Matrix——More Public Benefit for Crypto Mining

Bitcoin—A Great Financial Product

As news of Bitcoin price hitting 60,000 USD took financial media headlines by storm, the world was once again surprised by the growth potential of this novel financial asset. At the same time, crypto started attracting investment from mainstream financial institutions and tech visionaries (such as Elon Musk) alike. When the SEC announced it would approve Bitcoin ETFs, no one could deny anymore that Bitcoin had earned its place in mainstream institutions’ portfolios.

Picture: Bitcoin Price Chart

People call Bitcoin the greatest invention of the 21st century. This novel asset class invented by Satoshi Nakamoto has disrupted the financial sector and promises people a freer, fairer and more transparent financial life based on blockchain technology and PoW consensus mechanism.

The Original Sin of Crypto Mining

Despite being hailed as the greatest invention of the 21st century and a price skyrocketing 70 million times since its birth in January 2009, Bitcoin carries two original sins: energy waste and computing power waste.

Energy Waste

We all know that at the core of Bitcoin is the PoW consensus mechanism. This mechanism guarantees the security and fairness of blockchain networks, but this comes at the cost of energy waste.

Picture: Country Energy Consumption Compared with Bitcoin

If Bitcoin were a country, it would rank before Argentina as the 29th largest energy consumer in the world, and all the resources spent in mining could have been used for other socially beneficial causes instead.

Computing Power Waste

If we use floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) to calculate computing power, then Bitcoin mining consumed a total of 8.3×〖10〗^22 FLOPS in 2018.

Putting this in perspective, we have:

The total computing power available to Google: ~80P FLOPS = 8×〖10〗^16 FLOPS

The computing power output of 500 supercomputers: 672P FLOPS = 6.72×〖10〗^17 FLOPS

The total computing power available to the world: 1.2×〖10〗^23 FLOPS

As we can see, 70% of the world’s computing power is used for mining, and Bitcoin mining consumes a million times the computing power available to Google.

This is a huge waste because hash calculation in PoW mining is for encryption only. It guarantees Bitcoin transactions are accurate and immutable but does not create any other social value whatsoever. If this much computing power were used for scientific research, we might have already invented the artificial brain, which would be a quantum leap in science.

Controversy and Negative Impact

Although Bitcoin is getting accepted as a mainstream asset class, there are also criticisms. While Bitcoin bulls view energy wasteful mining as Bitcoin’s price anchor, bears argue that the waste is pointless and that Bitcoin doesn’t really have a price anchor. We can see this from Elon Musk’s attitude change towards Bitcoin.

Picture: Elon Musk Suspends Tesla Purchase Using Bitcoin

From Tesla buying 1.5 billion USD worth of Bitcoin to Musk announcing the suspension, merely three months have passed, and the news shocked crypto investors, causing Bitcoin price to halve in days.

Matrix Holds the Key

The issue of sustainable growth is the greatest hurdle to the rise of crypto and blockchain to the central stage of the financial world. To solve this problem once and for all, crypto enthusiasts and developers have experimented with countless solutions, and Matrix’s AI-empowered blockchain stands out as one of the most promising.

Matrix’s solution is twofold: 1. to build a PoW algorithm that can generate social value; 2. to design a consensus mechanism where only some of the miners do PoW mining.

PoW Algorithm That Creates Social Value

As security is one of the central benefits of PoW, we can’t do without an encryption algorithm. How do we guarantee the same level of security while making PoW mining useful to society? Matrix has the solution.

By adopting a PoW mechanism that integrates AI algorithms (image recognition) with hash algorithms, we can minimize energy waste and at the same time create social value with AI computing. This way, the value foundation of MAN is not only anchored by the value of the energy spent in mining but also the computing power used for AI computing. This socially beneficial way of mining is clearly ahead of the competition.

Picture: How Matrix AI Network Generates a Block

A Hybrid PoW Consensus Mechanism That Minimizes Computing Power Waste

Besides designing more socially beneficial mining algorithms, Matrix further reduces the energy consumption of mining by adopting a hybrid PoW consensus mechanism.

Hybrid PoW is essentially a combination of DPoS and PoW. Statistically speaking, election-based PoW has roughly the same long-term expected return as global full-time PoW, which is to say that the introduction of election-based PoW does not affect miners’ profits, the only concern being that the fairness of result may be compromised. This is the problem for most DPoS election mechanisms, while Matrix, through random clustering algorithms (RCA), is capable of truly random elections.

Picture: The Mechanism of RCA

With the help of RCA, Matrix is able to design a hybrid PoW that is truly fair and secure. Matrix doesn’t require all the miners in its network to do PoW mining in every mining cycle, and only nodes randomly chosen by RCA are involved in PoW computing. This way the energy consumption of mining is greatly reduced. Meanwhile, unelected miners can lease their idle computing power for other people and companies to use just like cloud computing platforms do.

Picture: Matrix’s Computing Power Output Workflow

Conclusion

Most public chains with a PoW consensus mechanism do not consider the energy waste it causes. Matrix, on the other hand, not only realizes the importance of socially beneficial mining but also has a practical way to implement it. This is especially rare.

As Matrix integrates more computing power providers including PoW-based public chains into its network, the original sins of crypto mining will become history, and by that day blockchain will truly become a powerful tool for scientific research and the development of society.