Bitmain and Elastos merge mining efforts

What merged mining means, for miners and Elastos

Bitmain is, by a sizable margin, the world's biggest cryptocurrency mining firm, designing, manufacturing and selling miners, operating some of the largest mining pools and doing a lot of the mining itself.

Elastos is a decentralised "Cyber Republic", built with an emphasis on cross-platform compatibility and ownership of digital assets, intended to give app creators more control over their creations and users more control over everything.

"We are starting an online country that will enable entrepreneurs and developers to democratically build the new internet," in the words of Elastos chief marketing officer Fay Li.

Elastos is the third coin to be joined by Bitmain in a merged mining partnership, which might be a strong vote of confidence from the mining giant.

"At Bitmain, we strive to be at the forefront of recognizing new, innovative technologies in the blockchain space as well as the cutting edge teams leading the way to mainstream adoption — Elastos is one of those projects," said Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu. "There are very few projects we have opened our community up to, and there are currently only three merged mining with Bitmain. I have an immense amount of faith in the potential impact of Elastos, which is not limited to the blockchain space alone. We look forward to continuing to be a part of the community promoting the Elastos ecosystem."

What does merged mining mean?

Pardon the alliteration.

Merged mining is essentially a way of putting mining hash power towards more than one coin at once, provided they use the same algorithm. In this case both Elastos and bitcoin, and others, all use the SHA-256 mining algorithm.

It's a technically complicated but often mutually beneficial maneuver. It brings some additional profits for the miners who take part, by paying them with both bitcoin and Elastos. This might be especially important among the tight margins of the mining world. Bitmain benefits from this with a tempting new draw card to bring miners into its pools. With Bitmain taking a cut of the profits from the pools it offers, this directly translates into more revenue for the company.

Elastos also benefits. The most significant advantages might be additional hashing power to better secure the network against 51% attacks, plus some publicity and what might be construed as a strong endorsement from an industry giant. This additional security might be especially important for Elastos, which has just gone live with its "Cyber Republic" and now needs as secure as possible an environment in which to set out and start building.

In this case, BTC will serve as the parent chain while ELA will work as the auxiliary chain. With this partnership, miners from BTC.com and AntPool can joint mine both BTC and ELA using the Auxpow consensus.

"Elastos is the first new internet infrastructure to be completed since the original launch of the world wide web thirty five years ago. We take great pride in providing a more secure internet landscape, that puts users in control of peer to peer interactions without an intermediary. These initiatives commemorate our one year anniversary, but will propel our project for many years to come," Li said.

"The accomplishments in our first year alone are indicative of Elastos' potential to make waves far beyond the blockchain space — we are on track to change the whole internet industry, its users, digital ecosystem and to create an industrial strength IOT network," said Elastos founder Rong Chen. "This is the internet of the future, where people will own their data, and connect directly and securely."

Disclosure: At the time of writing the author holds ETH, IOTA, ICX, VET, XLM, BTC, ADA

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