Exclusive interview with Tian Xin of Ant Mine Pool at the 2020 Digital Mining Summit of Mining.com: The era of alchemy is coming

On June 1, 2020, BTC.COM, Bitmain, Antminer, AntPool, BTC.COM and BitDeer jointly held the Digital Mining Summit in Chengdu. AntPool co-founder Tian Xin served as the roundtable moderator and discussed the topic of "In-depth Analysis of the Industrial Chain: Where Did the Miners' Coins Go?" with other experts. After the roundtable, reporters from Mars Finance, BoChain Finance, Babbitt and Liande conducted a joint interview with Tian. The following is the transcript of the interview:

Mars Finance: According to your observation, after the Bitcoin halving, are mainstream mining pools optimistic about the future price trend of the currency? Has the selling behavior increased?

Tian Xin: This is the third halving of Bitcoin, and the block reward has also dropped from the initial 50 to 6.25. We believe that the gold rush era may be coming to an end, and the alchemy era is about to come.

In general, in this mining industry, the entire industry is becoming more and more mature, and we can see that more and more funds/investors/entrepreneurs from other industries have also come to the blockchain industry. In the past, in the wild era, people with courage and insight, relying on extraordinary courage and outstanding foresight, could survive and become rich. Today, we can see that large mining companies are slowly becoming bigger. Although they are still far from monopoly, the agglomeration effect is slowly forming.

The halving in May will usher in a new reshuffle in the industry. High-cost miners will withdraw, leaving behind more professional, more focused, or resource-rich miners. The industry's centralization trend will strengthen, and the mining industry will further develop in the direction of scale. Overall, it is still relatively optimistic.

For mining pools, protecting user profits during the halving season is of utmost importance. Therefore, Ant Pool launched a machine gun pool profit guarantee plan on April 5. If the user's total profit during the event is less than the profit from mining BTC in the main area under the same computing power and fee conditions, the machine gun pool user will receive a 10-fold profit difference compensation from the mining pool and an additional 0 fee discount for the whole year, which will safeguard the miners' profits during the halving season.

In addition, AntPool has launched an overclocking firmware for S17/S17Pro/T17. According to actual customer tests, the net profit can be increased by more than 10%. The firmware supports both overclocking and downclocking functions, and also provides users with more mining options when facing coin price fluctuations.

Mars Finance: In the past two years, leading exchanges have entered the mining pool business. What impact will this have on the original market structure?

Tian Xin: The mining pool launched by the exchange has the following advantages:

1. The exchange itself will generate a large number of transactions on the blockchain, and these transactions need to be packaged into blocks. This is the first reason why the exchange is very suitable for mining pools.

2. Many users of mining pools are also users of exchanges. Exchanges can bring a large number of user resources when they run mining pools. This is the second advantage of exchanges running mining pools.

3. The exchange itself holds a large amount of coins, and Staking is very relevant to the exchange. It is natural for the exchange to launch a POS mining pool.

For us, mining pools are the application services closest to the Bitcoin network. We remain objective in welcoming emerging mining pools regardless of their size. We also hope that each mining pool can fulfill its responsibility to protect the Bitcoin network. Through reasonable and healthy competition among mining pools, the computing power of the entire network can be dispersed, making the digital currency network more secure.

However, we need to remind you that mining pool business has certain risks, such as lucky problems, security issues, etc., and requires a professional technical team to carry out continuous maintenance and optimization.

In general, we recommend that users consider all aspects of a mining pool from the five aspects of rate, transparency, service, stability, and revenue increase, and choose the best mining pool.

Mars Finance: What are Ant Pool’s next plans?

Tian Xin: For mining pools, protecting user profits during the halving season is of utmost importance. Therefore, Ant Pool launched a machine gun pool profit guarantee plan on April 5. If the user's total profit during the event is less than the profit from mining BTC in the main area under the same computing power and fee conditions, the machine gun pool user will receive a 10-fold profit difference compensation from the mining pool and an additional 0 fee discount for the whole year, which will safeguard the miners' profits during the halving season.

In addition, AntPool has launched an overclocking firmware for S17/S17Pro/T17. According to actual customer tests, the net profit can be increased by more than 10%. The firmware supports both overclocking and downclocking functions, and also provides users with more mining options when facing coin price fluctuations.

BoChain Finance: Mining circles and exchanges are the only two places that really make money in the blockchain industry. The three major exchanges have invested heavily in the mining circle (mining pool) business. What is the attitude of the leading mining pools? In the stock market, the total amount of the cake is limited. How to face the challenge?

Tian Xin: Regarding emerging mining pools, my idea is to embrace the newly emerging small mining pools. Reasonable and healthy competition will make the computing power more decentralized and more secure for the Bitcoin network. The mining pool is the closest application service to the Bitcoin network, so each mining pool should play the responsibility of protecting the Bitcoin network, and the computing power should not be particularly centralized. It is estimated that the mining pools will also have to be reshuffled after the halving, which is related to the existing high and low computing power machines and high and low power consumption machines in each mining pool.

The flood season is the same for all mining pools. In fact, the mining machine is the most affected. The power consumption and electricity cost affect the output of the mining machine. Therefore, the flood season is when miners with machines need to make real decisions. If the mining pool wants to be competitive in the market, then first of all, mining must be stable, products must be updated, and user experience must be improved. Of course, the most important thing is to bring revenue growth to miners. For example, our machine gun pool business is a business that subverts the traditional mining pool, breaking the inherent model of PPS+ and FPPS, providing more revenue and more secure services.

Babbitt Information: What capabilities and directions do you think a mining pool needs to stand out? Is the business model of the mining pool changing?

Tian Xin: An excellent mining pool should be user-centric and take into account five aspects: fee rate, transparency, service, stability, and revenue increase. The most important thing is to increase the revenue for miners.

As the leading mining pool supporting PoW mining coins, AntPool focuses on allocating resources to large mining coins. Large mining coins generally have certain advantages. Their user groups and mining income are generally relatively stable. Even if there is a big market, there will generally not be much turbulence. For example, the mainstream large mining coins are: BTC, ETH, BCH, etc. AntPool now supports ten large mining coins and 12 small mining coins, a total of 22 mining coins, providing miners with a diverse mining experience. We have been providing mainstream currency mining for seven years since 2014, and we have put a lot of effort into large mining coins. From 2018 to 2019, we experienced the moment when S9 had to shut down, so we did research on mainstream coins with common characteristics. For example, BTC, BCH, etc. are all SHA256 algorithms. Based on the commonality of the SHA256 algorithm, we have developed a "machine gun pool" that has a certain impact on traditional mining pools.

Liandede: Ant Pool is already a very experienced company. Can you share your operating experience and industry advantages?

Tian Xin: Ant Pool is the second mining pool in China. It mainly serves the mining field of the "mining circle" and provides mining services to miners. It has been in operation for 7 years. We have a top technical team, a distributed architecture that supports concurrent mining of millions of mining machines, nodes deployed all over the world, a 7*24-hour stable mining network environment, and supports multiple settlement methods. For mining pools, technology/UI/services are also very important. Products must be continuously iterated and updated to improve user experience. When miners choose a mining pool, they must also consider the comprehensive strength of the mining pool itself, such as service stability, operational intelligence, profitability and other considerations.