The Bitcoin Forum

Hi All,

My name is Wu Jihan, and I’m the co-founder of Bitmain, the world’s leading manufacturer of bitcoin mining hardware, and I’m also personally a bitcoin evangelist in China. In 2011 I created the first Chinese translation of Satoshi’s whitepaper, and subsequently founded bitcoin news site 8btc.com.

After graduating university, but before discovering bitcoin, I worked as a private equity fund manager in 2009 and also as a financial analyst. I decided to create Bitmain in 2013. As a co-founder and director of the company, I am in charge of marketing, sales, and investment affairs.

Bitmain’s growth over the past couple of years confirms that there is still growing demand in this space and that bitcoin use will continue to trend upwards. When we started the company, there were fewer than ten of us working on making our first mining chip. We are now the leading company in the bitcoin mining industry, offering the most comprehensive set of cryptocurrency services, including mining hardware, a mining pool, wallet software and blockchain services.

Bitcoin and blockchain technologies are now gradually changing people’s the way of life .

Ask me anything !

How will bitfury new asic chip affect your company, and do you see more decentralisation in mining.

How important do you see keeping mining decentralized in the Bitcoin industry?

What is the biggest issue you see with the blocksize debate and do you think that the new "Capacity Increases" https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitc ... /pull/1165 concensus on GitHub with most of the Bitcoin Devs for a soft fork instead of a hard for is a good solution?

Could you give any details on the next gen chip from Bitmain?

Thank you for doing the AMA.

Will banks eventually mine at a loss in order to control and secure the Blockchain? What protocol changes do you see being implemented in the coming new year?

I'm just going to guess that you've been to some pretty awesome mining facilities, maybe mining king's or others I don't know about yet? I really love the pictures and video of the inside of these places that is available, but there isn't much out there (for obvious reasons).

So my question is, what kind of interesting or unique setups have you seen in regards to mining facilities, or maybe just what is the biggest one you've been to? I saw a video of one that had such powerful exhaust fans that you couldn't even open the door to the asic room without shutting it down first because of the suction!

Also, as you know, asic chips have been becoming smaller and smaller, and I know that this means you can fit more power on one board but have you guys faced any new issues as a result?

Recently there have been some claims that mining farms have far greater hashing power than expected and use multiple pool to masquerade their share of the network. While it's very difficult to substantiate these claims, do you think there are any steps the mining industry can take to be more transparent and assure the community there isn't a monopolization of mining power?

Hi,

I remember once somebody from BITMAIN said they would start to design a fully custom ASIC.
What is the estimated performance difference between a semi custom and fully custom ASIC?


Thanks

Hi Wu Jihan! I have a question about miners' relationship with core developers.

Should miners be responsible for voting on protocol changes?

Thus far, core developers have submitted proposals (e.g. BIP101) assuming that miners would decide which are accepted with their hashpower. Is this the way to go? I've also heard some chinese miners say that they want the core developers to just decide how the protocol should work, and then tell the miners what to do. What do you believe?

Thanks! 谢谢!

Hello,

I'm new to Bitcoin and bitcoin, (August 2015), but tend to be a quick learner. I already mine at home, and cloudmine. Regarding ASIC production my question is this:

Would you be willing to make/market a 7.5 version of the Antminer, that had a single or double hashboard instead of the triple, so that miners just starting out, (and strapped for cash), can have an even better economic alternative, that still delivers the same critical hash/power efficiency?

--Patrick

Hi Wu,

Do you think it is possible to use quantum computers to attack the Bitcoin network?

Thanks

Hi Wu!

i Have a couple of questions that i want to ask you!

What are your opinions regarding the Blocksize-issue(Especially after the Scaling bitcoin event)?

are you for BIP100(increase of up to 17%)/BIP101(8 MB and up to GBs)/BIP248(2-4-8-32MB) with/without Segregated Witness and lightning network?

Are you one of the people that has signed/is going to sign ("Capacity Increase to the bitcoin system" https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/capacity-increases)?if so do you think Coinbase,Bitpay,Xapo amongst others will sign it too?

Do you hold bitcoins BTC yourself(in the trezor,web Wallet,mobile wallet or desktop wallet)? How much bitcoins do you hold(% wise of your savings and how much off your salary to you put into bitcoin)?

What do you think about bitcoins and other altcoins such as (litecoin and ethereum) future(block halvening,openbaazar etc)?

Hi Wu,

I would like to ask a non Bitcoin Mining related question:

How do you think, is it important for our industry to have smart and beautiful women from around the planet on board? And how can they help in improving the image of Bitcoin in the eyes of those who think Bitcoin is just a weird temporary programmists toy? I personally think programmers and geeks are doing not as well as smart and beautiful respected worldwide women (Like Bitnation's CEO, Susanne Tarkowsky-Templehof) could do.

Thanks!

PS. Can I offer you my service as a painter?

How will bitfury new asic chip affect your company, and do you see more decentralisation in mining.

It will spend me several minutes to read the news and present my congratulations. Of course, it bring more decentralization to mining.

How important do you see keeping mining decentralized in the Bitcoin industry?

What is the biggest issue you see with the blocksize debate and do you think that the new "Capacity Increases" https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitc ... /pull/1165 concensus on GitHub with most of the Bitcoin Devs for a soft fork instead of a hard for is a good solution?

Could you give any details on the next gen chip from Bitmain?

Thank you for doing the AMA.

Of course it is very important to keeping mining decentralised in bitcoin system. The decentralised hash power make it possible to secure safety of the Blockchain. Centralised hash power means the blockchain is controlled by small number of people.

As we know the bitcoin” s price/ value has increased rapidly in recent years, which makes it is very expensive to make any mistakes. At the same time, we are lack of real world experiment data to support the continuing development of Bitcoin. But sidechain and alterchain provide us a very good opportunity to experiment and observe the impact of those changes.

We will release our next gen chip with 16nm process, and the power consumption will be 0.1J/GH or less.

Will banks eventually mine at a loss in order to control and secure the Blockchain? What protocol changes do you see being implemented in the coming new year?

I don’t see banks will eventually mine at loss to control and secure the blockchain. They will just need to trust the security of the Blockchain.

I am not sure how fast the progress of the Core development, but I hope that Sidechain and lightning network will be implemented in a few years .

I'm just going to guess that you've been to some pretty awesome mining facilities, maybe mining king's or others I don't know about yet? I really love the pictures and video of the inside of these places that is available, but there isn't much out there (for obvious reasons).

So my question is, what kind of interesting or unique setups have you seen in regards to mining facilities, or maybe just what is the biggest one you've been to? I saw a video of one that had such powerful exhaust fans that you couldn't even open the door to the asic room without shutting it down first because of the suction!

Also, as you know, asic chips have been becoming smaller and smaller, and I know that this means you can fit more power on one board but have you guys faced any new issues as a result?

• The largest single mining farm that we have now hold on 20MW. So, much smaller compared to some other competitors.
  
  The most interesting setups I have seen is that usually the miners will only consider how to cool off the Antminers in home, but in large mining farms in the North of China, we should consider how to warm the miners up in winter time, while the outside temperature is -20C.
  
  The process node, the more difficult to design a chip. And we see that from 28nm to 16nm, though the mining power efficient improves, but the cost to manufacturing the mining rigs does not drop significantly.

Recently there have been some claims that mining farms have far greater hashing power than expected and use multiple pool to masquerade their share of the network. While it's very difficult to substantiate these claims, do you think there are any steps the mining industry can take to be more transparent and assure the community there isn't a monopolization of mining power?

The claims are not true at all.

Bitmain will continue to sell miners, to work against the monopolization of mining power. But make mining “more” “transparent” could be a little bit hard. We can see lots of statistics right now on website like blocktrail.com or btc.com, reports written by Meni Rosenfeld. I can hardly see any improvement on transparency without damage the privacy of the miners.

Hi,

I remember once somebody from BITMAIN said they would start to design a fully custom ASIC.
What is the estimated performance difference between a semi custom and fully custom ASIC?


Thanks

BM1387 is a full customized ASIC. Semi custom and full custom ASIC will have very little difference on the performance, as semi custom design will solve most of the problems. Sorry that I cannot give you a number on this.

Hi Wu Jihan! I have a question about miners' relationship with core developers.

Should miners be responsible for voting on protocol changes?

Thus far, core developers have submitted proposals (e.g. BIP101) assuming that miners would decide which are accepted with their hashpower. Is this the way to go? I've also heard some chinese miners say that they want the core developers to just decide how the protocol should work, and then tell the miners what to do. What do you believe?

Thanks! 谢谢!

If it is really the “miners” to vote, I think very likely yes. “One CPU one vote” is Satoshi’s idea in the WhitePaper. But right now the problem is that we are actually having the pools to vote. So it is more likely a “no”.

I mostly agree that core devs should make the decisions. It is obvious that the debate between the developers is already complicated enough, I don’t see bringing the pools into the debate has much value. Mining pools and miners should share more statistics and even original logs with the core devs, and core devs will be helpful if they help to define what the statistics are, and implement some features to help the mining pool to contribute the necessary statistics.

You talk of more decentralization being good for the network and you do sell miners. However when I inquired about even obtaining small amounts of ASICs for prototyping I was told to spend money on your miner as you were not selling the ASIC by themselves. If you really want to help decentralize Bitcoin why not allow more players into the space so they can make more miners that better suited for a certain purpose.

Hi All,

My name is Wu Jihan, and I’m the co-founder of Bitmain, the world’s leading manufacturer of bitcoin mining hardware, and I’m also personally a bitcoin evangelist in China. In 2011 I created the first Chinese translation of Satoshi’s whitepaper, and subsequently founded bitcoin news site 8btc.com.

After graduating university, but before discovering bitcoin, I worked as a private equity fund manager in 2009 and also as a financial analyst. I decided to create Bitmain in 2013. As a co-founder and director of the company, I am in charge of marketing, sales, and investment affairs.

Bitmain’s growth over the past couple of years confirms that there is still growing demand in this space and that bitcoin use will continue to trend upwards. When we started the company, there were fewer than ten of us working on making our first mining chip. We are now the leading company in the bitcoin mining industry, offering the most comprehensive set of cryptocurrency services, including mining hardware, a mining pool, wallet software and blockchain services.

Bitcoin and blockchain technologies are now gradually changing people’s the way of life .

Ask me anything !

does your company plan on selling racks for the antminer s7 and APW3-12-1600-B2?

Do you think raising the blocksize is an urgent issue?

Hypothetically, if the "Bitcoin Core" implemented a change that you disagreed with, would you use a different software implementation of the Bitcoin protocol?

Thank you for your answer about centralization! I agree it's a sensitive issue because of miner privacy.

The block halving is predicted to happen 3rd quarter next year I believe. How do you think this might change the layout of the mining landscape? Do you think there might be a dramatic drop in hash rate, or maybe a price shift to account for the difference?

I'm just going t....

• The largest single mining farm that we have now hold on 20MW. So, much smaller compared to some other competitors.
  
  The most interesting setups I have seen is that usually the miners will only consider how to cool off the Antminers in home, but in large mining farms in the North of China, we should consider how to warm the miners up in winter time, while the outside temperature is -20C.
  
  The process node, the more difficult to design a chip. And we see that from 28nm to 16nm, though the mining power efficient improves, but the cost to manufacturing the mining rigs does not drop significantly.

I never would have thought that anyone would need to deal with keeping the miners warm! Thanks for your response, that is certainly interesting

Hi All,

My name is Wu Jihan, and I’m the co-founder of Bitmain, the world’s leading manufacturer of bitcoin mining hardware, and I’m also personally a bitcoin evangelist in China. In 2011 I created the first Chinese translation of Satoshi’s whitepaper, and subsequently founded bitcoin news site 8btc.com.

After graduating university, but before discovering bitcoin, I worked as a private equity fund manager in 2009 and also as a financial analyst. I decided to create Bitmain in 2013. As a co-founder and director of the company, I am in charge of marketing, sales, and investment affairs.

Bitmain’s growth over the past couple of years confirms that there is still growing demand in this space and that bitcoin use will continue to trend upwards. When we started the company, there were fewer than ten of us working on making our first mining chip. We are now the leading company in the bitcoin mining industry, offering the most comprehensive set of cryptocurrency services, including mining hardware, a mining pool, wallet software and blockchain services.

Bitcoin and blockchain technologies are now gradually changing people’s the way of life .

Ask me anything !

Are you in communication with other Chinese mining companies and exchanges on a regular basis?

It seems important that Chinese Bitcoin community can unify around Bitcoin Core proposals that are proposed: https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/cap ... reases-faq

Will you be able to help bring Chinese Bitcoin companies together around these updates?

Hi Wu,

I would like to ask a non Bitcoin Mining related question:

How do you think, is it important for our industry to have smart and beautiful women from around the planet on board? And how can they help in improving the image of Bitcoin in the eyes of those who think Bitcoin is just a weird temporary programmists toy? I personally think programmers and geeks are doing not as well as smart and beautiful respected worldwide women (Like Bitnation's CEO, Susanne Tarkowsky-Templehof) could do.

Thanks!

PS. Can I offer you my service as a painter?

Yes, smart and beautiful women will help Bitcoin to have a better public image: soft, attractive, charming. I have a strong confidence that Bitcoin is a nice sector for women to work with. In Bitmain, we have 28% of employees are female and they are all beautiful in my eyes. I wish more women find passion in Bitcoin.

Please send email to me about your painting, jh at bitmaintech do.ot com.

You talk of more decentralization being good for the network and you do sell miners. However when I inquired about even obtaining small amounts of ASICs for prototyping I was told to spend money on your miner as you were not selling the ASIC by themselves. If you really want to help decentralize Bitcoin why not allow more players into the space so they can make more miners that better suited for a certain purpose.

Selling ASIC chips will bring our engineers into lots of supporting jobs. We have tried selling chips at the very beginning of Bitmain. Bitmain is still very short handed and sometimes we feel very sorry that our chip customers cannot deliver the miner production on time and suffering loss. So we decided that if we are not ready for a perfect support, we will not sell chips again.

Will you be making another USB miner, say a U4?

Hi Wu Jihan! I have a question about miners' relationship with core developers.

Should miners be responsible for voting on protocol changes?

Thus far, core developers have submitted proposals (e.g. BIP101) assuming that miners would decide which are accepted with their hashpower. Is this the way to go? I've also heard some chinese miners say that they want the core developers to just decide how the protocol should work, and then tell the miners what to do. What do you believe?

Thanks! 谢谢!

If it is really the “miners” to vote, I think very likely yes. “One CPU one vote” is Satoshi’s idea in the WhitePaper. But right now the problem is that we are actually having the pools to vote. So it is more likely a “no”.

I mostly agree that core devs should make the decisions. It is obvious that the debate between the developers is already complicated enough, I don’t see bringing the pools into the debate has much value. Mining pools and miners should share more statistics and even original logs with the core devs, and core devs will be helpful if they help to define what the statistics are, and implement some features to help the mining pool to contribute the necessary statistics.

This is good information, thanks.

Hi,

I remember once somebody from BITMAIN said they would start to design a fully custom ASIC.
What is the estimated performance difference between a semi custom and fully custom ASIC?


Thanks

BM1387 is a full customized ASIC. Semi custom and full custom ASIC will have very little difference on the performance, as semi custom design will solve most of the problems. Sorry that I cannot give you a number on this.

I understand BM1387 will give twice greater efficiency on Electricity Power versus Hashrate, but will 16nm process chip give twice the hash rate in comparison to BM 1385?