Bitmain: Regarding the recent ASICBOOST allegations and smear campaign

When Satoshi Nakamoto first introduced the concept of Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, some developers claimed that “decentralized consensus has been proven to be impossible.” Today, the same developers provide an equally specious “proof” that long-standing ASIC optimizations are some kind of “attack” against the Bitcoin network.

We want to clean the air.

Bitmain has tested ASICBOOST on the testnet but has never used it on the Bitcoin mainnet, which is what Gregory Maxwell is implying. We demand hard evidence from the claimant, as these unfounded assertions are toxic to the Bitcoin industry. We also believe that the math used by Gregory Maxwell is wrong and that this approach is not practical in a production environment.

Like some other manufacturers, our ASIC chip circuit design supports ASICBOOST. However, we do not use ASICBOOST technology on the main network. We have not seen any evidence that anyone is using this technology on the Bitcoin main network.

Bitmain holds the ASICBOOST patent in China. We can legally apply it to our mining farms and make money by selling cloud computing contracts. However, although this approach is profitable, we will not do it because we want to make Bitcoin better.

The mining equipment used by Bitmain for its own use is not technically superior or more energy efficient than the equipment it sells to the public. Bitmain does not use the ASICBOOST method to increase the energy efficiency of its own mining machines.

Bitcoin mining equipment is rapidly depreciating, and Bitmain is constantly introducing new and more efficient mining models for everyone. Deploying ASICBOOST can result in a 20% difference in energy efficiency, which is a somewhat negative development for Bitmain's business model. Bitmain has demonstrated its ability to thrive in the ever-changing and challenging Bitcoin mining environment. Whether ASICBOOST is applied or not, Bitmain will continue to develop more efficient mining machines.

Bitmain has always supported the Hong Kong consensus protocol, which means that we support Segregated Witness + a hard fork to upgrade to 2MB blocks until we no longer believe it will happen in the foreseeable future. In fact, in the public Hong Kong consensus protocol, Bitmain supports Segregated Witness and Lightning Network, and any accusations to the contrary are completely wrong and specious.

矿工们喜欢多层解决方案，例如闪电网络. Bitmain is very supportive of fixing the scalability issue in favor of these off-chain solutions. But at the same time, we also believe that Bitcoin's first layer network, which has been tested for a long time, is very important and should not be weakened. We are concerned about Bitcoin Core's policy and priority setting on this point.

TuDaMu, the block extension plan recently proposed by Purse.io, uses a new Bitcoin protocol called Bcoin, which is designed to be incompatible with ASICBOOST , similar to SegWit. ASICBOOST is not a deterrent for Bitmain to support SegWit or TuDaMu. We do not support SegWit in our products simply because the conditions in the Hong Kong consensus protocol are not met. Bitmain's co-CEO Jihan Wu has recently made it clear that he supports TuDaMu. TuDaMu is a real and standard block expansion, not through an arbitrary verification discount policy.

Gregory Maxwell's recent proposal suggests changing the collision rate from 2^32 to 2^64, making ASICBOOST more difficult. The result of this is a loss for both the patent holder and the Bitcoin protocol. The patent holder will gain nothing, and the Bitcoin protocol will become more complicated. The only beneficiaries will be the technocrats who do the work. The more complex the protocol, the higher the cost and barrier to multiple Bitcoin protocol implementations. We confirm that we support multiple versions of the protocol implementation, as they will bring more innovation and better security to the network, while threatening the monopoly of certain developers.

Bitmain has been advocating for Bitcoin block expansion. Increasing the block size will make collisions more difficult. According to Maxwell's proposal (assuming Bitmain uses ASICBOOST), this is precisely a destruction of Bitmain's profits. The conspiracy theory was broken without being attacked.

There are better ways to solve the problems that Gregory Maxwell's proposal is designed to solve. Adversarial thinking is not the only approach, and we suggest working with the patent holder so that the patent can be used by the public. If all mining equipment can use ASICBOOST, this will reduce the J/GH cost, and the total hash rate of the network will increase, making the Bitcoin network more powerful. Therefore, the ASICBOOST method is not a covert attack on the Bitcoin PoW function, but an engineering optimization.

The best way to exploit ASICBOOST is by using the version bits of the Bitcoin block header. The patent holder Timo has mentioned this in the patent. Gregory Maxwell's proposal seems to miss this. Using these bits was proposed by Timo Hanke through the Bitcoin Core BIP process, but was rejected by Gregory Maxwell and the Core developers.

Bitcoin Core is now almost entirely controlled by a small secretive committee. Anyone with a basic understanding of human history can see that this is the beginning of a dictatorship. Misrepresenting an optimization as an “attack” is a political trick to grab power.

The proposal mentioned "reverse engineering of a specific mining chip, from which it was concluded that ASICBOOST had been applied". This statement seems to be directly aimed at Bitmain. We believe that the Bitcoin community needs more constructive contributors, not such police officers.

Bitmain was not mentioned in the proposal, however, a well-planned troll team is spreading rumors about Bitmain in the community. Most Bitcoin companies are currently worried. The free value of Bitcoin is in danger.

The Bitcoin community suffered a serious misfortune when Maxwell led a coup against Gavin Andresen and removed his Github commit access. We as a community now have an unshirkable responsibility to find a new team of core developers who are not busy attacking Bitcoin's largest investor (Ver), one of the largest exchanges (Coinbase), and the largest mining equipment provider (Bitmain).

Those who oppose SegWit or the Core roadmap have a history of being vilified. Gregory Maxwell’s latest round of attempts follows his previous pattern. Maxwell has previously attacked one of the most important Bitcoin maintainers, Gavin Andresen, one of the earliest Bitcoin advocates and investors, Roger Ver, Brian Armstrong, the founder and CEO of one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, Joseph Poon, the first author of the Lightning Network, and now, he has pointed his finger at Jihan Wu, the co-CEO of Bitmain. He even called fellow Core contributors who signed the Hong Kong Consensus Agreement "idiots." This hostility is destructive to Bitcoin.

We are very adamant that the Bitcoin block size will increase. This is what Bitcoin and our co-founders signed on for, this is the roadmap designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, and it is Bitcoin’s destiny. We will protect it at all costs.