【Transfer】Li said: Be careful of people who are cold

Wu Jihan has been a top student since childhood. He was admitted to Peking University from Chongqing Nankai Middle School and obtained a double degree in economics and psychology. After graduation, he joined an investment bank. He climbed over the firewall to browse BBS every day and accidentally saw BTC. He translated the first version of Satoshi Nakamoto's creation paper "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System", which is still the most widely circulated version. This was in 2011.

In the following years, he left the traditional financial industry and joined the world of Bitcoin. Friedcat, Changjian, Zhan Ketuan, and Yang Zuoxing were all his teammates in recent years. He joined the Friedcat team to mine and develop chips. After leaving Friedcat, he founded Babbitt as an industry media, and then left again to create Bitmain with Zhan Ketuan.

In 2014, Bitmain's office was near Zhongguancun, and Huobi, where I worked, was in Shangdi. The two companies had only about a hundred employees in total. I was in charge of Huobi's business, and I got along well with a group of young market girls in the industry. We really made friends. One day I went to play with Didi from Bitmain. She was working, and I was sitting next to her in a trance. A baby-faced man came to greet me and said, "Zhang Li, you're here." After a while, he took out a few boxes of snacks from the office and distributed them. Now I have forgotten what I ate, but I only remember Didi saying, "The boss is a warm man."

This was not the first time I met Wu Jihan. When Huobi held various summits and offline exchanges, I was often responsible for inviting guests and soliciting sponsorship. At that time, everyone was a startup company and was not so arrogant. In the early days of this industry, there was a bit of idealism. Usually one company took the lead and friends in other industries would support. When there were activities, I would often ask him to participate. At that time, Wu Jihan was just one of the thousands of entrepreneurs, without any sharpness. He gave the impression to the outside world that he was humble, smart, and had a harmless baby face.

Two years later, during the real bear market, I organized a small blockchain science meetup. It was natural for me to ask him to share. Another guest speaker on the day was Zhou Shuoji. The venue was prepared for 100 people, but only about 30 people came. Although there were few people, the communication in a small range was very in-depth. Wu Jihan answered every question from the audience that day seriously and answered everything he knew. This period was also the most difficult period for Bitmain, and it was unable to raise funds everywhere. I also pushed Bitmain to major funds, and the responses were basically that they didn't understand it or didn't invest in the blockchain field.

This is also the industry winter that left the deepest impression on me.

In 2018, Wu Jihan's employees rarely saw him. Before founding Bitmain, Wu Jihan was in the investment business. Compared with selling mining machines and speculating in cryptocurrencies, he seems to be better at capital operations. Sequoia, IDG and Temasek are all his investors. The last round of Pre-IPO valuation was $14 billion, and the valuation after listing was $30 billion. He knew that the rising cycle of digital currency was unsustainable, the A-share IPO conditions were not met, Hong Kong stocks had a friendly policy for technology companies, and compared with Nasdaq, the valuation of domestic technology companies in Hong Kong stocks was much higher than that of US stocks. So he chose Hong Kong stocks. How much money Bitmain made in the first half of 2018 is clearly stated in the prospectus submitted by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Total revenue was $2.84 billion and gross profit was $1.03 billion. It is the most profitable company in the industry. According to the traditional entrepreneurial path, a project with a market value of more than 10 billion US dollars will take at least more than a decade for hundreds of people, but Bitmain was founded only five years ago.

He also has another project, BCH, whose market value at its peak directly impacted BTC’s position. When he was interviewed by the media, he said that market value is a “liquidity illusion.” It’s not that he doesn’t value these numbers, he’s just quite sober.

In fact, Wu Jihan is a low-key but decisive person. He is very measured and restrained in front of the camera, and his emotions are not easily captured. When talking to people face to face, his tone is calm. In public, he mostly shares cryptocurrency theories and rarely expresses his views on other events. His Twitter is very true to his nature, and it is simply Wu Duidu. Even though Bitmain is constantly controversial nowadays, he does not come out to refute it, nor does he accept interviews to build his image.

Bitmain's business includes mining pools, mining machines, investment and artificial intelligence. Mining machines and mining pools are their core products. Unlike f2pool, which "came from the masses and went back to the masses", miners can often consult the founder of the fish pool directly in the QQ group about technical issues. Bitmain's mining pool business is more like a business unit branched out from the sales of mining machines. Ant Pool and BTC.com Mining Pool are both affiliated with Bitmain, and even Jiang Zhuoer's BTC.top Mining Pool and Yang Haipo's Viabtc Mining Pool are closely related to Bitmain. The computing power of these four mining pools exceeds 50% of the total computing power. The biggest panic in the Bitcoin world is the 51% attack, which is directly pointed at Wu Jihan. This is also the origin of his mining tyrant. Although Wu Jihan explained that blockchain is highly immune to attacks, a 51% attack cannot shake the foundation of Bitcoin, not to mention that he does not have the power and ability to launch an attack. But people don't believe it.

In short, in the eyes of many people, in the world of POW, mastering most of the computing power is equivalent to original sin and a sword of Damocles.

Perhaps under the controversy of the 51% attack, Wu Jihan wrote "The Beauty of Calculation Power", which is a work with rich emotions and rigorous logic. There is no attack or factual reasoning, only physics, philosophy, and classical political economy. Ancient Greek tragedy, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Copernicus, Turing, and Schrödinger all appear in this article. The theme he wants to talk about is "computation power is beauty and nothing else". The article begins with this passage: "Since humans looked up at the stars and began to think about who I am, the final conclusion is that the meaning of life is entropy reduction, and all we do is to establish a tiny order for this chaotic universe." He said: "As a computing power holder, in addition to seeing the beauty of computing power, I also hope that computing power can show its true power and maximize the limited computing power."

"There are two things. The more we think about them, the more the wonder, admiration and awe they evoke in our hearts will be renewed day by day. These two things are the starry sky above our heads and the moral law in our hearts." This is the most widely circulated sentence in Kant's "Critique of Practical Reason". Wu Jihan's "The Beauty of Computing Power" has both the starry sky and morality. Perhaps he is unconsciously practicing the theory he agrees with.

Many people see Hayek in Wu Jihan. Hayek is a liberal economist who believes that competition is the key to the functioning of the market mechanism. The government's monopoly on the right to issue currency has destroyed the economic equilibrium. Through research, he pointed out and demonstrated the feasibility and superiority of the competitive currency system. Hayek believes that the denationalization of currency is the fundamental direction of the reform of the currency issuance system. The ideal currency issuance system is for private banks to issue competitive currency (i.e., free currency) to replace the state's monopoly currency. He calls this proposition "denationalization of currency" or "free currency theory."

This is a set of theories that challenge the existing monetary system. The currency theory of Satoshi Nakamoto is BTC, while that of Wu Jihan is BCH. In 2017, Wu Jihan made a desperate fork. Unlike BTC, which has a strong mass base, BCH has been controversial since its birth. It even rose to the point of political correctness. Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared after taking his small step, while Wu Jihan spared no effort to promote BCH around the world, and even shouted in public: Bitcoin Cash. This is the paranoia and persistence of an idealist.

At the end of 2018, I came into contact with the team that built the largest power plant in Georgia. I wanted to establish contact with the Georgian government to mine, so I approached Wu Jihan to discuss cooperation. He seemed to be thinking more than mining. He said: "Georgia hopes to develop the software industry. Russia, Turkey and other countries around it have very smart engineers, but the economy is very bad." Bitmain has established development teams all over the world. If it hadn't encountered a cold winter, it would have supported engineers in more small countries. This is the idealist's way of helping the world.

I really want to find a character from a martial arts novel to describe Wu Jihan, but a single image is a bit thin. In the blockchain world, his style is like Ren Woxing and Huang Laoxie. Ren Woxing has a deep martial arts training and is the leader of a school. He has political skills and ambitions. Huang Laoxie is a heretic with an unruly temperament. His current situation in the blockchain world is a bit like Xiao Feng.

The last chapter of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils is "Teaching the Chanyu to Break the Arrow and the Six Armies to Retreat and Arouse the Hero's Anger". Because of the conflict between the two countries, Xiao Feng committed suicide by stabbing the broken arrow into his heart and died instantly without leaving a word. After his death, the reactions of the heroes in the martial arts world are very interesting. The original text is as follows:

In 2019, half a year had passed since Bitmain went public in Hong Kong, and the result of the listing was still pending. The audience thought the building had collapsed. The media began to review the situation impatiently, just like the scene when the heroes of Jianghu saw that Xiao Feng was gone.

Our industry is not easy and full of controversy. There are scammers and idealists, geeks and speculators. We have to survive and advance in the cracks. It took five years for a Bitmain to emerge, and there may not be another one in the next ten years.