I'm Marshall Long aka 挖矿王子 - Partner & CTO of FinalHash, LLC and a True Bitcoin OG

[Marshall]

Hey Folks Ask Me Anything! (Will be responding starting at Noon EST)

A bit about myself.

+Started Coding when I was 15 years old
+Original Career in Engineering
+Got into bitcoin in Nov. 2009
+Started originally as a miner
+Currently one of the top 10 miners world wide with mines in China, Washington, Chicago, and Canada
+Have deep ties with China and go by the name of 挖矿王子 there. (Roughly translates to "Mining Prince")
+I love decentralized tech and ways to subvert the copious amounts of censorship handed out by governments
+Recently Featured in a documentary while in Tokyo with our very own ROGER VER!
https://youtu.be/8zKuoqZLyKg?t=5m27s



Outside of Bitcoin
+Own several companies from fitness, to drones and aerial media to consulting
+Love the outdoors. Give me an axe and some rope and I will be a happy camper
+Grew up in Texas
+Love mixing music when I have time.
https://soundcloud.com/marshall-long

[brucefenton]

Hi Bud!

It seems like China has a lot of their own, locally developed, businesses: their own versions of Facebook, YouTube, Amazon etc.

Can US or EU Bitcoin startups have a successful presence in China or is it too hard? Would they be better off focusing on partnerships, jvs, early expansion, branches or simply hiring people in China and moving forward?

What other advice do you have for entrepreneurs who want to tap into the massive Chinese market?

Thanks for all you do!

Bruce

[Bitcoin_CFO]

Hello Marshall,

With the halving coming up soonish, how are your mining companies returns going to be affected and at what point will Bitcoin have to be a particular price for your business models?

Thanks,
CFO

[timryan]

HI Marshall,

You have an interesting story. What does a typical mining operation look like?

How do miners decide which transactions they mine? Should any of the incentives be split up between the nodes so they are compensated for the network?

Can miners choose to "vote" which version of the Bitcoin code that they operate to use?


Thanks for all the clarity on this.

[SomaTodd]

Hello Marshall,

What are your thoughts on block size debate. Favorite BIP on block size increase?

[cypherdoc]

given miner's need to transition to tx fee income as block rewards subside, how do you plan to compete with LN siphoning tx fees offchain?

do you think merge mining of sidechains is a viable exercise given how OneName had to abandon Namecoin b/c of the 60% hashing share of f2pool?

how practical is it for miners to have to keep up with the necessary coding complexity of maintaining multiple sidechain mining software implementations?

[Marshall]

Hi Bud!

It seems like China has a lot of their own, locally developed, businesses: their own versions of Facebook, YouTube, Amazon etc.

Can US or EU Bitcoin startups have a successful presence in China or is it too hard? Would they be better off focusing on partnerships, jvs, early expansion, branches or simply hiring people in China and moving forward?

What other advice do you have for entrepreneurs who want to tap into the massive Chinese market?

Thanks for all you do!

Bruce

Bruce,

Yes, China does indeed have its own network so to speak of services and P2P apps. Many ask why. The reality is western companies don't understand the mentality or needs of the Chinese. With rampant censorship, better suited apps come to market and are directly available and more impactful than more traditional western apps.

US companies and EU companies can have a successful presence in China, however, the stark realities are that they in fact probably won't succeed. The best way to break into China is to have a very VERY trustworthy peer that has had success in China and can leverage that person's pre-existing Network. China is all about connections. If you do not have them, you lose.

Advice for entrepreneurs who want to break into the market would be, get to know the culture. However, this takes time. Upwards of 18 months in most cases. Most people do not have that kind of time. So I would say find somebody you trust that already knows how to do business in China.

[Marshall]

Hello Marshall,

With the halving coming up soonish, how are your mining companies returns going to be affected and at what point will Bitcoin have to be a particular price for your business models?

Thanks,
CFO

Thanks for the question. I get this one alot, and in fact I did a talk about it at Scaling Bitcoin Montreal. About the 1hr 53min mark
https://youtu.be/TgjrS-BPWDQ?t=1h53m18s

The reality is, miners have moved onto seeking more ways to monetize their business. We do not see fees as ever becoming a real way to drive revenue simply because the mentality of Bitcoin is, "It's Free!". Roger does a really great job when he explains it and ALWAYS says "Basically Free". We know this is a big part of the ETHOS of Bitcoin and really feel like that won't change and we do not necessarily want that to change. However, to answer your question more specifically, my company in particular should be able to weather the storm well below $180 however, FinalHash's set up is very unique. On the whole, anywhere under $250 after the halving would prove to be catastrophic in most of my colleagues set ups.

[Marshall]

HI Marshall,

You have an interesting story. What does a typical mining operation look like?

How do miners decide which transactions they mine? Should any of the incentives be split up between the nodes so they are compensated for the network?

Can miners choose to "vote" which version of the Bitcoin code that they operate to use?


Thanks for all the clarity on this.

Tim,

Great questions.

A typical operation looks like, what I like to call, a beautifully ghetto set up. And the extent of the "Ghetto-ness" depends on which country you are in. Mainland china, one of our operations literally only has 1 full wall. Basically it is a lean-to with 4 MegaWatts of power going to it. Stateside, generally they are a bit more put together, but are nothing more than a modified warehouse for better airflow movement with baker's shelving instead of your typical APC racks.

Deciding which transactions to mine is really a binary situation. With a few small exceptions. If we feel like the fee is worth our time, we mine it. Very few people mine zero fee tx's now with the exception being a good friend of mine Luke who runs an operation called Eligius. As far as incentives being split up between the nodes, what I personally would like to see is for people running nodes to set their relay fee appropriately. It really is tough to incentivize people to run a node. But if everybody demanded it, then the network MUST bear it. Additionally, the fees are nominal for miners to have to split that up amongst nodes, then we get into issues similar to net neutrality and so-called fast lanes. Nobody really has time for that debate currently.

Currently, miners can choose AND actually do use whatever version of bitcoin they want. Only a few things are enforced like which block version and mission critical updates force people to upgrade. Like Peter Todd's BIP66.

[Marshall]

Hello Marshall,

What are your thoughts on block size debate. Favorite BIP on block size increase?

My Thoughts
In general I like Jeff Garzik's proposal. However, my reasons are extremely fleeting and very biased. It let's miners stay in control, which for the record isn't a bad thing. Miners are incentivized to keep Bitcoin working, or else we have Millions of dollars of unused hardware sitting... doing nothing... with ZERO resell value. However, as I said this is biased and really that is the only reason I have a preference.

Miners Thoughts
In general we do not care which BIP gets merged. We only care that the scaling issues get resolved and in a timely manner. Additionally, we want to be cautious as farms in China usually have excruciating latency. So the one thing we do know definitively is that most of the core folks leading the BIP proposal charge have Bitcoin's best interest in mind and that gives us comfort.

[Marshall]

given miner's need to transition to tx fee income as block rewards subside, how do you plan to compete with LN siphoning tx fees offchain?

do you think merge mining of sidechains is a viable exercise given how OneName had to abandon Namecoin b/c of the 60% hashing share of f2pool?

how practical is it for miners to have to keep up with the necessary coding complexity of maintaining multiple sidechain mining software implementations?

So in general, we do not ever feel like tx fees can be helpful to us. Right now and going forward they will be and continue to be nominal at best as the ETHOS of Bitcoin seems to be "It's Free" and that is not likely to change, nor should it.

Regarding OneName, their assessment of the NMC hashing dis-proportionality IMHO was completely and utterly wrong. Many of my colleagues and even my own operation, and some of the other pools are constantly mining NMC. What they should have done was reach out to the miners and confirm their suspicions. NETKI did this and saved an inordinate amount of time and money doing so.
However, I digress. Merge mining is ALWAYS an interesting thing for us to look at because it is effectively an additionally revenue stream potentially for us. The only way we don't merge mine is if the code base is weak and requires constant maintenance and makes our operation unstable. In mining, you get one chance to WOW us as it were because sloppy implementations cost us money on both labor and down time.

[helloworld]

We do not see fees as ever becoming a real way to drive revenue simply because the mentality of Bitcoin is, "It's Free!".

That's scary to read coming from a supposedly big miner. :S

Firstly, transacting is already cost money. Secondly, It's in the original whitepaper that fees will compensate for the diminishing block reward in the future. It was satoshi's original vision.

It's not about making the network expensive, but gathering a big userbase so the small fees add up.

If not enough people use btc in the future to compensate, then it's basically a failure anyways, and the price won't go up enough to make any business like this profitable in this scenario.

I wonder what do you think about this.

[Marshall]

We do not see fees as ever becoming a real way to drive revenue simply because the mentality of Bitcoin is, "It's Free!".

Firstly, transacting is already cost money. Secondly, It's in the original whitepaper that fees will compensate for the diminishing block reward in the future. It was satoshi's original vision.

It's not about making the network expensive, but gathering a big userbase so the small fees add up.

If not enough people use btc in the future to compensate, then it's basically a failure anyways, and the price won't go up enough to make any business like this profitable in this scenario.

I wonder what do you think about this.

Good questions and welcome to the forum. Seems like you are new here. Hope you like what Roger is trying to do.

Yes, transactions do cost money. This is ONE reason banks charge fees. And sure, in a perfect world everyone would use some kind of digital asset to transport value. However, currently fees do not provide incentives for us to mine, in general. If somebody came to a bank and said, I would like you to move $500,000 for $4, they would get laughed out the door. I agree with your hypothesis, but in general, electricity is expensive. VERY expensive.

[cypherdoc]

given miner's need to transition to tx fee income as block rewards subside, how do you plan to compete with LN siphoning tx fees offchain?

do you think merge mining of sidechains is a viable exercise given how OneName had to abandon Namecoin b/c of the 60% hashing share of f2pool?

how practical is it for miners to have to keep up with the necessary coding complexity of maintaining multiple sidechain mining software implementations?

So in general, we do not ever feel like tx fees can be helpful to us. Right now and going forward they will be and continue to be nominal at best as the ETHOS of Bitcoin seems to be "It's Free" and that is not likely to change, nor should it.

Regarding OneName, their assessment of the NMC hashing dis-proportionality IMHO was completely and utterly wrong. Many of my colleagues and even my own operation, and some of the other pools are constantly mining NMC. What they should have done was reach out to the miners and confirm their suspicions. NETKI did this and saved an inordinate amount of time and money doing so.
However, I digress. Merge mining is ALWAYS an interesting thing for us to look at because it is effectively an additionally revenue stream potentially for us. The only way we don't merge mine is if the code base is weak and requires constant maintenance and makes our operation unstable. In mining, you get one chance to WOW us as it were because sloppy implementations cost us money on both labor and down time.

there was a great post on reddit the other day by a guy named "singularityxxx" who calculated how easily a larger volume of tx's per block due to larger blocks would fund current miners. you should look at the numerous calculations that have been done confirming this hypothesis of satoshi's.

[chriswilmer]

Just wondering which people in the Bitcoin eco-system you tend to stay in contact with. Do you communicate much with the founders of various Bitcoin exchanges, for example, or with the CEOs of companies like Coinbase or Circle? Have you talked to Gavin Andresen on the phone? (I've listed a tiny slice of people, my question is more general... who do you tend to keep in touch with in the ecosystem)

[Marshall]

So in general, we do not ever feel like tx fees can be helpful to us. Right now and going forward they will be and continue to be nominal at best as the ETHOS of Bitcoin seems to be "It's Free" and that is not likely to change, nor should it.

Regarding OneName, their assessment of the NMC hashing dis-proportionality IMHO was completely and utterly wrong. Many of my colleagues and even my own operation, and some of the other pools are constantly mining NMC. What they should have done was reach out to the miners and confirm their suspicions. NETKI did this and saved an inordinate amount of time and money doing so.
However, I digress. Merge mining is ALWAYS an interesting thing for us to look at because it is effectively an additionally revenue stream potentially for us. The only way we don't merge mine is if the code base is weak and requires constant maintenance and makes our operation unstable. In mining, you get one chance to WOW us as it were because sloppy implementations cost us money on both labor and down time.

there was a great post on reddit the other day by a guy named "singularityxxx" who calculated how easily a larger volume of tx's per block due to larger blocks would fund current miners. you should look at the numerous calculations that have been done confirming this hypothesis of satoshi's.

Those calculations do not adequately reflect propagation issues in mainland...

[Marshall]

Just wondering which people in the Bitcoin eco-system you tend to stay in contact with. Do you communicate much with the founders of various Bitcoin exchanges, for example, or with the CEOs of companies like Coinbase or Circle? Have you talked to Gavin Andresen on the phone? (I've listed a tiny slice of people, my question is more general... who do you tend to keep in touch with in the ecosystem)

Great question. Was just talking about this last night actually.

In general, Bitcoin has a huge personnel problem IMHO. People who do too much talking and not enough walking. The people who can back up what they say are, in fact the people I stay in touch with. Not many exchanges TBH because FinalHash runs an OTC desk and we do not interact much with exchanges. However, I know most of the core devs very well, in fact Peter Todd frequently bogards my couch hahaha. As far as non devs, I'd say most of the CEO's in companies that have raised OVER 3M and are STILL OPERATING are the "CEOs" I talk to. However, I do not consider myself an elitist as the previous statement definitely made me sound. I really admire people who can make a plan, execute that plan, and not complain during the process. That I find as a very scarce group of folks in the ecosystem.

Not sure if that clears it up at all.

[Global Tax Accountants]

Marshall, general question. How will the upcoming halving of the block reward to 12.5 in 2016 affect the mining industry? With smaller reward & presumably lower margins, will we see even more centralization of mining? Will the Bitcoin price pop as the increase to supply of Bitcoin will slow down due to smaller block reward?

[Kexkey]

Hi Marshall, thanks for being here,

We know China weighs big in mining. Would it be a plausible scenario that Chinese gov takes control of all mines in China and then be able to break the trust in Bitcoin system by getting the majority of its hashpower?

What do you think about centralization of mining?

Mining is addictive. Do you think we should see psychologists for that?



Kex

[Marshall]

Hi Marshall, thanks for being here,

We know China weighs big in mining. Would it be a plausible scenario that Chinese gov takes control of all mines in China and then be able to break the trust in Bitcoin system by getting the majority of its hashpower?

What do you think about centralization of mining?

Mining is addictive. Do you think we should see psychologists for that?



Kex

Hey there,

The chinese government IMHO has bigger problems on its hands right now than to worry about a $7B Market cap. Additionally, we can sabotage miners to basically brick themselves in the event of something like this going on so the labor would be super high to fix all these machines.

Mining centralization has pros and cons.
Pros, being able to rapidly respond to forks, i.e. July 4 2015
Cons, easier to break things all though this is a reverse incentive

And mining is addictive, but its all in your head

[Marshall]

Marshall, general question. How will the upcoming halving of the block reward to 12.5 in 2016 affect the mining industry? With smaller reward & presumably lower margins, will we see even more centralization of mining? Will the Bitcoin price pop as the increase to supply of Bitcoin will slow down due to smaller block reward?

Great questions as usual from you,

The industry will be hurt unless the price rises more. However, bitcoin doesn't really trade like a commodity. Its more like a commodity-backed stock. Which in this case the price could go up OR down. Hopefully the price pops at every halving. I think it is important to keep the security at such a high level.

[jtoomim]

there was a great post on reddit the other day by a guy named "singularityxxx" who calculated how easily a larger volume of tx's per block due to larger blocks would fund current miners. you should look at the numerous calculations that have been done confirming this hypothesis of satoshi's.

Those calculations do not adequately reflect propagation issues in mainland...

The only thing that needs to propagate across the GFW or within the mainland is the block header (e.g. via stratum). That's about 80 bytes, independent of block size. Have you thought of setting up your full node/poolserver in e.g. Hong Kong and using a stratum proxy in your farm?

If you wanted, you could even compress that down to the top few Merkle nodes, so you could have your LAN-side server/proxy create its own coinbase transaction, and only rely on the full node to handle the other transactions.

Do you think this is a good idea? Would you want help implementing it?

[imaginary_username]

Thanks for doing the AMA! Two questions:

1. You mentioned the very high latency being a problem for Chinese miners - especially since as it's implemented right now, a block needs to "race" in its entirety from its originating node. However, Bitcoin XT is currently working on implementing IBLT, which enables propagating hashes instead of the full block to compatible nodes, eliminating the need to propagate the full block to nodes that already has relevant tx in their mempools. If the patch comes out, it will obviously benefit low-bandwidth countries like China by a lot - do you see yourself switching to XT (or XT pools) in that scenario? Or would you stick with Core without IBLT propagation for the sake of continuity?

2. As far as I understand Bitcoin in China, as of right now, is mostly mining and speculation, while having very little in terms of economic activity (i.e. buying/selling goods and services, whether legally or illegally). Do you see that changing anytime soon? Does the Chinese community has any advocates of building a Bitcoin economy?

[Marshall]

Thanks for doing the AMA! Two questions:

1. You mentioned the very high latency being a problem for Chinese miners - especially since as it's implemented right now, a block needs to "race" in its entirety from its originating node. However, Bitcoin XT is currently working on implementing IBLT, which enables propagating hashes instead of the full block to compatible nodes, eliminating the need to propagate the full block to nodes that already has relevant tx in their mempools. If the patch comes out, it will obviously benefit low-bandwidth countries like China by a lot - do you see yourself switching to XT (or XT pools) in that scenario? Or would you stick with Core without IBLT propagation for the sake of continuity?

2. As far as I understand Bitcoin in China, as of right now, is mostly mining and speculation, while having very little in terms of economic activity (i.e. buying/selling goods and services, whether legally or illegally). Do you see that changing anytime soon? Does the Chinese community has any advocates of building a Bitcoin economy?

Very well thought out questions.

1. We as miners would never switch the XT. All biases aside, switching our pool servers over would be a massive waste of money.
2. And yes, Chinese are naturally risk taking gamblers. Some farms are mining at a deficit (until the price hike this week) in hopes of a price spike.
3. BTC is not huge in China. Simply because they have great ways to make P2P payments already IMHO. Alipay, WeXIN Pay, etc.

[Stonesolone]

Thanks for doing the ama.

I have recently tried aquiring ASIC chips for building my own mining rig to sell to consumers. However every current gen manufacerer will not sell chips to third parties. Doesn't this mean that mining is already centralized? Since the chip makers can effectively lock out new competition and inevitablely the existing competition will come down to fewer and fewer that are able to keep up.

Not being able to get bare chips is preventing us from creating an alternative approach to mining that would allow for profitable decentralization. Does this mean we will have to spin our own silicon if we don't take the datacenter approach and buy miners from another company?

[helloworld]

1. We as miners would never switch the XT. All biases aside, switching our pool servers over would be a massive waste of money.

Sorry but that's BS.

XT is a fork of bitcoin core, There is basically 0 difference whether the fork happen or not.

The downtime would be basically non-existent if the migration is planned and executed right, so I'm curious what "waste of money" you are referring to?

[helloworld]

3. BTC is not huge in China. Simply because they have great ways to make P2P payments already IMHO. Alipay, WeXIN Pay, etc.

Neither of those are p2p payments. All of them involve banks and companies.

I really hope that the majority of the miners are more intelligent and better informed than this individual, otherwise bitcoin's future is less bright.

Also, I really hope that in the end Satoshi's vision works out and individual bad apples won't be able to ruin the "experiment".

[jtoomim]

1. We as miners would never switch the XT. All biases aside, switching our pool servers over would be a massive waste of money.

Sorry but that's BS.

XT is a fork of bitcoin core, There is basically 0 difference whether the fork happen or not.

The downtime would be basically non-existent if the migration is planned and executed right, so I'm curious what "waste of money" you are referring to?

My best guess is that he's referring to the propagation expense of dealing with >= 8 MB blocks. It seems he thinks that orphan rates and bandwidth expense would grow faster than revenue would with fees. Marshall, is this the case? Are you worried about downstream bandwidth or upstream bandwidth?

[helloworld]

Sorry but that's BS.

XT is a fork of bitcoin core, There is basically 0 difference whether the fork happen or not.

The downtime would be basically non-existent if the migration is planned and executed right, so I'm curious what "waste of money" you are referring to?

My best guess is that he's referring to the propagation expense of dealing with >= 8 MB blocks. It seems he thinks that orphan rates and bandwidth expense would grow faster than revenue would with fees. Marshall, is this the case? Are you worried about downstream bandwidth or upstream bandwidth?

XT won't make blocks magically 8MB straightaway....it raises a limit.

As for the chinese infrastructure, If I recall correctly, he is not exclusively mines from China but many other countries.

Also, why would the ecosystem favor and limit the network to the capabilities of the chinese infrastructure? It doesn't make sense in my opinion.

[2drewlee]

Texan programmer mining Bitcoin in China. Quite the unusual combination.

How did you end up in China?