China's richest Bitcoiner: A 1985 graduate from Peking University founded the world's largest mining organization

The ban on ICOs has caused a collective decline in the value of a number of digital currencies, including the most resilient Bitcoin. For Bitcoin tycoons, this has also led to a significant reduction in their wealth.

For a long time, Li Xiaolai was recognized as the richest man in Bitcoin. He was a famous teacher at New Oriental and a best-selling author. After coming into contact with Bitcoin, Li Xiaolai began to claim that he held a six-digit number of Bitcoins and founded the Bitcoin Fund in 2013.

However, many people in the cryptocurrency circle believe that the real richest man in Bitcoin is a person born after 1985 - Jihan Wu, CEO of Bitmain.

Jihan Wu, CEO of Bitmain

Spend all your savings on Bitcoin

Wu Jihan graduated from Peking University with a double degree in psychology and economics. A Renren homepage suspected to be Wu Jihan shows that in 2005, he was admitted to the School of Economics of Peking University from Nankai Middle School in Chongqing. His favorite movie is "The Matrix" and his favorite book is "Rogers' Global Investment Travels".

The movie and the book seem to hint at Wu Jihan's entrepreneurial journey.

In 2009, Wu Jihan graduated from Peking University and entered the investment industry as a venture capital analyst and investment manager. This year, Satoshi Nakamoto developed Bitcoin.

Two years later, Wu Jihan came into contact with Bitcoin and spent all his savings to buy it.

Another science fiction writer named Chang Qia also invested all his savings in Bitcoin. Chang Qia owned several thousand Bitcoins at the time, and his works won the China Science Fiction Galaxy Award for three consecutive years. In 2006, Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem also won the award along with Chang Qia's works.

Chang Jia's real name is Liu Zhipeng. In 2011, Wu Jihan, Chang Jia and Lao Duan founded the Bitcoin information exchange platform "Babit". In April 2014, Hangzhou Timestamp Information Technology Co., Ltd., which was developed from Babit, was established. Chang Jia invested 9.5 million yuan, accounting for 95% of the investment, becoming the largest shareholder.

Mining and buying mining machines to earn 200 million yuan a month

As the value of Bitcoin increased, Wu Jihan also completed the accumulation of original capital. At the same time, he realized that he could not only make money by trading Bitcoin, but also go further upstream to produce Bitcoin mining tools - mining machines.

But Wu Jihan did not have a technical background, so he needed to find a technical expert. Later, he met Zhan Ketuan, who graduated from the Computer Science Department of Tsinghua University.

The acquaintance of Wu Jihan and Zhan Ketuan was quite dramatic. At that time, Zhan Ketuan was running a company called "DivaIP" (Tianjin Diwei Digital Technology Co., Ltd.), which was engaged in the set-top box business. When Wu Jihan was walking on the streets of Beijing, one of Zhan Ketuan's salesmen took the initiative to promote the business. In this way, Zhan Ketuan entered Wu Jihan's vision.

In 2013, Wu Jihan decided to found Bitmain. He found Zhan Ketuan, who was ten years older than him, and handed him the Wikipedia information about Bitcoin. Zhan Ketuan spent two hours reading it and immediately decided to join Bitmain.

Subsequently, Bitmain acquired Zhan Ketuan's company in full. In 2014, Bitmain subscribed to a capital contribution of 10 million yuan, accounting for 100% of the capital contribution.

After reaching a high of $1,200 in November 2013, the price of Bitcoin entered a bear market in 2014. At the end of February 2014, Mt.Gox, the world's largest Bitcoin trading center, was attacked by hackers and 850,000 Bitcoins were lost.

At the same time, as the remaining bitcoins decrease, mining becomes more and more difficult, requiring a lot of electricity and cost to compete for computing power. The sales of Bitmain mining machines have dropped sharply, and Bitmain is in trouble and can only wait for the rebound of Bitcoin prices to avoid bankruptcy.

But Zhan Ketuan was not idle. He developed the fifth-generation mining machine, Antminer S5. Compared with the first-generation mining machine, S5 reduced power consumption by about one-third. In mid-2015, the price of Bitcoin rose, and miners returned and chose S5 as their first choice. Bitmain was revived.

Today, Bitmain has become the world's largest Bitcoin mining organization, but mining machines are still Bitmain's main source of income. According to Bloomberg, Sequoia Capital and IDG Capital are also planning to invest in Bitmain.

A senior Bitcoin player once told a reporter from China Securities Journal that Bitmain is expected to make a profit of 30 million US dollars per month, close to 200 million RMB. If the estimate is correct, Bitmain has achieved a net profit of more than 1 billion RMB in the first half of the year.