One news stood up in my news feed this morning. It was about a new cryptocurrency (no, really?) aimed at (and here I'm not sure I understood properly) creating a better internet.
I perused the website at http://skycoin.net but I wasn't able to understand more than I just wrote in the paragraph above. But what I did understand is that they're planning to sell their own mining hardware.
Before running away, be advised that this mining hardware is the thing that got my attention. It's not an ASIC. It's an ARM. The same family of processors that powers Raspberry Pis, Odroids, Pine 64s and Arduinos. In other words, a very low consumption processor, initially designed for IoT (Internet of Things).
I'm not yer sure how SkyCoin will solve whatever problems they intend to solve, but I'm very interested in this new trend. I myself run a few mini-nodes on ARM processors (raspis and odroids for now) and I'm keen to go in this direction. The reason? But it's obviously, my dear Watson: electricity. Electricity and its associated cost. I think the huge mining farms we know about now in China or Iceland will become obsolete sooner than we think, and they'll be replaced by very low consumption devices, running PoS, PoB or BFT consensus engines.
For a glimpse of how the SkyCoin miners will look like, here's a screenshot from the site the-blockchain.com
And another one, from a different angle.
As you can probably see, the 8 boards used in the node aren't proprietary PCBs, but most likely some varieties of Odroids, Orange Pi or Pine (they have multiple USB ports, not needed in such a setup, and audio chips and HDMI outlets, also not needed).
Most likely, this is a prototype and if it's going to be successful, they'll start designing their own boards.
Nevertheless, I'm happy to see this trend, in which environment is finally becoming a real concern.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
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