Technical Specifications: How AI and Mining Meld Together
As previously outlined, Abelian Technology is disrupting the stagnation of crypto-based mining. The implementation of Artificial Intelligence and mining optimization was the next logical move to allow individuals and collectives to configure their personal mining needs. Additionally, they require an exchange that allows miners to partake in portfolio management easily and automatically according to their portfolio balancing needs.
Although the term Artificial Intelligence has become a sort of buzz word for advancements in the automation of things; it nonetheless is an important aspect of making certain mining operations more efficient and automated. There are several technical aspects of how Abelian Technology is approaching mining with regards to AI integration.
To begin, we must first talk about some of the necessary inputs that are needed to be analyzed in order for us to understand the context in which AI and mining can combine.
One of the most important mechanisms that facilitates mining is hardware. Notably ASIC, GPU and FPGA miners. These are three different, but increasingly debated chips that are being built to provide assorted alternative options for miners. The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a broad-based chip set that is useful in its ease of switching which coins to mine due to exogenous factors affecting price, difficulty, etc. Application Specific-integrated Chips (ASIC) are highly specialized units that are very profitable machines, but due to there over specification, they are increasingly less useful in downturns in the market as well as when more individuals use that specific unit. Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an up and coming design that is harder to initialize than the previously mentioned units, but these are looking like a viable option for miner switching automation. FPGA creates logic blocks, essentially tables full of inputs in which it then decides desirable output points. All three of these options have benefits and costs, so it is necessary to have the competency to understand and optimize all three of them.
Alongside the hardware, several intangible characteristics need to be pointed out for optimization. Electricity is among the top of that list. Everyone has read in the news about how energy intensive mining has become. On average, the need for electricity will increase in the future as problem solving becomes more difficult — all else remaining equal. GPU, ASIC and FPGA all require different levels of energy. In mining pools, the combination of different hardware will need to be considered and optimized by profitable application and switching. Other factors to consider are price and hash rate. Since hash rate is proportional to profitability, this suggests that hash rate and computation power are directly related to mining profitability.
An obvious factor in mining profitability is market price. You should always want to mine at moments of opportunity in cryptocurrency. This is usually when the price is high, or rapidly increasing. Along with price, difficulty rate is also important to account for. As a network gains more miners, the network difficulty rate increases requiring more hashing power from each-individual miner in-order-to fulfill network transactions. As a result, you begin to lose profitability as the difficulty rate increases relative to your own hashing rate. Individual miners are left with two main strategy options to remain competitive:
1. Purchase more hardware and scale their mining facility
2. Optimize their mining performance
Although most serious miners will consider both options, rapidly scaling hardware is very expensive and cost prohibitive for smaller miners. Furthermore, as individuals scale their mining infrastructure this increases network difficulty which in-turn reduces net-profit for miners on the network as-a-whole. Alternatively, focusing on performance optimization can help miners increase profitability with their existing hash rate without increasing network difficulty. By automating strategies to mine the most profitable networks according to present and future predicted value, this can guide miners to support under served networks and relieve pressure from some of the bigger networks that are over supplied. As a result, this has the potential to increase the net-profitability of the mining market by incentivizing miners to support emerging networks. While larger organizations and conglomerates may develop their own in-house AI mining solutions, there are few industry grade open-box solutions for the small to mid-size miner to access. In response to this market gap Abelian is developing a tier-1 solution to improve mining performance for every level of miner large and small.
Due to the reasons outlined above, it’s easy to conclude that there are numerous opportunities to optimize the switching from mining a single coin to merge mining. This is when AI can really speed up some of the decision-making processes. However, miners will only feel comfortable with this kind of tool if they can experience a concrete sense of control over their mining activities.
It is still apparent that individual miners want to have some say in their mining practices. Fortunately, these inputs can be managed on a macro level. The Abelian mining application will feature a dashboard that allows users to choose custom pre-built and manually built strategies that reflect their specific preferences. Users will be able to select and define their personal mining strategy based on their chosen: risk preferences, profit yield time horizon (near-term vs. long-term), miner risk tolerance (large vs. small capitalization coins), portfolio distribution, and cost management strategies (all keeping in mind hardware capabilities).
The Abelian mining application will allow participants to customize their own strategies with ease and the ability to modify their specifications at a moment’s notice. Not unlike driving a car with panel shifters: In most circumstances the car can shift gears optimally on its own, but every once in a while, you want to control your own RPMs. It is important in a dynamic industry like crypto-mining to be able to change strategies with ease and efficiency. This is why AI is so advantageous in this use case. AI will send information to user applications to inform miner activities. These information signals will only be sent once it has been requested by the application. Simple as that.
Abelian Technology is working hard to solve some of the biggest problems in mining performance and automation. With their dynamic approach to implementing custom mining optimization, Abelian has discovered a scalable solution to the crypto-mining problem. This is of high value for all miners wanting to have more control and oversight over their pool mining objectives.
