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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

#31

Post by sillysaurus3 »

Mtinie wrote: post #17
loserboss wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, even if you controlled 99.99% of the hashing power, you still couldn't "generate bitcoin until everything crashes." You can't give yourself an arbitrary sum.

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

#32

Post by xinyhn »

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...

I know everyone says it's good, etc. I just want to reinforce the point. It is really really good. Definitely one of the best scifi I have read. The story just gets bigger and bigger as the books progress as well as the imagined tech and physics. I know it's cliche but it definitely caused me to think slightly differently when looking up at a night sky.

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

#33

Post by bpicolo »

jameskegel wrote: post #30
bpicolo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What part do you consider inaccurate? You pay for hashes/s in their hardware pool. The phrasing seems pretty sufficient.

e.g. https://pool.viabtc.com/contract/

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

#35

Post by sp332 »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #31
Mtinie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, even if you controlled 99.99% of the hashing power, you still couldn't "generate bitcoin until everything crashes." You can't give yourself an arbitrary sum.

If you're either hoarding or spending 99.99% of all new bitcoins, that's going to cause issues in the market. But the other thing you can do with majority hashpower is double-spend your coins, then fraudulently verify the transaction as if it were valid.

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

#36

Post by flashdance »

bpicolo wrote: post #33
jameskegel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>rented mining cloud Would you like to rephrase this to something more accurate?

What part do you consider inaccurate? You pay for hashes/s in their hardware pool. The phrasing seems pretty sufficient. e.g. https://pool.viabtc.com/contract/

Hashnest is a similar service run by bitmain.

> Hashnest is a cloud hashing platform. This means you can participate in bitcoin mining without maintaining the hardware yourself.

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

#37

Post by new299 »

raverbashing wrote: post #8
spupy wrote: post #3

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

Kinda. It's not a major plot point that's being given away It's more like "there's an Alien in Nostromo"

Errrr... I think it's a bigger give away than that. I came to the three body knowing almost nothing of what it was about... the information in the article would have removed much of the surprise.

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

#38

Post by sbenitoj »

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?

Even if they could, why would they destroy an absolutely MASSIVE income stream, it goes completely counter to their own economic incentives.

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

#39

Post by kaffeemitsahne »

Mtinie wrote: post #17
loserboss wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They still could if they had put a backdoor in all their mining hardware.

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

#40

Post by jstanley »

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.

> It's a rented mining cloud.

That's not all it is. They do sell actual hardware as well, which you then run yourself.

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