Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Nishant Sharma: Bitmain – Rising to Mining Dominance

Episode Date: November 19, 2019

Bitmain is one of the most well known, and one of the most polarizing companies in the blockchain space. The largest ASIC manufacturer and operator of several mining pools, Bitmain is the center of many controversies and discussions around centralization in the space. But not only is it the subject of discussion, Bitmain breaks out of the “passive miner” stereotype and is very active in many of the discussions in the community, most notably the Great Scaling Debates. In this episode, we sit down with Nishant Sharma, Head of Community Relations, who is responsible for acting as a bridge between the Bitmain company and the many communities it interacts with through its mining and ASIC operations. We explore the origins of Bitmain and its founders, the economics of ASIC production, its past and current relationships with different communities, and the future of the company.Topics covered in this episode:Nishant's Story in the Bitcoin mining space and how it led to joining BitmainOrigin of Bitmain and its founders, notably Jihan WuDoes Bitmain contribute to centralization in the blockchain spaceHow Bitmain maintains its superiority in the ASIC manufacturing spaceEconomics of ASIC production and manufacturingBalancing business models of ASIC production, operating multiple mining pools, and exploring new verticalsBitmain's role in blockchain debates like the scaling debate, Bitcoin Cash split, and ProgPowEpisode links: Bitmain WebsiteNishant on TwitterBitmain on TwitterFallout: Everyone’s a loser after Bitcoin Cash split – Brave New CoinBitmain WikipediaBTC.com PoolAntpoolLeaked Transcript Details Power Struggle Inside Bitcoin Mining GiantBitmain – CoinDeskDovey Wan on TwitterSponsors: Vaultoro: Trade gold to Bitcoin instantly and securely starting at just 1mg - http://vaultoro.comCosmos: Change the future of finance at the SF Blockchain Week Defi Hackathon – $50,000 prize pool for winning teams - https://epicenter.rocks/sfcosmosThis episode is hosted by Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/314

This is Epicenter, episode 314 with guest, Nishant Sharma. Hi, welcome to Epicenter. My name is Sebastian Kutjou. Today, our interview is with Nishant Sharma. Nishant is head of community relations at Bitmain. This interview was done by Sunny in person at the ETC Summit in Vancouver in early October, just before DevCon. In this conversation, they discussed a number of things. There's the history of Bitmain and some background on,

the founder, Ji Han Wu. He was the first person to translate the Bitcoin white paper into Chinese many years ago. However, as they discussed, Ji Han was ousted as CEO in late 2018, early 2019, after a failed IPO. Now, since this interview was recorded in early October, there's no discussion of the recent drama at Bitmain, which some people have qualified as a civil war within the company. So in late October, just a few weeks ago, Ji Han Wu regained control of the company in what appears to be some sort of coup. These events are still unfolding, but if you're interested in learning more, you should follow Dovie Wan on Twitter. She is a founding partner at Primitive Crypto, and she's been reporting on and translating a lot of the documents that

are coming out of Bitmain. I'll add her Twitter handle to the show. notes. But what they did talk about is how Bitmain has grown into to become a superior player in the ASIC manufacturing space and how they balance this part of the business with other business models, mining pools. Of course, Bitmain operates two of the main Bitcoin mining pools, antpool and BTC.com. And they also talked about Bitmain's role in some of the great debates of the last few years, like the scaling debate, the Bitcoin cash split, PraguePow, etc. I really enjoyed listening to this interview. We've never had an ASIC manufacturer on the podcast before. And it's a topic that we rarely get the cover. So it was interesting to get a glimpse

into that business, some of the challenges they face. And of course, looking at the future, although the future is now somewhat uncertain with this drama happening within the company. Anyway, Sunny did a great job on this one and hats off to him for pulling this off. Before we go to the interview, I'd like to tell you about the sponsors, which make this show possible. Gold is the oldest and most enduring form of money. It's a hedge against the financial system. It's a hedge against the volatility in crypto. And if you're holding crypto and you want to buy gold, there's no better place to do that than Valtrow.com. Valtrow is the leading hedging solution for the crypto community. They've been around since 2014. And you can start trading gold as little as one

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Thank you, Altaro for those supportive epicenter. We're also brought to you by Cosmos, the Internet of Blockchains. Now, in preparation for the upcoming inter-blockchain communications protocol, IBC, they're announcing the second ever adversarial test net challenge game of zones. Now, this is a competition that will create an educational opportunity for people to learn about the nuances in the IBC protocol because an interoperable blockchain has never been done before. There's lots to learn before we launched. this in production. The competition will start in December or January. The dates are still being

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We're looking forward to seeing what comes out of this. You should also check out the Cosmos blog because as I'm recording this, just a few minutes ago, they've just released the recap article for the SF Blockchain Week Defy Hackathon. There are all the winners announced, lots of pictures and videos. Definitely check it out if you weren't there. And there's even a picture

of me doing a weird D5 VR thing. We'd like to thank Cosmos for the supportive epicenter. And with that, we go to Sunny's interview with Nishant Sharma. So we're here today live, actually. First time I'm ever doing an episode live. And so we're here today at the Ethereum Classic Summit and we're out here in the lobby recording. There's a bunch of new events coming up next couple of weeks and so we try to do something different and do some live recordings at these events, see who we can grab from the crowd and put on a good episode. And so we'll see how it goes and given that it's a live event and I'm the only host this time.

It's also my first time soloing as a host. So I'm here today with Nashan Sharma. He's the head of community relations at Bitmain, one of the, well, not one of the, I'd say the largest ASIC manufacturing company. and it also operates a number of mining pools. So, Nishan, welcome to the show. Could you please introduce yourself? Thanks for having me.

I'm a fan of EpiCenter. I've been hearing a lot of good things about it. And always a pleasure to meet you at different conferences, Sunny. So thanks for having me. So talking about myself, I joined the cryptocurrency space in early 2014 by joining an ASEC maker based out of Schengen.

And then when the 2015 bear market happened, we realized we couldn't keep up. We had to pull the plug. And then I joined the company that was doing everything right, everything we wanted to do right. Bitmain was doing it right. So I joined Bitmain in 2016, beginning of 2016. Which ACIC company was that before you joined Bitmain?

It was called BitCrain, B-I-T-R-A-N-E, like a crane that does mining. Yeah, the how I came across that one was, so I was working in Guangzhou in the LED industry in China. And the company was not very interesting. interesting. Like the company's product wasn't that good and yeah, the early industry in China was just overloaded. It was oversupplied and it was surely not the best company to work for at that time. So I was looking for other things to do. And then I met this Taiwanese American guy

who had secured the chips from hash fast liquidation. He was planning to make ASIC miners based out of Shenzhen using those chips. And that sounded like a very cool, exciting idea. and the person seemed like someone I can bet my career on. And so I did that. I joined him, and it was a great ride until the bear market of 2015 happened. Cool. And so what would you say is your sort of role at Bitmain? So, you know, I met you first time last year in December.

We were at this weird event. It was sort of like it wasn't officially a Bitcoin Cash event, but it was essentially a Bitcoin Cash event. And so I met you and a bunch of the Bitcoin Cash team that led to our two-part episode with Amari. But then I've seen you again at multiple events, at Ethereum events, at the Zcash conference. Today at Ethereum Classic event. And then we're both going to DevCon next week. So tomorrow, right.

And so what would you say is sort of your job? What does it mean to be a community relations manager for a mining company? So that's a good question because Bitcoin is very unique. not just because of its size, but because also its role, that it plays in all the proof of all cryptocurrency that it makes products for. It impacts those cryptocurrency community. It's an integral part of the ecosystem. So what we do matters a lot to these cryptocurrency ecosystems.

So we want to act more responsibly, and that's why a major part of my job is to maintain dialogue with these cryptocurrency communities. So it's more with the sort of communities rather than with the miners themselves. So there's other people who handle maybe, I don't know, minor relationships. Yes, that would be the sales team of. the Antminer brand. So they would deal with that. And so that's why you see me at events like the ETC Summit now or at the Zcash conference or the Ethereum conference or other events where there are multiple communities coming together. Yes, that's a major part of my job. The second part,

a smaller part is a PR strategy for between the holding company. So I don't do PR for the Antminor brand or for the BTC.com brand or the Antpool. They have their own PR in marketing teams. I only do strategic PR for the holding company. And if there's any guidance needed for these brands, I give them. That's the second part of my job. Can you give a brief summary? So the listeners have an idea. What are some of the major brands

that Bitmain has? So Bitmain is the best example of vertical integration in the crypto ecosystem. So Bitmain makes the chips. It makes the machines. It builds and operates mining farms for others as a service. It also builds and operates mining farms

where it has its own stake as well, which is where it's mining for itself, which is a smaller part of the business. Then it also operates mining pools that these mining farms would connect to. And it also has a collaboration with the cloud mining service now. It's called Bit Deer, B-I-T-E-E-R. And of course, another major business of Bitmain is the AI business, where we are making chips for AI, where we are making chips like T-P-Us, like Google's T-P-Us. We also call them T-P-Us.

This one is called Sopon, S-O-P-H-O-N. Your listeners can go to Sopon.a-I to check it out or even place orders. We have four generations of new chips already released in AI since 2016. So that's going strong. Yeah, these are major businesses of B-M-M-M-D-M-N. It probably doesn't cover everything between us, which is a lot of things that B-B-P-M- does in this space. We also invest in a lot of startups and open-source projects in the space to grow this space.

Yeah, these are the major things we do. Cool. And so, you know, I actually asked you earlier if we could get the new CEO of Bittman. What was his name again? Haichai Wang. Haichai Wang. But, you know, you mentioned to me that he tends to be more of a sort of reserved guy, doesn't prefer to make large public appearances, which is, I guess you could say quite a bit of a departure from the previous CEO, Jihan, because, you know, he was very well known, very active in the community. Is this like, was this a decision that was made from, you know, as a. purposeful shift from the past, or is this a general, like, a cultural difference between Chinese companies and America and while Ji Han maybe was an exception? To answer your question, it is the latter. There's a cultural difference in companies in the West and companies in China because of the social political nature of China. So the companies are less

out there, and they have a less in need than companies in the West to be out there. Yeah, that's the major reason. And talking about the difference in back then and now, The difference is mainly because of Ji Han. He's a well-known person in the cryptosphere even before Bitmain was a thing. Because he translated the Bitcoin white paper to Chinese. He was the first person in the world to do that. Oh, wow. Didn't know that.

Yeah, because he saw the value of it. He saw the value of Bitcoin before anyone in China or anyone who speaks Chinese only saw the value. And then he started Bitmain much later. And because he was driven by this cause. and when the great scaling debate of Bitcoin happened, he had a strong opinion on it. That's why he was out there even when he was CEO of Pitmaid, because he really cares about Bitcoin and the road it's taking.

He really wanted Bitcoin to grow the wage. He believes it was the best way, and many others believed too. And that is why you saw him more out there. And when the great scaling debate was over by Bitcoin cash forking off from Bitcoin, there was no need, and you didn't see Jehan out there after that like he was before. And then changing, getting a new CEO was just a normal evolution of the company, which is the same in the West or anywhere when the company grows so big. The CEOs often tend to assign the role to someone who they think is a better person to be at the wheel. And that's what happened with the new change.

And the new CEO, like I mentioned, companies in China do not have this need or prefer not to be out there so much. So he's not so out there yet. And so you come and take his place? I can't because there's so much happening at Bitmain that I don't know about. It's such a big company. So I can't. Maybe I know only the tip of the ice book, but the CEO would know everything. So he would be surely patched better representative of Bitmain than I can ever be.

Yeah, because I've heard people refer to you as Gihon's right-hand man. And so I figured maybe that's why I agreed to the interview. Oh, I think that's misguiding to say that because, There are many people that are helping Jehan, and it's not just me. I'm just one of them. But I guess I'm more out there in the cryptocurrency communities outside China. So that's why you may have heard of that from some people in the cryptocurrency space outside China. So could you tell me a little bit about the history of Bitmain?

And so, yeah, when was it created? And was it always a mining ASIC company? Or was that something they pivoted into? Who's the founders? So that's a good question. I will tell you what I know. which won't be every detail, but I will go into as many details as I can here. So Gian was always into researching about currencies,

the role they play in the evolution of mankind and the world today. And when he read about Bitcoin, despite the language gap and the cultural gap, he knew it was a game changer and it would change the world we live in. And so he bet everything he could, even borrowed money from his friends and family to buy more Bitcoins. And even when the price plummeted the first time from like, nearly $40 to $50 to $2, he only borrowed more money and maxed out his credit card to buy more Bitcoins. And then he was just counting the days it would take him to do a job, which like the one he was doing at that time,

to pay off all that money if Bitcoin didn't work out. And then, yeah, it worked out eventually. And he also started a small mining operation somewhere in China. I don't know the details of that, but it wasn't as big as he would imagine it to be now. And then that paid off well. And then he invested in Frightcat's startup through the global Bitcoin stock exchange back then, which was mentioned and introduced on Bitcoin Talk.org back in the day. And that paid off very well.

Then he researched on A6 because A6 was how Fratcat was giving such good returns to its investors, to his investors. And then he somehow stumbled across Mike Rhee, the co-founder, who had previously approached the VC firm that Jihan was working for to raise funds for another startup that Mikri wanted to do. So now Jihan, when he has this idea, stumbles across Mikri again, explains to Mikri about his ideas on ASIC making for Bitcoin mining. And Mikri, after thinking more about it and researching Bitcoin a bit,

I think Mike Rie said it was two hours that he took to understand Bitcoin and research it. He said yes. And that's how they founded Bitcoin. Was it a Freudian slip? Are they maybe actually Satoshi? I don't know what to say. So they started with ASIC manufacturing from the get-go. They didn't-

Not manufacturing. Fabulous design. The design. So Bitmin is a fabulous design, ASIC design company. We don't manufacture it. They're manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan. A factory we outsource it to.

Just like most fabulous chip companies that you've heard of, like Nvidia or AMD or ARM or Intel or Apple. Oh, Intel, sorry. Makes their own chips. They are the exception. But everyone else outsources them to a factory like TSMC. This is the best in the world at the moment to make chips. But so then the goal was always ASIC design, not mining pool.

Because I know there's a couple of ASIC manufacturers or designers who started running mining, and then they decided, oh, you know, to get the edge, we need to start building our own stuff. Seems like Bitman came from the other direction, really. Yeah. I mean, I think every other example that I know of today followed Bitmain's lead. They saw what Bitman did and they did the same. Bitman is the best example of vertical integration in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. So Bitman makes the chips.

Bipman makes the miners, sells them on its website, so it has a really retail website too, that it's operating. Then it operates builds and maintains mining farms of the larger scale. They have the most experience. And also operates mining pools that these mining farms would connect to later. And it also has Bitcoin wallet under the brand of BDC.com. It also has BDC.com blockchain analysis and explorer and other analytic services for the blockchain. So, yeah, it's very well vertically integrated into the space.

And when Bitmain's example was out there, others did the same. Cool. So let's jump into talking a little bit about the mining hardware. So currently, you know, Bitmain obviously is the largest manufacturer or seller of ASIC hardware. do you know roughly what percent of you know i've heard numbers like as high as up to like 70 of the asic market uh do you do you have any more you know precise numbers of like roughly how many let's say i guess it's hard to say because of different coins let's say bitcoin as an example of what do you guys have an estimate of how what percentage of the asic market it's unknowable

because uh you don't know who which machine mined uh the coin or because it's mindful mind how about by asic sales though i think we've known never done this kind of comprehensive analysis, and it's also hard because we can't be sure which customer who bought tons of machines from us maybe three years ago is still mining with those machines. We don't know. So it's really unknowable, even if we did such an analysis, it would be way off the correct answer. But it's a widely accepted fact and something that Frost and Sullivan reported in their report that we have about 70% of the market. Even at day at the conference at the Ethereum Classic Summit, you know, you were on a mining panel,

just great panel. And there seems to be like a sense of resentment in many different communities often against Bitmain, where that it's a little bit, maybe too big. And to me, it's a little bit of villainizing your success in a way. So yeah, why do you think that like there is this general sense of resentment towards Bitmain as a company? They're kind of seen as sometimes as a a bit of a boogeyman in the space. That's a good question. So, of course, I've given it a lot of thought in my role as PR for Bitmain.

And first, I used to think it was because of our involvement in the great-skilling debate that all this started. Well, it did start because of that. It increased this political hatred against Bitmain at that time when we were in the great-skilling debate. But it stayed that way,

not because of that, It's still that way because we have become so competitive and big, and this reminds people in the cryptocurrency communities who join these cryptocurrency communities to escape the establishment outside the space of the establishment. So that is a reason that we, that is inescapable when you are competitive and successful or as successful as you can be. And that is something that we couldn't have avoided, even if we were not involved in the great scaling debate.

And that is something that I was reminded of again today when there was this panel today in the ETC summit about governance or community. And someone asked who would be the biggest threat to ETC. And the answer promptly came from one of the panelists was the person with the maximum of money. Yeah, cryptocurrency communities, by nature of their trustlessness, by nature of their suspicion of the establishment, have this inherent suspicion against any competitive, or established player. Do you think that there's, the mining space is inherently centralizing? Is there a sort of fundamental incompatibility between competitive capitalism,

which the mining space is, and decentralization? Thanks for asking that question. I don't think it's the case. I think what is often described as centralization in this context is actually just competition. and competition will always lead to one player emerging competitive than the others if it's fair competition. And so the more fair the competition is, the more you will see a successful player emerge. And that successful player will be the victim of this hatred of so-called centralization. Are you familiar with the economist Joseph Shumperter?

No. He also is a well-known political economist. His entire theory of competition is basically he thinks that in a competitive marketplace, you will have these monopolies and oligoplies, but competition really comes through innovation. And the term he's most famous, he coined was this term called creative destruction, where you kind of, at any given moment, there is no ASIC manufacturer that maybe, you know, there's one ISIC manufacturer that's the largest, which is you guys. but competition, at one moment there might not be,

looked like there's a amount of competition, but over time, if you look in the scale, maybe who is that largest ASIC manufacturer at any given time keeps changing? Yeah, that's true. So before, when I joined the space, Betmain was one of the underdogs. The biggest players or the most hailed players

were Butterfly Labs, Pondulis, K&C, minor. These were the big names. And then there were some others that surely were scams. they were the big names, and Bitman was just one of the underdogs. And of course, Fright Cat, that's the one that made the best miners, and there was no reason to doubt they won't. They shipped their products.

They had the best product at that time. And there was, of course, Avalon, the first ASIC manufacturer in the world with the biggest head start. Bittman came from nowhere with not enough resources to compete with these well-funded companies. Many of these were well-funded companies. So how did it do it? by just being the best by taking... So I was working for a competitor of Bitmain at that time

and all of our customers would come back and tell us everything we are trying to do, Bitmin was doing the best in that. So they would tell me that, hey, your product shipped later than Bitmain's product. When I ordered the Bitmin's product at the same time when it reached me before yours did, hey, your machine couldn't work seven days even after I got it. My Bitman product has been working for one month

and no problems. Every time, everything that happened wrong in any other manufacturer, it turns out Bittman was doing right. And these were not very innovative things. These were not very groundbreaking things they were doing right. They were just simple things like supply chain management, efficient supply chain management, a machine that is reliable,

machine that performs as advertised. So what do you say it was more of a operational project or it wasn't more of a technical, like? In the beginning, it was operational, because the first chip that the S-1, the first machine from Bitmain, wasn't even using a totally in-house design. The chip was designed by outsourcing it to other chip engineers from Russia and some US and some outsourced designs.

It's only after S3, I believe, that Bitmain made its own in-house, completely in-house design of chips. So it wasn't purely technical. In the beginning, it was operational. And then it became technical when they had more funds and when they saw the returns being promising. I see.

And so you guys started working on, you know, the first famous miner was the S1, and that came out in 2015, I think, right? It wasn't the most competitive. When S2 wasn't the most competitive, even S3 wasn't the most competitive. And S5 turned out to be the most competitive. Was that like your iPhone product,

where it's like, oh, now we... Yeah, that was the game changer. And it wasn't just because, I mean, we could have had competition, maybe. I don't know. But it came out when the 2015 bear market happened. So this was a make-a-break for us at that time. That's been all the other ASIC manufacturers were going out of business.

Yes. So we would have gone out of business too if we did not release a very competitive product, which we managed to. That kept Bitmain alive through the bear market of 2015. Not thriving, just alive. And after that, yeah, when the bear market turned around and yeah, Bitmain was already prepared for it. When did you guys start working on A6 for other chains as well?

We started doing that much after I joined Bitmain, which was in 2016. I cannot remember which was the first alt-coin miner we released. But maybe it was the light coin miner. Yeah, I'm not sure now. But I think it was the light coin miner near the end of 2016, somewhere in 2016. So that's when we ventured into other coins. And we never turned around. We've been making crypto.

Pro-Carency miners since then. How many different hashing algorithms do you guys make minors for? On the top of my head, maybe five. I mean, because it's a tough question, because we are not making them right now. Maybe we made light coin miners back in the day. We made eth-hash miners two years ago. You're not selling them now. And yeah, I don't know if we are going to make them again in the future because that's

part of our confidential R&D in-house. Maybe we can walk through a little bit about what the life cycle of a chip is. is because, you know, I'm actually not too familiar with this. And so it's so it's not like there's a constant production of like, you know, most manufacturing, you know, you have a constant shipment of, okay, we have like a couple hundred A6 coming off the assembly line every day. So what you seem to be describing is it's like, okay, a batch production and then sale process. Or one thing I am aware of in the mining world is just often sometimes sale and then batch production. So could you walk through a little bit about what is the strategy team at Bitmain

decided, okay, you know what? We want to go build ASICs for Zcash. What comes next? What's the timeline? So the timeline is changing depending on the difficulty of the algorithm or the difficulty of the particular ASIC. I believe it used to be the whole product life cycle. When I joined the space, it used to be three months, the whole cycle. That time, these chips were like 14 nanometer, even bigger processes than 14. nanometer. Because in three months, the difficulty of Bitcoin was rising like crazy. It was just skyrocketing. So after three months, your miner becomes obsolete. In general computing, they have this Moore's law of like doubling every two years. Do you guys have like a equivalent in the mining world?

It's just moors law on steroids. There's no word for it. But is there a, you know, okay, these chips become deprecated in how long? There's no such law. it just depends on the competition. So if another player comes up with a better chip, it will keep pushing the difficulty even higher and make the difficulty increase even steeper than it was before. So it depends a lot on the competition.

So when I joined, there was a lot of competition. Like I mentioned, this was, oh, I didn't mention now. This was like when everyone was thinking, Bitcoin mining was analogy to the California gold rush. Everyone thought, make the shovels and you will make more money than the gold diggers. And so everyone was making A6. when I joined the space, there were so many companies around the world making A6.

And that was pushing the difficulty even more steeper. And if you release a new ASIC miner, which is most efficient to mine Bitcoin in the world now, maybe next week someone else releases one. And then you have a problem at your hands. And the only solution is to release a better one than your previous one before any other competitor does. There was no other way around it. And so in the beginning, the life cycle was like three months, then it became six months, then one year.

and then when we released the S-9, which was... One that everyone started off. Game changer at that time. Yeah, the Antminor S-9, based on the 16 nanometer process. That was breaking like this threshold in the industry, a technical threshold that everyone was stuck with. And the S-9 stayed for the longest time in Bitmain's history or in the history of Bitcoin,

no one generation of mine has stayed this long. I was looking on the website today, and I think you guys are still selling the S-9. Yes, they are still being sold. People are still buying them or buying even secondhand. S-9 miners now. So S-Times survived or was profitable even for masses. Of course, there are people who can get almost free electricity. For them, even an S-7 is still profitable. But for the masses, or generally speaking, S-9 was profitable for about three years. That is a big change compared to

the three-months lifecycle that I entered the industry with. So yeah, let's jump back into the timeline. So, okay, back to the story of Z-Cash ASIC. So, okay, we decided to make the ASIC. Do we start designing first or do we start like, you know, or do we try to gauge, try to get pre-orders? How does that work? We start designing the chip. Well, before we even deciding to design the chip, we will see what the community's beliefs or sentiment is about these things.

We don't want to do something that seems like we are fighting the community or doing something against their roadmap. We don't want to disrupt what their plans are. So first we make sure that the community doesn't have any, you know, heart feelings against such plans that we may have. Because we don't want to make any investment off over time and money on something that the community wouldn't like, right? It's counterproductive.

Aren't there some cases, though, like pretty well publicized about, like, you know, sometimes the community wasn't quite fully aware or accepting. The one I know is I'm good friend to David from SIA. And so, you know, I know from the SIA community, there was quite a bit of drama last year. Yes, so the community relations part, we have, although we have increased this since the last two years, before that it wasn't so effective,

and we didn't do it for every community, because we have limited resources at our end. Right now it's just me doing it, and we're looking at expanding the team, so I have more help, so I can keep my ears on the ground in many communities, not just one at a time. Usually it's hard to keep up with so much happening overnight

all the time in different time zones for one person. So, SIA wasn't something we were following at that time. and also CIA algorithm was purposely an ASEC-friendly algorithm because the founder envisioned making money by selling A-6 for his own coin. So that makes it easy for anyone

to make A-SIC-minor-FOR. It's kind of assumed that they were going to be welcoming of A-6s. Yes, that's what you would assume. But it seems like he was very surprised that the biggest ASIC mining manufacturer, ASIC miner-maker in the space, was making A-6, or now

they will make ASICs for a coin that is ASIC friendly. Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me. One of the common critiques against many ASIC manufacturing companies is this idea of hidden mining. And so could you like maybe describe a little bit about what hidden mining is? So hidden mining or secret mining as it's popularly called is a practice of an ASIC maker using next generation products secretly to mine a cryptocurrency and not releasing it to the market or the public.

and our policy on secret mining is no tolerance. We have a zero tolerance policy published on our blog. It's part of our transparency initiatives. What does it mean to have a zero tolerance? Is it like there were situations where like employees of Bitmain or some basic manufacturers were mining into... That means we will never do it and we will never endorse someone who does it. That's what it means.

Would you also say, has Bitmain ever secret mined before? Never. because Bitmin's always been working at a very large scale and its major income generator or source of income is selling the machines, which is less riskier than mining it, mining with the machines yourself. What about scenarios, for example, in like Minero,

there were cases where Monero was concerned that there were A6 and they kind of announced that they're going to hard for it to fix it and then the hash rate dropped by like 80%. And this is right around the same time, About two months before Bitmain announced their, I think it was the XM3s, or I forgot what the exact number was. X3, I guess. X3, yeah.

Yeah, so what would be your response to those allegations? I believe no one in the community raised allegations against Bitmain. It was quite clear for everyone in the community that wasn't Bitmain doing it. So I heard during this conference, ETC Summit, too, people speculating on other ASIC manufacturers having done it. I'm sure it could be some of the ASIC manufacturers who could have done it. probably a smaller one because a one that is big of the size of Bitmain, it doesn't make sense because there are thousands of people who will find out at Bitmain and the word will get out.

So there's no reason for us to do that compared to making money by selling the machine instantly. So yeah, we are just disincentivized to do that, but it could have been a smaller player. And also there are players who, like David that you mentioned of Secault, they advertise their business model as being secret mining as a service. That's their business model. So assuming they even have one single customer, secret mining is happening. If we assume that companies like Davids even has one customer. One thing I never quite understood is why is secret mining so frowned upon?

Okay, I understand that if you promise to sell customers and you're mining on stuff that they paid for, yes. I guess my question is, why does Bitmain sell ASICs instead of mining using them? As I mentioned, my talk to, the major source of income for Bitmain is selling the machines. And more importantly, selling a mining experience to the users of the machine. Because we just don't want to sell the machine once. We want to keep the customers coming back for more. And to do that, we have to sell a good mining experience to the customer, not just a machine, which is the reason Bitmain succeeded during the time when everyone was making A6, you know, the back in the day.

now if we start competing unfairly with new generation A6 with our customers, it will jeopardize their mining experience and our cash cow. Why even sell in the first place? I agree. If you're selling some and you're competing with the customers. So now assuming BitPen is a smaller company and doesn't want to stay in the business for more than one or two years and just wants to make quick money, we would have to be smaller for sure. I think it actually needs a larger company in a way where instead of selling, you guys have

the largest ASIC manufacturing, and now instead of selling it to a bunch of miners around the world, wouldn't it be better to use your economies of scale, become, find the largest warehouse in the world you can with, and, you know, get a great partnership with an electricity company and just run the largest mining farm? Why sell your ASICs instead of using them yourself? The simplest answer is to distribute risk. If you do it ourselves, we are betting on the price going up. betting on others not doing the same. We are betting on the difficulty staying stable. So we are betting on a lot of things and imagining that kind of investment, it's just the crazy risky to do that. That makes sense, but

you know, if you're trying to hedge, wouldn't it make sense to maybe sell off a portion, not vast majority, right? So that's what we kind of do, but we keep a very small portion of the farm ourselves and we sell the vast majority of the mining farm. That's our mining farm business. It just seems very odd to me. The road's like, and is this what like all ASIC manufacturing... A smaller ASIC manufacturer may find it profitable to mine themselves, especially if their miners are not competitive enough to sell in the market against Bitcoin's miners.

Then it would make sense for them to do it in secret with some very friendly electricity cost or some other cost-cutting measures to keep it profitable in some time. Because I've thought about buying an ASIC before. just for fun just to try it out. And then I was thinking about it. Like, why is this company selling this to me? Like, it seems that if it's profitable to mind using this, they should be using it themselves.

Clearly, if it's not, I'm the schmuck for buying this when it might not actually... Okay, so it's more about, you know, risk management, sort of. So what percentage of A6 does Bitmain that are manufactured does Bitmain use itself? Like, not in order to sell ever, but just... Almost negligible. negligible. So mining for ourselves is the smallest part of the business. We do it just to keep our feet wet so we know what the customers go through. And because it's also a part of a business where we build mining farms for others, how can we be doing that if we don't build mining farms for ourselves or if we've never built any mining farm? So we build the mining farm. Maybe if we have a share in the mining farm that we built, we would not have more than 10 to maybe 13% in one mining farm. That's the part we will own. The rest will be given to other

investors who can mine any coin they want in that share of the mining farm, or maybe not even mine a cryptocurrency, maybe they can be using for big data, AI applications, whatever they want to do with their part of the data center. Okay, so you guys don't run a large mining farm, but what you guys do do is run some of the largest mining pools. And so how did that start? So the two biggest ones in Bitcoin are antpool and BTC.com. one question for us right off the bat, why have two pools instead of merging into one pool?

That's a good question. Because naturally you wouldn't think of having two pools instead of one. So for answering your first part of the question, which is why we did the pools at all. So it's the founder's vision, the founder's vision that we started making A6 when people did not think making A6 would be that profitable. They started doing that long ago. And then it was part of their vision to have us worded. integrated into the space. So not just making the chips or the machines or the mining farms, but also the mining pools that the mining farms connect to. So it's part of the vertical integration vision that they had. And now why do we have two pools? It's because we want to keep Bitcoin as decentralized as we can. We realize that having a lot of hash power in one pool

causes problems if the pool has some vulnerability or some problem. So these pools are one of the The second pool that came later, BDC.com, started as open source pool, totally open source. The world's first, totally open source, large-scale pool. That was the vision of the founders to have an open-source pool. And Poole is not an open-source pool. So that's one big difference. What does it mean to be an open-source pool versus a closed-source pool? It means all the code is out there.

Anyone can just copy the code and make. And after Anpool was founded, many other pools that came after it are using the tools and competitive advantages that BTC.com have. They're using those because they could copy it from the... code of BDC.com pool. The reason for separation is as a security mechanism to avoid software vulnerabilities and pool software? Yes, and to decentralize the mining space more.

So the teams are totally different. The engineers are totally different. Their CEOs are different of BDC.com and Poole. They are located in separate places, Singapore, Beijing. They have, yeah, they're totally different. How answerable or influenceable? are they by the Bitmain holding company? Their job is to make profit, and that's what they're doing.

And so Bitmin holding company will not tell them to do something else, as long as they are making profit. These two pools are now, I think, the second and third largest mining pools in Bitcoin. It's changing all the time. Sometimes they're first and second. Sometimes they're first and third with Poolin coming to the second. So Poulin was founded by a former BDC.com employee, three former BTC.com employees

who started the BTC.com mining pool with the open source code. So yeah, they have that experience from Bitmain's BTC.com pool. And so if you take these two together, do you know roughly what the hash rate of BTC.com and pool together are? It's always changing,

but I guess it's about 35 to 40%, maybe even lesser. Yeah, now maybe lesser, 32 to 40% in between that. I know there's also always these conspiracy theories about Bitmain's relationship as well with Via BTC, where it is a separate company independent, but there is heavy investment from BitMain and stuff. And so if you add that into a level of influence that BitMain has, do you think now we're over 50%? No, still not.

Because YBTC is one of the smaller pools now. Okay. And also we published a blog post about it. long ago about our association with YBDC. So we invested in YBDC, but we have almost no decision making power there. So the decision making power of the founder, that is Hypo Yang, is about 10 or 20 times more than any of the investors. So yeah, we have almost no influence in that way. No legally binding influence. But of course, if Hypo Yang wants to follow Bitmain or do what Bitmain is doing or go with the ideology of Bitman, that's up to him.

And that's up to any other pool in the world for them to do it or not. But yeah, we don't have any legal influence or any binding influence over YBDC. Why do you think it is that the Bitmain operated mining pools are so popular? So I think the answer is very simple. How did Bitmain become so big?

It didn't have a head start, it was an underdog, it didn't even have the resources to make A6. The design had to be outsourced in the beginning. it's because they just found everything that the customer cares for and made it the best possible. And that is what the mining pools did too. So when I joined the space, the biggest mining pool was ghash.io,

and they had 50% of the hash rate of Bitcoin and no one thought anyone could ever replace those pools. But then a few years later, Bitmain has the world's biggest pool called ad pool. And much later, then Bitmain starts another pool with a totally different team, totally open source, which also becomes the world's biggest pool beating Bitman's own are the biggest pool and pool.

I think the reason for these fluctuations is because of the competitive advantages these pools offer, and these competitive advantages are very concrete. For example, you would go to the biggest mining farm owners and you would ask them what they need most from the pool. And depending on what he says, you can provide many of those things. Maybe he wants a dedicated customer support.

Okay, you provide him that. maybe he wants a better rate on what he's mining on your pool. You can provide him that if he's really big. You can provide him a special rate. You can, yeah, these kind of things. It's just collecting feedback from the customer, giving what the customer wants. It's as simple as that.

But not everyone manages to do it, but Bitcoin managed to pull it off, not once but twice. So jumping back to the ASIC manufacturing side, who would you say is nowadays your largest competitor when it comes to ASIC manufacturer? I do not know who the biggest competitor is, but it keeps changing.

I believe there are some good machines in the market, machines from eBang, machines from Bitfury, from Kanan, the Beijing based to the company, the first company to make A6, ASIC miners, still making ASIC miners. Inosilicon, yeah, these are the ones making A6 for Bitcoin.

One of the concerns about A6 is that they're very sticky. And like if you have a large market share, there's definitely, there's probably some sort of, you know, as in all hardware stuff, there's economies of scale. And if I had a up and start ASIC company, it would be very difficult for me to get the access to the fabs

and the connections and stuff that Bittmain has. Do you think these concerns are founded? I do not think so. Because, again, coming from my personal experience, I joined the space when Bitmain was an underdog. You know, the only thing that made them as big as they are now, or we are now, is being competitive and doing whatever you can best. It's unfair competition.

There was no unfair competition. There was no Bitcoin god or Satoshi helping Bitmain, pulling some strength, changing Bitcoin's code to favor Bitmain's mining machines or something. There was no manipulation. It was just pure competition. And that is how Bitmain became as established as it is. now. And similarly, another player could come in and do the same, even

now, today. Mining Bitcoin was that profitable and stays as profitable? I see bigger players from outside the BitCryptospace, entering the space to make chips. Yeah, I was going to ask, what happens when are you guys prepared for, let's say, an Intel or Nvidia? It's hard to say.

They're surely more established than Bitcoin in chip design and chip manufacturing even. When it comes to Intel, they even make their own chips. So they are surely more established. But I don't know what will happen. How do you think the mining space as a whole would change if one of these manufacturers comes in?

I think then people would finally see Bitmain as the Messiah as the savior. Because right now, a lot of the hatred that Bitmain gets is for being quite big and making more profit than other ASIC manufacturers. And once there's a bigger company

making much more profit than Bitmain, people would see hope that Bitmain challenges that company and takes a big part of the profit share of that company. Has there been any hints or, like, rumors of one of these big players entering? So there were, no, there is no any concrete news or any concrete rumors, but just talking about rumors, there were rumors about Samsung making chips to mine crypto, and they were headlines like Samsung's going to enter the space and going to take Bitmain head-on and stuff like that.

and they were so baseless these news because Samsung is a fab. They do not make chips or machines. It was just a fab order by one of the other companies that make A6. And some company just ordered a Samsung to make chips for cryptocurrency mining for themselves, not for Samsung, but for whichever company it was. So as we mentioned earlier, you know, Bitmain got quite a bit of notoriety a little bit because of its large role in the great scaling debates, which eventually, you know, led to Bitmain being a large part of the initial creation of Bitcoin Cash.

So could you tell me a little bit about why, you know, like we mentioned, like, why go from a neutral arms dealer to someone with a heavy stake and, like, political opinion when it comes to... As I mentioned today in my talk, too, that Bitmain has always adhered to its founding values. And the founders of Bitmain, they bet, bet, on Bitcoin's economics, Bitcoin's technology, Bitcoin's power to change the world, at a time when no one thought much of Bitcoin or hadn't even heard about Bitcoin, that's when the founders of Bitmain bet on Bitcoin. And that is something that Bitmain sticks to all the time. So during the great scaling debate, Bitmain continued to stick to the power of Bitcoin to change the world, which at that time, the founders believed it was Bitcoin's ability to be,

an efficient medium of exchange, more importantly than just a store of value. So that's why. There was an interesting quote today that Charles Hoskinson gave during his end speech, which I kind of really liked, where he described minors as sort of mercenaries, where they're not people who, and so he was explaining why he likes proof of stake over proof of work. And he said that minors are these sort of mercenaries who are just, you know, showing up and doing their job and mining for the profit, and then they don't have a stake in the project. And from what it seems like what you're describing, it seems that the goal of Bitmain

is not be a mercenary, and you guys do want to be active participants in the governance and ecosystem around the coins that you're participating in. Yes and no. So there are coins like Bitcoin, which are truly decentralized, which has no founding association, no foundation, deciding, what? happens to the protocol, and same with Bitcoin Cash. And they are also the coins that our founders started Bitmain with in their hearts. So these are very important to Bitmain.

But when it comes to protocol changes on other coins, we are still learning. We are not in a position yet to know what is best for those coins. But as we learn, we hope to contribute more actively and do what is best for the long-term growth of those ecosystems. But at this time, we are just listening and learning from the communities themselves. Do you think it is the role of the mining pool operators to be these active participants in governance? And this is sort of what 2017 was about. It was just like, at least the Bitcoiners, frame it as just like battle for control between the miners and the users.

And from my perspective, it seems clear that the developers and the users won that battle. Would you say that's a fair assessment of the results of the last two years? It's hard to say yes, because if I do, it is misleading. I'll tell you why. So you're talking about Segwit 2x versus USF. I think that's probably the most famous example, yeah. USF won because it was the case where you create a nuclear bomb and you say, I will blow this bomb and everyone on planet Earth if you don't do what I say.

and then you get what you wanted because most of the world wants the best interest of the earth or people on the earth. And that is what USF was. It was very risky for Bitcoin. It could have the risk of reorg wipeouts because it wasn't with any replay protection. And Peter Reisen published a paper or report

or it was a BUIP he published which explained that the chances of a reorg wipeout if USF was done were as high as 11% with just 70% of the hash rate Did you just try really quickly what a wipeout it means? Wipeout is where a second fork can replay transactions on the original chain

and wipe out the transaction history, which is where the value of Bitcoin comes from. So if that's ever wiped out, Bitcoin will have zero value or it's just plummet. Yeah, people ask me all the time and people probably hear that question to everyone in the crypto space hears that question from people outside the space,

which is what gives us? Bitcoin value. It is the ledger. And it is the fact that everyone in the world knows that this Bitcoin that I gave to you is given to you by me and it's yours now. If there's no ledger, Bitcoin has no value. That is how grave this threat of USF was. So if you think that the people who were creating noise with USF hats won, yeah, they did. But they won because the victory was given to them by the people who really cared about Bitcoin more than the people who were wearing these USF hats and talking on social media. Recently, Blockstream announced their new mining pool.

And I have some mixed feelings about that. But one thing I was super excited to see was in their mining pool, they're using the better hash protocol, which gives a lot of power back to individual miners and away from the pool operator. So you're mining with a pool so you can get the reward sharing. They don't control your governance participation. Would this be something that Bitmain would be interesting? in looking into with its pools?

So at Bitmain, like I mentioned before, in the example of how Bitmain became from an underdog chipmaker to the biggest chipmaker in the space, or from no mining pools to having one biggest large-scale mining pool and then having two largest mining pools. It's because it listens to the customers and give what the customers want. And right now, most of the mining farm owners, they do not want to choose themselves. They don't want to decide and read every day and follow what. what's happening in the scaling debates of Bitcoin or what's happening on the Bitcoin protocol level debates and vote on things.

They don't want to do that. They want to outsource that to the mining pool and let the mining pool give it its profit. They give the miner his profit. And that is what would give them a good mining experience. And that's very important for Bitcoin to do. So if the day comes when all mining pool owners are most of our customers are asking for a better hash kind of algorithm, sure, why not? Are there cases where maybe miners might want to just delegate to you guys what coins to even mine?

So, for example, let you guys figure out whether to mine Bitcoin or Bitcoin cash and allow you to shuffle voting mining power across chains like that? That's already the case in a way because every miner and every mining pool offers its miners or users the option to automatically switch between whichever is more profitable. and most users choose that. So the users don't need to think, even the mining pool doesn't need to manually decide. It's just automatic. Given the level of voting power that, you know, Bitmain does have, or Bitmain-owned mining pools have,

how does it manage balancing that with governance decisions that may affect Bitmain's primary business? So the historical example is that, case about covert ASIC boost. But even today, in Ethereum, we have this debate around, you know, Prague-Pow versus keeping E-Tash and you guys have the E-9 miners already. So, for one, can you tell us a little bit of the history of, you know, for people who aren't very familiar about the ASIC boost? So ASIC boost was an optimization technique for mining Bitcoin. So three years ago, we're envisioning ASIC boost to be an open patent in the future. We started adding chips, support on our chips.

for ASIC boost. And then two years ago, some known malicious actors in the Bitcoin community raised allegations that against BitMain saying BitMain is secretly using ASIC boost

to compete with BitMain's own customers which are the biggest income generators for BitMain and made it seems like some kind of an attack on Bitcoin. Although we had never used it on the main net, we had tested on the test net as all.

And later it turns out that the same people who were raising these allegations against BitMain were hailing another minor maker called Dragon Mint Minor as the Bitmain Killer. And that one was also using Asick Boost to get some kind of a competitive edge

over Bitmain's minor of that time. Majority of the community wants to implement ProgPow. At what point does BitMain, let's say it has the majority hash power, which it does not right now in Ethereum, a coalition of miners who, they all have ASICs, and they don't want to switch a PraguePow, when do the miners give in to the community when it hurts their...

In this case, it wouldn't be for Bitmain to decide. This would be for these miners that you mentioned. Does Bitmay not run a mining pool on Ethereum? We have on Apple. So you do have to make part of a decision, right? In this case, we wouldn't because we would let the users of the mining pool decide. And the users will most likely, in such a case, if there are many considerable number of users who are mining Ethereum with A6,

they will probably fork it off. They will probably keep the original chain and let Ethereum fork off with ProkPow. And that's what's happened with so many other coins. With SIA coin, when the founder of Sia coin decided to monopolize A6 by activating some kind of backdoor that he had put in his own cryptocurrency.

It's Sia Classic was found. Sia Classic continues the original algorithm which is open to any ASIC manufacturer while Sia coin can only be mined by A6 manufactured by the founder of Sia coin. So when it comes to this decision-making, for example, let's say Bitmain is signaling to stay on ETH-Hash, anti-Prog-Pow. Now, enough of the community or of your miners want to switch to promote ProgPow, right? Do you think it's the responsibility of the mining pool operator to change their signaling, or is the onus on the miners to vote with their feet by pointing to a different mining pool?

I think the ideal result, or what would actually happen if it was a bit main control mining pool, is the mining pool would offer services to both, the Prokpao people and to also the Eth Hash people. But they offer the way to signal both? I'm talking about for the governance process of how miners are signaling. The miners would signal then, not the pool itself. By moving with their feed. Yeah, they would give them some kind of options, maybe like a survey, for all their users

because the pool users, there's no defined ways for them to vote. The users are for pool. So the pool may send out a survey for everyone to fill up. That would be a way to go forward. Let's move on and now talk a little bit

about, you know, what's the more current events of Bickman over the last year or so. You know, you guys had a pretty publicly attempted IPO. Could you talk a little bit about that? So we redisclosed the information of our IPO in a blog post in the beginning of this year, where we summed our last year

and talked about the IPO as well. So we had applied for the IPO in Hong Kong, as you know, because the application is public. And it wasn't accepted by the regulators in Hong Kong exchange. So we plan to go IPO in the future at an appropriate time. You know, one of the things I've also heard, though, is that part of the hesitation, you know, there's maybe a little bit of bad timing with the IPO and let the Bitcoin market had just crashed. And how much do you think that was an impact on the IPO process? It's hard for me to say because I don't know what goes on in the regulators' brains or, and I shouldn't even speculate on what the regulators think or may have thought. But if I was a decision maker for Hong Kong exchange, I would certainly see it as a

negative point and not a positive point in the application if the prices were too low, because an exchange always does care about its revenue as well. So if they can see a new listing that can bring a lot of revenue for the exchange, they might make some tradeoffs. And so this shift towards this AI and machine learning aspect of the company, would you say that this is sort of in response to hedging against the crypto market as a whole, where like, you know, Pitman doesn't want to put all its eggs in one basket of saying, oh, we're completely dependent on the status of the crypto space. Well, it wasn't the case, and it's not a shift because we started making chips for AI in 2016, and we've released four generations since then. So we've been making chips even through the bull market of Bitcoin.

There's no shift of focus. It's just another business of Pitman. And it's not about hedging our risk on the crypto market. It is about taking our success and expertise and experience. to more areas that benefit the world than just cryptocurrencies. At the beginning of this year, or maybe it was the end of last year, Xihan stepped down as CEO. Was this sort of in response to the performance of the company last year?

It wasn't a reactionary measure or response to whatever happened because of the cryptocurrency markets. It was a natural evolution of the company where the founders and the board decided to give the wheel to someone who is proven to be very competent, someone who really cares about the company and can do the job very well. Is Jihon still actively involved with the company, or has he moved on to... Sure, he and Mike Reeve both are still actively involved with the company. What are their roles right now?

So they are members of the board of Bitmain now. I've also heard that Jihon has been working on some new projects. in Singapore. Are you able to comment on those? That's the news talking about him starting another company and leaving Bitmain, which is not the case. One of the co-founders of Bitmain, there was a third co-founder, Yu Sheng or John, that's his English name. He founded Matrix, this OTC trading desk slash custodian solution, that the media connected to Jihan. Could you tell one last question about, like, what do you see as the future of Bitmain? And so, you know, there is this focus on AI and machine learning.

Are you guys interested in proof of stake at all? Like a number of the large mining pools, F2 pool is pretty active in the staking space now. They have related company called Bitfish and Spark Pool is also running on, I'm familiar with a lot of the validators on Cosmos. And so a lot of these large mining pools are running pretty large validators on Cosmos. So is this something that Bitmin is looking into? We are surely looking into it, but we don't have any plans of, for offering these services like them right now.

Having said that, we continue to have our focus on making the best chips for cryptocurrency mining as well as for AI. And that will remain the focus of BredPain to make the best chips. Well, Nishon, it's been great having you on and learning a lot about Bitmain and the history and clearing the air

on a lot of some of the things that, you know, I hear about on like Twitter and Reddit and stuff and really getting a better understanding of some of the things in Bitman. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, or wherever

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