In the network of Ethereum, if you want to get Ethereum, you must dig mines to achieve it. At present, Ethereum also uses POW * * knowledge mechanism, but it is a little different from the POW mining of Bitcoin, and the mining difficulty of Ethereum can be adjusted. The Ethereum system has a special formula to calculate the difficulty of each subsequent block. If the verification speed of a block is faster than the previous block, the Ethereum protocol will increase the difficulty of the block. By adjusting the block difficulty, the time required to verify the block can be adjusted.

Ethereum adopts Ethash encryption algorithm. In the process of mining, it is necessary to read memory and store DAG files. Because the bandwidth of each reading is limited, and it is difficult for the existing computer technology to make a qualitative breakthrough on this issue, no matter how to improve the computing efficiency of the computer, the memory reading efficiency will not be greatly improved. So in a sense, Ethereum's Ethash encryption algorithm is "anti-ASIC".

Different encryption algorithms lead to great differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum in mining equipment and computing power.

At present, bitcoin mining equipment is mainly ASIC mining machine, which has a very high degree of specialization. The maximum computing capacity of a single mining machine reaches 1 12T/s (Shenma M30S++ mining machine), and the computing capacity of the whole network reaches139.92eh/s. ..

The main miners of Ethereum are graphic card miners and custom GPU miners, and there are few specialized ASIC miners. On the one hand, the "anti-ASIC" of mining algorithm in Ethereum raises the threshold of developing ASIC mining machine, on the other hand, because the knowledge mechanism of Ethereum will be transformed into PoS after upgrading to 2.0, the mining machine cannot continue mining.

Compared with ASIC mining machine, the computing power of graphics card mining machine is two orders of magnitude worse. At present, the computing power of the mainstream graphics card mining machine (8 cards) is about 420MH/s, the computing power of the leading customized GPU mining machine is about 500M~750M, and the computing power of the whole network of Ethereum is about 235.39 th/s.

From the time dimension of the past two years, the computing capacity of the whole network of Ethereum has grown relatively slowly.

According to the Ethernet protocol, the dynamic adjustment of the difficulty is to make the time interval for the whole network to create a new block 15 seconds, and the network creates a blockchain within 15 seconds. In this way, because the time is too fast, the synchronization of the system is greatly improved, and it is difficult for malicious participants to launch 5 1% (that is, more than half) computing power to modify historical data in such a short time.