It is reported that Bitmain's Ethereum mining machines will be shipped in May, and Wu Jihan wants to lead the mining group to control ETH

Synchronous Finance reported on March 29

Jihan Wu, founder of Bitmain

Synchronize Finance learned from multiple sources that the ASIC chip-based Ethereum mining machines produced by Bitmain will be officially shipped in May this year, but will only be available to a few large miners and ordinary miners will not be able to buy them for the time being.

A source told Synchronize Finance that Bitmain's new mining machines will be mainly supplied to the company's core partners. In the future, Bitmain may use its own computing power as a weapon to seek to give mining groups greater voice in the Ethereum ecosystem.

This will bring huge changes to the Ethereum ecosystem. Today's Ethereum mining farms are mainly based on graphics card mining machines. Once ASIC chips gain a dominant position, graphics card manufacturers including Nvidia and AMD and miners in the chain will face tremendous pressure.

The greater crisis lies in who will fire the first shot between Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who has always been wary of miners, and Bitmain founder Jihan Wu, who has always been strong.

1. Fork Crisis

For the Ethereum core team, the mining group represented by Bitmain will be a huge threat, and may accelerate the Ethereum team to modify the consensus mechanism from relying on miners' POW proof of work to POS proof of equity.

But for Ethereum investors, this may be a good thing. Since the virtual currency entered a bear market in 2018, the price of Ethereum has been the most volatile among high-market-cap currencies, while BTC and BCH, which are supported by mining groups, have fallen relatively less.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin

Unlike Bitcoin core figure Satoshi Nakamoto who has disappeared and has little influence, Ethereum core figure Vitalik Buterin still has a greater say in the Ethereum community, and he has always been wary of the excessive concentration of miners in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

However, the launch time of Ethereum 2.0 (Pow+POS hybrid proof) designed by Vitalik Buterin is 2020 or even later, which means that the mining group will be difficult to resist for at least the next two years.

Given that both Vitalik Buterin and Wu Jihan have had experience with hard forks and have achieved success, a hard fork of Ethereum in the future is likely to become a high-probability event. The only suspense is who will fire the first shot.

2. The Butterfly Effect

On Monday, Susquehanna lowered its target share prices for AMD and Nvidia from $13 per share and $215 per share to $7.5 per share and $200 per share, respectively.

Christopher Rolland, an analyst at Susquehanna International Group, said that the company recently confirmed that Bitmain, the world's largest mining machine manufacturer using ASIC, located in China, has produced and shipped the first batch of Ethereum mining machines, which is a huge negative for existing graphics card giants.

Ethereum is designed to be more conducive to graphics card mining. The Ethereum craze in the second half of 2017 made it difficult to get Nvidia and AMD cards. With the successful development of ASIC Ethereum chips, it means that graphics cards will return to the hands of ordinary users, and the normal weakness of the PC market has lasted for more than ten years.

AMD even warned in its recently released annual report that reduced purchases of mining machines by miners could have a "material negative impact" on GPU demand.

A bigger problem is how the emerging miners who own graphics card mining machines will make their decision. According to Synchronize Finance, there is a big gap between these Ethereum miners and Bitcoin miners in terms of entry time and financial strength.

As the price of Ethereum continues to decline today, some small miners have begun to sell graphics card mining machines at a discount, and a group of miners are looking for new virtual currencies with graphics card mining mechanisms as their main focus.

The butterfly's wings have already flapped, and in more than a month, we may see more chain reactions. Synchronous Finance will continue to follow up and report on related content.