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China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

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Re: China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

#11

Post by Tenoke »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #4

How great would it be if AI advances ended up controlled by an authoritarian Chinese government built off of the profits of libertarian Bitcoin users? It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos and interest in them has been dependent upon China.

>How great would it be if AI advances ended up controlled by an authoritarian Chinese government built off of the profits of libertarian Bitcoin users?

Bitmain is a private company. And even if you can describe bitcoin as a libertarian technology, I wouldnt think that most of Bitmain's profits come from libertarians based on who uses their hardware.

>It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos and interest in them has been dependent upon China.

Nothing special in the biggest part of the market dominating the price the most, really.

Re: China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

#13

Post by loserboss »

pdog wrote: post #12

> [Bitmain] has over 70% of the market for bitcoin mining rigs—effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network. It's incredible that one company accounts for the vast majority of the entire Bitcoin network's hash rate.

Can't they now take over the market and generate bitcoin until everything crashes?

Re: China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

#14

Post by hetspookjee »

matt4077 wrote: post #5
pcr0 wrote: post #2

Aren't machine learning workloads more variable than crypto mining? How would ASIC users cope with that?

The big advances in neural networks stem from the use of GPUs that are themselves less flexible than CPUs, but allow extremely good parallelisation of (some) linear algebra (mostly matrix multiplication). This seems like a logical next step, and it's probably similar to those "tensor processing units" of the newer Tesla chips and whatever Google's custom hardware was called.

Google indeed calls them Tensor Processing Units and NVIDIA used the name as well iirc, thus the birth of the TPU.

Re: China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

#15

Post by __s »

pdog wrote: post #12

> [Bitmain] has over 70% of the market for bitcoin mining rigs—effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network. It's incredible that one company accounts for the vast majority of the entire Bitcoin network's hash rate.

Zipf's Law

Re: China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

#16

Post by raverbashing »

pdog wrote: post #12

> [Bitmain] has over 70% of the market for bitcoin mining rigs—effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network. It's incredible that one company accounts for the vast majority of the entire Bitcoin network's hash rate.

I wonder what's the effect of the Big Firewall on connecting to the btc network

Re: China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

#17

Post by Mtinie »

loserboss wrote: post #13
pdog wrote: post #12

> [Bitmain] has over 70% of the market for bitcoin mining rigs—effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network. It's incredible that one company accounts for the vast majority of the entire Bitcoin network's hash rate.

Can't they now take over the market and generate bitcoin until everything crashes?

In this case, no. They produce ~70% of the hardware used by other miners. If they kept the hardware inhouse it would be another story all together.

If history is an indication, selling the "shovels" to others during this digital gold rush is more lucrative for Bitmain than mining would be.

Re: China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

#18

Post by digitalzombie »

loserboss wrote: post #13
pdog wrote: post #12

> [Bitmain] has over 70% of the market for bitcoin mining rigs—effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network. It's incredible that one company accounts for the vast majority of the entire Bitcoin network's hash rate.

Can't they now take over the market and generate bitcoin until everything crashes?

The story talked about how they survived the 2013 crash or something.

Also IIRC, digital currency is base on how much someone is willing to pay for it. If you own 90% of bitcoin and the rest own 10%, then wouldn't it be useless? I mean I'm not force to use bit coin I can just use real money if it's so hard to get bitcoin. There aren't that many people who are deeply invested in bit coin with a 90-10. The whole thing is kinda base on greed...

Re: China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

#19

Post by digitalzombie »

Tenoke wrote: post #11
aaron-lebo wrote: post #4

How great would it be if AI advances ended up controlled by an authoritarian Chinese government built off of the profits of libertarian Bitcoin users? It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos and interest in them has been dependent upon China.

>How great would it be if AI advances ended up controlled by an authoritarian Chinese government built off of the profits of libertarian Bitcoin users? Bitmain is a private company. And even if you can describe bitcoin as a libertarian technology, I wouldnt think that most of Bitmain's profits come from libertarians based on who uses their hardware. >It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos an…

I think most libertarian see it as libertarian because it is not issued by any government and so it isn't affected by gov when they change interest rate.

It is purely dictated by the market of supply and demand.

This is just what I think why Libertarian see it as libertarian; I'm not one in any real sense nor do I subscribe to any of Ayn Rand's reasoning.

Re: China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI

#20

Post by digitalzombie »

Good.

Nvidia stuff 1080ti cost too much for a graduated student.

AMD is working on their own stuff supposely later this quarter we'll get tensorflow and other support on their card.

Google's TPU is not for consumer, only for cloud.

If bitmain can sell ASIC for consumer with reasonable price and support tensorflow, pytorch, etc... then it'll be good for the deep learning community.

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