Bitmain's mysterious rival? Halong Mining plans to strengthen competition in the mining field

As the most active anonymous contributor to Bitcoin Core, BtcDrak has entered the mining hardware industry. This developer is not only a contributor to the Bitcoin Core codebase, but also maintains bitcoincore.org and the Bitcoin Core community's Slack channel. He said that he founded Halong Mining, an ASIC chip manufacturing company, in the past year, and they have already produced the first batch of mining machines, which are scheduled to be released in early 2018.

BtcDrak said:

Our goal in launching the mining project is to bring necessary competition to the market. We want to 'make SHA256 great again'.

Mining Machine

The company's website mentions that Halong Mining's product line currently only has one type of machine: DragonMint 16T. The name of this miner is inspired by Dragons' Den, a famous private chat channel in the Bitcoin Core community Slack. It is reported that this miner is equipped with a newly designed chip and has a computing processing power of 16TH/秒. What's more, BtcDrak said that this machine is 30% more efficient than the most advanced ASIC miner on the market (Bitmain's AntMiner S9).

DragonMint will be the most advanced mining machine to date.

The main bottleneck to entering the ASIC market is obviously capital: it is very expensive to develop professional chips from scratch. Although BtcDrak is currently unwilling to disclose more information about Halong Mining, he pointed out that this batch of mining machines is produced by a "very professional" team.

The developer said that Halong Mining has currently invested $30 million in research and development, and more than 100 people are involved in the project, including chip designers, electronics hardware experts and software designers.

BtcDrak explained:

The R&D process is very costly and we also need a large number of talents with different skills.

BtcDrak said that at this stage, Halong Mining has produced a batch of DragonMint prototypes for testing and adjustment, but due to the risks of reverse engineering, the existing batch of machines will not be sold to the public. However, he emphasized that these machines have started to work:

There are other companies that plan to enter the ASIC mining industry that will first conduct research and development in a simulation environment and then launch a small number of the first batch of mining machines as pre-sale versions. However, the process of NRE (non-recurring engineering) and chip manufacturing is very difficult; it is not easy to do it well for the first time.

Halong Mining recently released a video about DragonMint on YouTube. BtcDrak believes that the first batch of DragonMint mining machines will be able to start mass production within 4 months and will be shipped to various places in March next year.

In addition to the DragonMint mining machines, he also said that Halong Mining will also sell mining chips separately.

compete

With the launch of the DragonMint miner, Halong Mining will be able to provide the market with an alternative to Bitmain’s miners, which have dominated the market for the past few years. It is estimated that more than 70% of the network’s hashrate is generated by Bitmain’s miners, while about half of the network’s hashrate comes from mining pools owned by or closely associated with Bitmain, such as AntPool, BTC.com, ConnectBTC and ViaBTC.

BtcDrak said:

One manufacturer dominating is not good for Bitcoin. Mining centralization is always a problem, no matter how nice you are. If there is a center, then governments and criminals can attack. Decentralization protects the entire system and all its participants. That's why I want to bring competition.

Additionally, Bitmain has not been very popular in the Bitcoin community over the past few years. The Chinese ASIC manufacturer was at the center of the AsicBoost and Antbleed controversies. Perhaps more importantly, there was speculation that the company manipulated mining machine hashrate to control sales and thus influence the mining system. However, Bitmain denied this speculation.

Halong Mining hopes to sell ASIC miners on a large scale to help decentralize mining. BtcDrak added that the company is considering open-sourcing its circuit board design and software. By sharing Halong Mining's research results over the past year, new manufacturers have gained a foothold in the market.

BtcDrak concluded:

There are a lot of risks. A lot of time and money has been invested. … There is a great opportunity to diversify the bitcoin mining industry and make the network more secure.