorithm to be completely resistant to "freestart collision." According to RSK's setup, the SHA256 needs to be at least as secure as brute-forcing 80 bits.
No freestart collision has been found in SHA256, and the best results correspond to finding semi-free-start collisions in a reduced-round version of SHA256 (38 of the 64 rounds, at the cost of 2^65 operations).
So far, the algorithm has been deemed safe for use. However, if such an attack is discovered, RSK can be protected by a network upgrade. In that case, RSK will not use the cryptographic compression trick. This will, however, lead to a small increase in block size.
NOTE: If SHA256 does suffer from a free-start collision attack, it would render it completely useless. This will be extremely problematic from Bitcoin as well.
Also, RSK's 1.0.0 release provides 80-bit security against possible tag collisions. An 80-bit collision attack is theoretically, economically and computationally irrational.
Computational POV : An attack of this magnitude will need an unrealistic amount of memory. Also, the CPU cost of the collision attack is more than 2000 times higher than the cost of solving the RSK PoW puzzle (69 vs. 80 bits). Theoretical POV: RSK's DECOR+ consensus the colliding blocks would share the block reward, so there is no benefit to find new siblings of past blocks if the past block reward is approximately equal to the reward of a new block. What this essentially means is that the attacker would be mainly competing with themselves. Economic POV : An honest merged miner earns Bitcoin transaction fees, so merged mining is subsidized by Bitcoin. An attacker, on the other hand, will have to pay the full cost of the collision attack. This means that any attack on the POW linkage is not cost-efficient.
According to RSK, "We think the tag is secure for the next 20 years, even considering a breakthrough in computing efficiency. However, if computing trends radically change, a future network upgrade could easily expand the size of the hash to the full 32 bytes."
RSK is the most profitable option for merged mining on Bitcoin. The RSK team has developed several fully working plugins for several pool implementations such as CoiniumServ, CKpool, BTCpool, and Eloipool. Other pools have implemented their own plugins. They personally recommend CKpool over other mining pool software as it is appropriately optimized. If you are a mining pool that wants to get started, just follow the instructions on the RSK merged mining section.

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Nvidia Posts Record Q3 Earnings, Sales of GPUs to Crypto Miners Reach $175 Million.
Nvidia released its earnings for the third fiscal quarter of 2021 this week, showing better-than-expected results, driven by sales of its graphics processing unit (GPU) chips. The firm reported graphics segment revenue of $2.79 billion for the quarter, beating analyst estimates of $2.1 billion.
Within the graphics segment also falls the gaming division. Nvidia said that its new line of graphics cards based on a new technology called Ampere drew strong interest from computer and videogame console developers. For example, one of the new models, the Geforce RTX 3080, went on sale in September and sold out immediately.
Nvidia said gaming revenue climbed 37% year-on-year to $2.27 billion, a record for the company.
The graphics processing units produced by Nvidia are mainly used in video game consoles and graphics cards but they have also become popular with cryptocurrency miners, particularly those extracting coins like ethereum (ETH), monero (XMR), and zcash (ZEC).
For the quarter in review, Nvidia sold at least $175 million worth of new generation GPUs to ethereum miners, helping the outperformance, according to a note from RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves. The analyst had guided sales to miners to come in at $150 million for the quarter.
Steves noted that the upcoming network upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain, also known as Ethereum 2.0, which is scheduled to take place sometime in December, demands that miners switch over to more efficient mining hardware. Nvidia's new Ampere GPU chips are thought to meet that need.
However, GPUs are no longer effective for mining bitcoin (BTC), which has moved on to more efficient application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners.
Overall, Nvidia reported revenue of $4.73 billion for the quarter, up 57% from a year earlier. Analysts expected revenues of $4.41 billion. The company revealed that it continues to face supply bottlenecks for its chips and cards in the fiscal fourth quarter, which ends in January.
It also said its acquisition of British chip designer ARM from Japanese conglomerate Softbank is expected to be completed by the first quarter of 2022.
Shares of Nvidia fell 0.92% to $532.65 in Nasdaq stock market trading on Friday. Over the past 52 weeks, the stock has reached a high of $589.07 and a low of $180.68.
What do you think about Nvidia's rising sales of graphics processing units to crypto miners? Let us know in the comments section below.
Nvidia Mining GPU to Be Launched Sooner Than Expected, Reports.
New Reports suggest that Nvidia is going to launch a mining GPU sooner than previously expected. The graphics unit comes with features that cryptocurrency miners will find attractive. According to leaked specifications, the Inno3D card is based on the gaming GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.
New Card Good for Mining Ethash Coins.
The leading manufacturer of video processing hardware Nvidia is going to launch a dedicated mining graphics card, according to new media reports. Preliminary specifications suggest that the Inno3D model is be based on GeForce GTX 1080 Ti. It is said to be a cutdown clone of the gaming card, but will feature customization targeted at cryptocurrency miners.
The upcoming lineup will be powered by a version of the older "Pascal" chips, which were installed in GTX 1080 Ti and Titan-branded cards. Unlike the gaming products, the mining card will offer custom configuration for the memory and faster performance, but it won't have a video output.
The card uses Inno3D's Twin X2 cooler design, with two fans and five heat pipes. No bracket for attaching to a mining frame is seen on leaked pictures, although according to Crypto Mining Blog , a standard PC bracket will be provided as an accessory.
The P102-100 GPUs are similar to Nvidia's P104-100 cards. They are equipped with CUDA cores 3200, with base clock at 1582 MHz. The physical memory is 5 GB in size, GDDR5X type, with 320-bit interface and 11 Gbps clock. The memory bandwidth is 400 GB/s. They come with PCIe Gen1 x4 bus support and two 8-pin PCI-E connectors. The maximum thermal design power is 250 Watt.
P102-100 will offer the following hashrates: ETH.
879 hs. The data provided by Inno3D is for reference only. The GPUs are optimized for mining Ethash coins. Currently, there is no information about the price of the new graphics card.
Shifting Winds, Changing Expectations.
Strong sales in the crypto segment last year have forced major manufacturers to take measures to adapt to growing market demand. It has been reported that more than 3 million graphics cards were bought by cryptocurrency miners in 2017, with sales reaching $776 million. Advanced Micro Systems (AMD) announced intentions to increase production. It has been rumored that Nvidia was preparing to offer a new "Turing" card dedicated for mining applications.
More recent reports, however, suggest that companies fear decreasing demand, caused by market and regulatory risks. Tech sites announced Nvidia had decided to postpone the launch of "Turing" until at least July, and might even scrap plans to offer a mining GPU. AMD has also shared concerns of dropping card sales in 2018. Then, winds shifted again, with information about a new player entering the mining GPU market. Hardware manufacturer Asrock is expected to join the competition in April. The company may introduce its own graphics processing unit, which will be based on AMD chips.
Inno3D will offer crypto miners another specialized product sooner than previously expected. Last year Nvidia released two graphics cards dedicated for mining. P106-100 and the P104-100, based on the previous-generation "Pascal" design, were sold through other companies, including Inno3D. Using "Pascal" chips, P102-100 cards may be offered as a cheaper alternative to the "Turing" cards, which should be based on the new Volta architecture.
Do you think reports of new dedicated mining GPUs hitting the market indicate optimistic expectations for the crypto sector? Share your opinions in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Crypto Mining Blog.
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AMD Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800XT - the first test in the mining of Ethereum cryptocurrency.
Along with the start of sales of new AMD video cards - Radeon RX 6800, RX 6800XT, the first tests of these video cards in mining the Ethereun cryptocurrency (Dagger-Hashimoto mining algorithm) became available. As expected, RDNA2 video cards are not far from the previous generation of RDNA (RX5700) in terms of performance in ETH mining. the video memory subsystem has not undergone drastic changes. The 256bit memory bus and GDDR6 are still used, which has become a little faster. The mythical Infifnity Cash, on which many pin great hopes in these tests, did not show itself in any way.
On stock settings using the Pheonix 5.2c miner, both cards showed the same hash result, which is not surprising, but different power consumption levels.
Radeon RX 6800 - 59-60Mh/s 170W.
Radeon RX 6800XT - 59-60Mh/s 240W.
It is worth noting that the latest AMD drivers for video cards have a new function Memory Timings - FAST TIMINGS , which is obviously designed to increase the performance of video cards in mining cryptocurrencies and Ethereum in particular.
Enabling this option shifts the hashrate range by 2-3Mh/s upwards (59-63Mh/s)
Opportunities for overclocking video memory in the current beta drivers are very limited - it is not possible to raise the memory frequency by more than 150MHz.
Memory +150Mhz, Fast Timings -ON.
Radeon RX 6800XT - 63-66Mh/s 250W.
The next step is to reduce GPU power consumption.
Memory +150MHZ, GPU - 550MHz (1450Mhz), Fast Timings -ON.
Radeon RX 6800XT - 63-66Mh/s 170W.
Conclusion: In the current realities, the AMD Radeon RX 6800 and RX 6800XT video cards turned out, as expected, 15% better than the previous generation in Ethereum mining, but this is on stock settings. If we take into account the rich experience of miners in fine tuning the RX 5700 (60MH/s 150W), then the advantage of the RX 6800 becomes even less obvious, especially if we take into account the difference in the price of video cards of different generations. In the near future, we may also see better mining settings for the RX 6800. First of all, this is the ability to increase the video memory frequency by more than 150MHZ and a more aggressive downvolt in the core. Do not forget about Infinty Cash, which has not yet been discounted, because mining is not limited to just one Dagger Hashimoto algorithm.
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AMD Radeon RX 6800 may be 50% faster than GeForce RTX 3090 for cryptomining.
By John Loeffler 09 November 2020.
Stock? What stock?
If the rumors are true, then the new AMD Radeon RX 6800 ( not the RX 6800XT) is 50% better at mining for cryptocurrency than the current crypto champ, the Nvidia RTX 3090.
When factoring in the associated costs of cryptocurrency mining, as explained by Videocards, the RTX 3090 can generate about $3.37/£2.63/AU$4.72 of cryptocurrency a day, or about $103/£80/AU$144 a month. The RX 6800, meanwhile, can potentially mine about $5.00/£3.90/AU$7.00 a day, or roughly $152/£118/AU$213 a month.
The rumored mining performance was initially posted - appropriately - on Chinese messaging service QQ and later reprinted on Chiphell. As of right now, this is simply a rumor so it shouldn't be taken as gospel, but it's, nonetheless, an understandably upsetting one for many.
How cryptomining could inflict stock shortages on the new Radeon RX 6800.
Like a spectre of unfettered capitalism haunting the PC gaming scene, cryptominers have been swooping in for years now and paying exorbitant prices for GPUs, which they then use 24/7 to crunch complicated math problems that then generate bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
While the crush of miners buying up GPU stock across the board has slowed since the dizzying heights of the Bitcoin boom a few years back, the demand has steadily returned. Now, with the launch of more powerful graphics cards from both Nvidia and AMD at a lower price than the previous generation cards they are replacing, it looks like the cryptominers may once again aggressively buy up stock.
Already, one of the biggest issues with the Nvidia Ampere graphics cards launch was that the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 sold out at every retailer within seconds of going on sale.
This may have been a function of bots and eBay profiteers who snatched up the cards before the PC enthusiast and gaming public could get through the checkout process.
If it turns out that the RX 6800 - which is the least expensive of the three AMD RX 6000 series cards to be announced so far - is beating out the current GPU-profitability champ when it comes to mining, it is all but guaranteed to be a prime candidate for crypto-mining-related shortages.
Fortunately, AMD seems to be anticipating this and looks to have a new GPU in the works specifically designed with cryptominers in mind. Hopefully that will give the rest of us a chance to get one of these new cards ourselves.
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For Android: 4.1 and up Guide: Bitcoin Remote Miner - Mine BTC Remotely cheats tutorial When updated: 2019-04-18 Star Rating: 4.413243 Name: Bitcoin Remote Miner - Mine BTC Remotely hack for android Extension: Apk Author: myfavoritedev File Name: get.bitcoins.for.free Current Version: 1.1 User Rating: Everyone Downloads: 10000- Version: mod, apk, unlock System: Android Type: Education.
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