Yuan Ye, Tsinghua Alumni Fund: Mining with “Cores”

Recently, there is a list of Bitcoin rich people, and it is said that most of them are "rich": many of them were "cheated" by Bitcoin pyramid schemes around 2010, so they held large amounts of BTC, put them aside and didn't pay attention to them. When the price rose sharply in 2017, they found it after searching through boxes and cabinets, and then realized that they had made a fortune. This once again proves that "great wealth depends on fate, small wealth depends on hard work."

In the cryptocurrency world, there are basically only two types of people who actively earn Bitcoin: one is to organize others to issue coins and earn commissions themselves; the other is to mine.

The mining here is not done with hammers, but with FPGA, GPU, CPU, ASIC, what are these? These are chips.

There is news that in 2017, the largest mining company in China (and the world) - Bitmain, had a gross profit of 3-4 billion US dollars a year, close to the world-renowned GPU manufacturer Nvidia. What does this mean?

Founded in 1993, NVIDIA's main product is GPU (graphics processing unit), which is called a graphics card in computers and is mainly used for graphics display. In 2016-2017, NVIDIA was very successful, mainly due to the explosive growth of the artificial intelligence (AI) market. GPU has outstanding advantages in deep learning and parallel computing. For a time, NVIDIA became a leader in the chip field and ranked fourth in the global chip industry.

China's Bitmain was founded in 2013 by a child under the age of five, 20 years younger than Nvidia. It initially used CPUs or GPUs (produced by Nvidia) to assemble computers or workstations and other machines for Bitcoin mining, earning a lot of money.

There is a key point in Bitcoin mining: Successful mining can earn you Bitcoin rewards, which were originally 50, but now seem to have dropped to 12.5 (which is also worth $100,000 at the latest price). Mining Bitcoin is a probabilistic event, and the probability of success is determined by the percentage of your overall computing power in the total network computing power. The stronger the computing power, the higher the probability of mining Bitcoin. Bitmain continues to upgrade its computing power, claiming that the computing power it controls is close to or even exceeds half of the entire network.

The chips used by Bitmain for mining have evolved from the initial GPU (graphics processing unit), to FPGA (field programmable gate array), and now to ASIC (application-specific chip). This ASIC chip is designed, taped out and produced by Bitmain specifically for mining Bitcoin. It can be said that Bitmain is not a mining company, but a chip design company, a mining machine production company, and a mining pool leasing and maintenance company. It is said that in addition to mining Bitcoin, Bitmain also mines Ethereum, Monero, etc.