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

qz.com

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

#21

Post by elif »

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?

As others have said they sell a lot of miners but their pool is the largest at 25%. If they did push 50%, even getting there, let alone the potential manipulations, could only be for negative outcomes. McDonalds could destroy the beef industry... But why?

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

#23

Post by CyberDildonics »

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?

No. They don't actually control that much hash rate. Either the article is confusing the sales of their mining units to other miners or is outright wrong. If they really controlled that much of the hash rate, they would have activated emergent consensus to increase the max block size. They would have gotten around core and all their toxic censorship and bitcoin cash would never have needed to create a fork to get reasonable throughput.

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

#24

Post by bpicolo »

digitalzombie wrote: post #20

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.

I suspect they'd be designing for datacenters rather than consumers. That's essentially what they already do with bitcoin rigs too. It's a rented mining cloud.

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

#25

Post by socialist_coder »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #23
loserboss wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No. They don't actually control that much hash rate. Either the article is confusing the sales of their mining units to other miners or is outright wrong. If they really controlled that much of the hash rate, they would have activated emergent consensus to increase the max block size. They would have gotten around core and all their toxic censorship and bitcoin cash would never have needed to create a fork to get rea…

It's not wrong, look at the wording:

> effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network.

They are providing the processing power by selling mining chips. They are not operating those mining chips, so they don't control the processing power. They only provide it.

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

#26

Post by socialist_coder »

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.

Is it that hard to believe? If you make the best X in your market, it's gonna be the most popular. 70% market share isn't so abnormal.

If you're digging for gold and there are 5 different shovels you can buy, but 1 is clearly the best, is it that hard to believe that 70% of all shovels in use will be that best one?

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

#27

Post by derimagia »

digitalzombie wrote: post #18
loserboss wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They could mine it and still sell it, so it wouldn't be 90-10

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

#28

Post by dankohn1 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #6
spupy wrote: post #3

Is that a spoiler for "The Three-Body Problem" in the second paragraph? Thanks, QZ!...

Had never heard of it, but it looks really interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/07653...

Highly recommended. Sequel is quite good as well.

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

#30

Post by jameskegel »

bpicolo wrote: post #24
digitalzombie wrote: post #20

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.

I suspect they'd be designing for datacenters rather than consumers. That's essentially what they already do with bitcoin rigs too. It's a rented mining cloud.

>rented mining cloud

Would you like to rephrase this to something more accurate?

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