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Text | Blake, Ono
Produced by | Gyro Finance APP (ID:tuoluocaijing)
As the co-founder of Ant Mining Pool and the operator for five years, Tian Xin has rich experience in the mining industry and has unique insights into the current status of the mining industry at home and abroad, as well as the implementation of blockchain. Recently, at the Global Digital Mining Summit held by Bitmain in Frankfurt, Germany, Gyro Finance had the honor of interviewing him. The following is the full text of the interview, with some deletions: Gyro Financial Reporter: Could you please give our readers a brief introduction to Ant Pool? What business are you mainly responsible for here? Tian Xin: Mining has three elements: mining farms, mining machines, and mining pools. The mining farm provides physical electricity and placement environment, the mining machine provides computing power, and the mining pool is a middleware that connects the physical and virtual, connecting the computing power of the physical mining machine to the blockchain, using computing power to drive the blockchain to explode blocks and package and broadcast transactions. It is an application closest to the blockchain.The emergence of professional mining machines and professional mining pools has greatly simplified the mining process. In the early days, mining was just a toy for geeks. It required configuring a wallet address on a computer, downloading a wallet client, etc. It was quite cumbersome and each computer needed to be configured, so it was impossible to mine on a large scale. Now, as long as you have a professional mining machine, power it on, connect it to the Internet and connect it to the mining address of the mining pool, you can simply mine. Ant Pool is a professional Bitcoin mining pool. I was mainly responsible for technology in the early days of Ant Pool, and now I am responsible for overall business and operations.
Differences between domestic and foreign mining
Gyro Finance Reporter: Miners from all over the world came to this German summit, including many Chinese miners. What do you think is the biggest difference between domestic miners and overseas miners? Tian Xin: There is still a big difference between domestic miners and overseas miners. The biggest difference is that foreign miners are more focused on the long term, while domestic miners are more focused on the short term. Most people in China prefer short-term and quick returns, and need to seize opportunities, compete in speed and short-term explosive power. However, foreign miners will make long-term plans for mining, such as 3-5 years, and they also take a long time to build mining farms, which are more standardized. Gyro Financial Reporter: The domestic policy on mining seems to be rather vague. From your understanding, is mining still in a gray area in China? Tian Xin: Although I have no experience in building a mine, I have learned from the miners around me that from 2017 to now, the so-called "fuzzy" stage has passed and the process has become formalized and legalized. Most mines have formal power resources, which are obtained from local governments, and some agencies have gone through layers of approval, with complete procedures and taxation.
Blockchain landing
Gyro Financial Reporter: Staking suddenly became popular in the first half of this year, but is relatively quiet now. What do you think of staking? Tian Xin: POS may be a little popular this year. Its earliest origin is the "proof of share mechanism". Using this concept may help everyone better understand the essence of POS.In the past two years, the term "mining" has been widely used. This is essentially because of the tenacious consensus of Bitcoin mining, and the miners are very united. From 2018 to now, the people who have persisted are all miners, so it may be that everyone tends to lean on the concept of "mining" in everything they do. After all, "blockchain" still sounds rather illusory, and mining, as the only real industry, makes people feel more down-to-earth. Gyro Financial Reporter: Are the mining circle, currency circle, and blockchain circle relatively independent of each other? Tian Xin: These three circles are just three areas after the blockchain is subdivided. All three areas are one of the starting ways to understand the blockchain. In the early days, the only way to learn about Bitcoin mining was to mine it. Only through mining could one understand the production, packaging, and reward mechanisms of blocks, and then understand blockchain. Later, there were models such as POS and DPOS. People learned about new models by buying coins and increased their understanding of blockchain.In general, these circles participate in blockchain in different ways and want to make blockchain a reality, but they do different things and have different consensus. Gyro Financial Reporter: Speaking of implementation, you just mentioned that mining may be an entity industry in the current blockchain field. Is it possible that new entity application scenarios will emerge in the future? Tian Xin: Conservatively speaking, it may not be easy to implement because the decentralization of blockchain is still too difficult.There are two ways. The first is mining , because mining mobilizes a lot of social resources of entities, and these resources may be used later to do things that benefit society.The second channel may be "decentralized applications" , which will give birth to some applications that everyone can use and are relatively convenient, just like Internet applications.
Industry competition and attention
Gyro Financial Reporter: It seems that the competition among the major Bitcoin mining pools is quite fierce. How do you view this competitive relationship? Tian Xin: The competition among mining pools is quite fierce, and there are also many small mining pools. This kind of competition has both advantages and disadvantages.For miners, competition among mining pools will allow miners to obtain part of the profits that originally belonged to miners but were not distributed to miners, thus making their profits higher; competition among mining pools will also increase the degree of decentralization of computing power distribution, allowing the entire industry to gain more sense of security from the decentralized computing power; for mining pools, fierce competition means greater operational challenges and more effort will be required. Gyro Finance Reporter: Do you think that if the mining industry gets more attention in the future, will it be a good thing for the entire industry, or will it bring instability? Tian Xin: I think it’s a good thing. Compared to the stock market, the blockchain is not very big now, and the increase in the number of participants is a good thing for the industry as a whole. If you carefully understand the entire production and operation mode of blockchain Bitcoin, you will find it is a very interesting thing. Some people learned about the so-called "blockchain" from other channels and were "cut off", so they may feel resentful towards blockchain. If they learned about it from the mining channel, the people in the mining circle are relatively simple and may give you some help, and everyone can support each other and move forward together.
Industry trend prediction & beginner advice
Gyro Financial Reporter: "Bitcoin halving" is also a hot topic in the mining circle. What is your opinion on halving? Tian Xin: I personally think that halving will not necessarily bring about big fluctuations. The last halving took place in June 2016. We sat around, eating and drinking, waiting for the Bitcoin halving, but the market did not fluctuate too drastically at the time. Talking about halving now feels like a Bitcoin festival, and there will be an upgrade at a fixed time. There may be some market conditions before or after the halving, because everyone may need to do something with their assets. Gyro Financial Reporter: How do you judge the future industry trends from the perspective of computing power and price? Tian Xin: My idea is more conservative. I think it will be around 10,000 US dollars by the end of the year. The flood season in October is over, and the hashrate will drop a bit, and will reach a relatively low point in about two months. Some new high-hashrate machines have been launched recently, and some miners should deploy them. It is estimated that the hashrate will not return to the level at the beginning of the year by the end of the year. Gyro Financial Reporter: For novice miners entering the market, is it more practical to mine or buy coins? Tian Xin: Mining is a relatively long-term activity that can continuously produce Bitcoin. After the payback period of the mining machine and electricity costs, the mined coins are pure profit, which is one of the important charms of mining.However, getting started with mining requires a lot of knowledge, and some of it is not easy to learn. For example, to build a mining farm, you need to connect to power resources, and you also need to understand building specifications. You need to understand everything, so the threshold is relatively high.Which method to choose depends on the individual.
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