Bitmain Blog

Bitmain absolutely is an amazing tech company. You may want to read 2018 retrospective at Bitmain blog: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/bitmain-following-a-busy-2018-what-can-we-…

I think you missed the key issue. Mining is largely centralized under the control of Bitmain, both via pools and indirectly via miners they have sold (which in the past have had backdoors). They profit from using an exploit called ASICBOOST. Segwit will disable ASICBOOST as a side effect of improving the protocol. Therefore, BitMain has been launching FUD campaigns and numerous attempts to propose alternative software to stop segwit (XT, BU, BTC1, BTCABC etc.) Segwit2X is a compromise-- but Bitmain does not like it because it activates segwit. So BitMain has announced they plan to do a forcible Hard Fork of Bitcoin, splitting off into another chain, that they will privately mine-- and they intend to neutralize segwit on it. They have publicly complained that segwit offers lower fees for transactions that use less resources. The entire conflict (including the "scaling problems" which have recently been proven to be due to spam driving up transaction costs) is Bitmain attempting to increase and protect their near monopoly. Please be aware that their fork, which will have nearly unlimited block size will increase their monopoly. Due to the great firewall of china, large blocks have trouble getting transmitted, so whenever a chinese miner finds a block, when the blocks are very big, they have a significant competitive advantage in finding the next block. Thus simply activating a spam campaign (which they have been doing the past 3 months or so already) will allow them…

Well, that's a remarkably uninformative announcement. Here's an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur. Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems, which lead to high transaction fees. Numerous proposals to fix the scaling issue have been proposed, the two main camps being "increase the block size" and "muddle through by discarding less useful data" (aka Segregated Witness/SegWit). However, any changes require consensus from the miners who create Bitcoins and process transactions, and because it's not in their best incentive to do anything to reduce those transaction fees, no change has received majority consensus. In an attempt to break this deadlock, there is a "Bitcoin Improvement Proposal #148" (BIP148) that proposes a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) taking effect on August 1, 2017. Basically, everybody who agrees to this proposal wants SegWit to happen and (here's the key part) commits to discarding all confirmations that do not flag support for SegWit from this date onward. If successful, this will fork Bitcoin, because whether a transaction succeeded or not is going to depend on which side of the network you believe. However, BIP148's odds of success look low, as many of the largest miners out there led by Bitmain have stated that they will trigger a User-Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) if needed to stop it. Specifically, if UASF appears successful, instead of complying with SegWit, they'll start mining BTC with large blocks…

Also add that the largest manufacturer and user of ASICs is most likely covertly using something called AsicBoost [1], a patented [2] chip optimization for Bitcoin's proof of work. They (Jihan Wu/Bitmain/Antpool) have stated that the capability is manufactured into their chips but they are currently not using it [3] for the greater good of Bitcoin, though this would cost them millions in mining profits. Activating Segwit as a soft fork would prevent the ability to use AsicBoost and therefore a lot of people suspect that most of this debate is actually just a delay tactic by Bitmain to maintain their mining dominance with covert AsicBoost. They likely have no intention to support Bitcoin Unlimited (they don't seem to be running the software). Segwit recently activated on Litecoin only after the threat of a User Activated Soft Fork (much easier to execute on Litecoin). The Segwit activation threshold on Litecoin was 75% of the hashpower (compared to 95% on Bitcoin). At one point Segwit had achieved 75% of the hashpower until suddenly 3 mining pools increased their hashpower by about 300% in 1 day to block Segwit (the same day that Jihan Wu, CEO of Bitmain declared that the Litecoin miners to be shipped needed "additional firmware testing"). These pools were Antpool, LTC.top, and LTC1BTC [4], all of which controlled a much smaller fraction pre-segwit. For this reason, it's likely that Jihan Wu controls both Antpool and BTC.top and therefore about 30% of the hashpower on…

>The energy perhaps. The "computers" aren't. They're just ASICs that can calculate hashes at a phenomenal rate, they're not general purpose. The chips are made with recent-ish nodes, so the silicon/fab capacity could theoretically be used to make CPUs. edit: looks like at least one bitcoin ASIC maker is using TSMC 7nm, the same process used to make AMD CPUs. [1] https://blog.bitmain.com/en/bitmain-announces-next-generation-7nm-asic…

This was "fixed" by the high tech workaround solution of: echo “127.0.0.1 auth.minerlink.com” >> /etc/hosts https://blog.bitmain.com/en/antminer-firmware-update-april-2017/

Stop spreading this conspiracy theory stuff (which is very popular on /r/Bitcoin) Bitmain's own pools—AntPool and BTC.com—were voting for (not against) Segwit through nVersion flags in July 2017 Although Bitmain have had criticism about segwit, they are overall «publicly on record as historically supporting it» source: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-smear-campaig… They signed this pro-segwit letter: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266…

the only way your money is at risk with Coinbase is if BTC itself does lose out - the so called 'wipeout' scenario described here: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip148 'wipeout' is a total longshot and we ought to be able to see it coming. either way it's not really a problem unless you have transactions on both versions to reconcile, and you can avoid that by simply not spending coin for a couple days. Coinbase can't just freeze everyones coin so having to reconcile with a fork after it achieves majority hashrate would be a real nightmare.

The days are counting down to the "Segwit2X" rollout, the idea supported in the "New York Agreement" (NYA)[0]. There is a contingency plan in place should the Core-supported User Activated Soft Fork become activated.[1] Segwit2X has working code, has been tested in beta, and is now in RC.[2] Without commenting on the merits of the different approaches, the current situation is thrilling to watch as a spectator. To call it a "Civil War" is not an exaggeration. [0] https://medium.com/@DCGco/bitcoin-scaling-agreement-at-consensus-2017-… [1] https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip148/ [2] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-segwit2x/2017-July…

This is really good. A companion piece: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip148/ I will caution you that the amount of Bitcoin backstory you have to be caught up on to understand why this matters (and even what is going on) is pretty high.

Statement from the company: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/antminer-firmware-update-april-2017/ tldr; Code left behind from abandoned feature implementation to allow owners to remotely shutdown miners that have been stolen/misappropriated. Our bad... sorry.

Bitmain claims they don't use it on mainnet https://blog.bitmain.com/en/ >Our ASIC chips, like those of some other manufacturers, have a circuit design that supports ASICBOOST. However, the ASICBOOST method has not been used by us on the mainnet. We have not seen any evidence yet on the main net that anyone has used it in the patented way.

Bitcoin network is going to split at end of summer, driving uncertainty in its future value. The SegWit proposal does not have universal support. Some mining groups are advocating a hard fork, some advocate soft fork, many even want it to remain as is. https://blog.bitmain.com/en/uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip148/ https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/why-viabtc-rejects-segwit-soft-fo… http://www.uasf.co/ http://www.coindesk.com/bip-148-segwit2x-bitcoin-scaling-compromise-mi… https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/beginners-guide-surviving-coin-sp…