Exclusive interview with Ant Pool CEO Zhou Zhenbao: The era of gold rush may be coming to an end, and the era of alchemy is coming

At 14:00 on April 21, BitDeer and eight major mining brands jointly held the "First 421 Flood Festival" live broadcast conference. Many well-known people in the industry expressed their views on the flood season, halving market and future industry development. As a strategic media, BlockBeats interviewed Ant Pool CEO Zhou Zhenbao and asked him to comment on the layout of Ant Pool during the flood season and the halving market.

Image: Ant Pool CEO Zhou Zhenbao's speech at the "First 421 Fengshui Festival"

BlockBeats: There is fierce competition among mining pools in the market. All major exchanges have begun to develop mining ecosystems and launch mining pools. What does Ant Pool think of this? What are your views on the selection of mining pools?

The mining pool business of Zhouzhenbao has certain risks, such as lucky problems, security issues, etc. It requires a professional technical team to carry out continuous maintenance and optimization, so there will be many mining pools that come and go. The mining pool launched by the exchange has the following advantages:

1. Exchanges 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 exchanges are very suitable for mining pools.

2. Many users of mining pools are also users of exchanges. When an exchange operates a mining pool, it can bring with it a large number of user resources. This is the second advantage of an exchange operating a mining pool.

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 Bitcoin network more secure.

Mining pool selection criteria:

Due to the particularity of mining, users are not very clear about the computing power of mining machines. We have also received feedback from some users that some mining pools will do things that harm the interests of users. Therefore, we must first choose a mining pool that is honest and well-known, and the income is transparent and open, so that customers can mine with peace of mind.

If a mining pool wants to maintain its market competitiveness, it must ensure the stability of mining. The mining pool must have professional technical capabilities and deploy multiple mining nodes to ensure the stable operation of mining services. Mine owners can also choose nodes close to them to ensure network problems.

Of course, the most important thing is to increase the profits for miners. AntPool also continues to optimize mining services and products to maximize user benefits.

BlockBeats: The computing power has changed frequently recently. Previously, the block time of BitcoinSV and BCH was very unstable after the halving. Why did this happen? Is it related to the machine gun pool? Does AntPool also have a machine gun pool? Can you introduce the related business?

Zhou Zhenbao: Why is the block generation unstable?

1. This is determined by the characteristics of the network. Because there is a certain degree of randomness, the interval between each block is not stable at 10 minutes. Even though BCH/BitcoinSV has a DAA difficulty adjustment mechanism that can adjust the network difficulty according to the computing power of the entire network, BCH will adjust the difficulty according to the current computing power every 144 blocks to ensure that a block can be produced every 10 minutes in probability, but this is only a probability of 10 minutes, and there may be differences in reality.

2. The machine gun pool makes it easier for miners to withdraw computing power. Miners can mine the coins with the highest returns without noticing. However, it may also reduce the computing power in the BCH / BitcoinSV network. Similarly, if a certain coin can bring greater benefits to miners, the machine gun pool will quickly switch computing power to it and achieve block explosion as soon as possible. At the same time, in order to prevent the centralization of computing power in the entire BCH / BitcoinSV network, the Ant Mining Pool machine gun pool will limit the scale of computing power in a certain coin.

Introduction to the Gun Pool Project:

The Gun Pool is a new project launched by Ant Pool in February this year. It refers to a strategy that improves user benefits by intelligently dispatching computing power to the best-yielding currency for different currencies with the same algorithm. When users use the Gun Pool function, the backend system will intelligently match computing power to different currencies based on real-time benefits to maximize benefits.

To give a simple example, originally your mining equipment could only mine one of BTC, BCH, and BitcoinSV. Now, if you use a machine gun pool, you can intelligently determine which of these three currencies has a higher return and mine it dynamically.

The advantages of the machine gun pool are:

1. Reduce damage to mining machines and reduce the cost of switching mining addresses

For example, if you want to switch from BTC to BCH, you need to change the mining address of the mining machine for BTC to the mining address of BCH before you can mine BCH. After going through the step of changing the mining address, your mining machine will have to be restarted once. At this time, your mining time will be shortened, and the restart of your mining machine may cause damage to the computing board. If you use a machine gun pool, we will help users solve the above problems from the mining pool end. Users do not need to restart the mining machine, reducing the cost of mining machine damage and restart.

2. Maximize your profits and don’t miss out on any dividends

Mining income is the most concerned point for miners. For example, BCH and BSV have soared several times in the past period of time. How to seize the opportunity to increase income in time every time the price of the currency increases? The machine gun pool helps you solve this problem. The Ant Pool Machine Gun Pool adopts intelligent scheduling, which determines the mining income once in a few seconds, and directly mines the most profitable chain. Finally, it can be settled in BTC or original currency. The steps of manual calculation are omitted, which is neither accurate nor real-time. The intelligent scheduling system of Ant Pool uses the average index of the top ten exchanges in the entire network as a reference, and measures the mining income of several currencies once in a few seconds to maximize user benefits.

BlockBeats: Bitcoin halving is coming soon. The current price of the currency is not ideal. It is said that the halving market has already consumed a large number of miners in advance and may eliminate a large number of miners in the future. The reduction of miners will inevitably have an impact on the mining pool. Is Antpool prepared for this? Do you have any suggestions for miners?

Zhou Zhenbao: 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 begin.

In general, the entire mining 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 could survive and become rich with their extraordinary courage and outstanding foresight. 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 may be an opportunity for 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 intensify, and the mining industry will further develop in the direction of scale.

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 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.

BlockBeats: The flood season is coming soon. At present, the situation is much better than last year. What are the layout and arrangements for the mining pool during the flood season?

Zhou Zhenbao: Ant Pool will have many operational arrangements before and after the flood season, such as some flood season gift package activities, offline gatherings, online AMA, etc., including the machine gun pool business that has been launched now. The advantages of the machine gun pool and the guaranteed income activities have just been mentioned, so I will not repeat them. Let me introduce the reward activities for miners during the flood season. In order to help miners obtain higher returns, Ant Pool will launch the flood season mining gift activity from April 15. Users can invite others to form a group or participate in this activity alone. According to the increase in computing power during the activity, users can get different mining surprise gift packages. If the computing power increase exceeds 1P, you can win 100%. The highest reward for group mining is 0 fee for 60 days. In addition, the TOP20 Honor miners can also get additional gift packages, and the highest reward is a Huawei Porsche mobile phone. I hope that our flood season series of activities can help miners obtain higher returns.

BlockBeats: Mining pools seem to have always been monopolized by Chinese people. Is it because a large amount of computing power is still in China? Why have overseas mining pools not been able to develop?

Zhou Zhenbao: Currently, the top mining pools are all monopolized by Chinese people. There may be several reasons:

China has a good manufacturing industry, and the largest mining machine manufacturer is in China;

l Many places in China have cheap electricity. Although some places have cheap electricity, such as Central Asia, the political situation is relatively unstable, so China is still more suitable for mining at present;

· For mining pools, technology/UI/service are also very important. Products should be continuously updated to improve user experience. Mining pools are very international projects. Miners choose mining pools not because of their nationality, but because of the overall strength of the entire mining pool itself, such as service stability, operational intelligence, profitability and other considerations. The entire blockchain industry is in a very early stage, and overseas mining pools are likely to develop gradually.

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