Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#21

Post by makomk » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:48 PM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #17

Is that $4B worth of USD/CNY, or BTC? If it’s BTC then a) the real figure is much lower because they can’t sell $4B of BTC without drastically moving the market, b) what portion of that is due to their BTC holdings increasing in value by more than 1000% in the past year? Either way it’s still a lot of money, though.

A bunch of that is probably going to be in BCH, since they were requiring that for mining hardware purchases for a while, and that's an even shallower market.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#22

Post by gigatexal » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

I've moved to coins that are asic-tough

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#23

Post by garyrichardson » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:57 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #16

oldcynic wrote: post #2

Making and selling shovels seems to be still the best way to go then.

Not if you're very high on the food chain. It inverts there. It's better to be Aramco, Exxon or Shell than Baker Hughes or Schlumberger. Much less a lowely oil equipment maker (the shovel makers). It's better to be the railroad (BNSF, etc) than the car maker (eg Greenbrier), or really any other rail equipment maker. Better to be the largest natural gas companies, than the fracking sand provider (eg U.S. Silica), or t…

Are these things true or equivalent? These areas are not necessarily booming. They are stable with few consumers of the goods.

At this point, every scheming hustler is in the market for a bit coin miner. Same in a gold rush -- any fool can dig with a shovel. It's not until boredom or consolidation happens that the shovel maker margins start getting thinner.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#24

Post by wffurr » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 10:07 PM UTC

garyrichardson wrote: post #23

adventured wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you're very high on the food chain. It inverts there. It's better to be Aramco, Exxon or Shell than Baker Hughes or Schlumberger. Much less a lowely oil equipment maker (the shovel makers). It's better to be the railroad (BNSF, etc) than the car maker (eg Greenbrier), or really any other rail equipment maker. Better to be the largest natural gas companies, than the fracking sand provider (eg U.S. Silica), or t…

Are these things true or equivalent? These areas are not necessarily booming. They are stable with few consumers of the goods. At this point, every scheming hustler is in the market for a bit coin miner. Same in a gold rush -- any fool can dig with a shovel. It's not until boredom or consolidation happens that the shovel maker margins start getting thinner.

Better is to think of it as making something a lot of people want. Lots of miners = lots of people who want shovels/ASICs. Whereas mature industries like those end up as monopsonies i.e. a single buyer with lots of suppliers.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#25

Post by twiceaday » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 10:15 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #20

vernon99 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a one-sided comment. There’s a lot of research going into different variations of proof-of-stake. 4 out of 10 largest crypto (by market cap) are PoS. There’s a lot of work Ethereum community (Casper), Cardano folks, Tendermint etc are doing to create better consensus models.

PoS is not going to be very popular as it removes the literal "money out of thin air" that was happening with GPUs in the past few years (coming to end in medium term). PoS strongly favors already well capitalized owners, instead of allowing new ones.

Doesn't PoS generate money out of thin air? It's just a matter of putting your dollars into stake vs hardware and electricity.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#26

Post by dfox » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

lawn wrote: post #14

sosuke wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading somewhere they also use the shovel for a while before sending it off.

Yes, see AntPool with ~15% of the current hashrate. https://coin.dance/blocks

I would assume that significant fraction of bitmain's customer mine on antpool, as that is what the devices are preconfigured for.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#27

Post by narrator » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #16

oldcynic wrote: post #2

Making and selling shovels seems to be still the best way to go then.

Not if you're very high on the food chain. It inverts there. It's better to be Aramco, Exxon or Shell than Baker Hughes or Schlumberger. Much less a lowely oil equipment maker (the shovel makers). It's better to be the railroad (BNSF, etc) than the car maker (eg Greenbrier), or really any other rail equipment maker. Better to be the largest natural gas companies, than the fracking sand provider (eg U.S. Silica), or t…

In most of those cases the guys higher up the food chain have appreciating assets such as land, consumer brand value, mining rights, developed oil fields and mines, etc. The guys lower down the food chain make depreciating assets and have to get up every morning and make new stuff to sell every day or they go out of business.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#28

Post by tlrobinson » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 10:20 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #20

vernon99 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a one-sided comment. There’s a lot of research going into different variations of proof-of-stake. 4 out of 10 largest crypto (by market cap) are PoS. There’s a lot of work Ethereum community (Casper), Cardano folks, Tendermint etc are doing to create better consensus models.

PoS is not going to be very popular as it removes the literal "money out of thin air" that was happening with GPUs in the past few years (coming to end in medium term). PoS strongly favors already well capitalized owners, instead of allowing new ones.

Transitioning from PoW to PoS seems like a possible solution. Or shortcut the PoW phase by seeding your coin with snapshots of one or more existing coins that had a “fair” distribution phase.

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#29

Post by dawnerd » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

sosuke wrote: post #4

oldcynic wrote: post #2

Making and selling shovels seems to be still the best way to go then.

I remember reading somewhere they also use the shovel for a while before sending it off.

I mean they need to make sure they work first right ;)

Re: Bitmain, the largest mining hardware company, made around $4B last year

#30

Post by JustAnotherPat » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 10:23 PM UTC

kenneth wrote: post #9

As an engineer, it saddens me to see the huge inefficiencies inherent to cryptocurrency mining these days. Surely, when we're spending in the billions on wasteful hashing, we could dedicate a small fraction of that to engineering better consensus algorithms. Unfortunately, we have an ecosystem where everyone is incentivized to ignore the problem because they're too invested in maintaining the price of Bitcoin and oth…

95% of people wouldn't be interested in crypto if it didn't make them money. You're asking people to give up the money to improve the system for what? So they can't make as money?

Crypto isn't charity. If you want better tech, you have to prove why it is worth it.