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Have you ever played mining games? Many people may find it boring. However, the real version of mining games is much more exciting. In the virtual world, there is something called Bitcoin. Some players have invested tens of millions of yuan in mining machines alone, and of course the income is not cheap. A player in Chengdu earns 250,000 yuan a day, which makes people curious about the players in the Bitcoin circle.
Bitcoin has suddenly become popular these days. Some people regard it as a wealth game, while others regard it as gambling speculation. However, when this game started, it was just a small circle game. People who played it also had a pure heart at the beginning.
What can Bitcoin do? Initially, Bitcoin only circulated in small circles such as hackers and enthusiasts on the Internet. Users can use Bitcoin to purchase some virtual items, such as clothes, hats, and equipment in online games, as long as someone accepts it.
However, some offline merchants abroad have sensed the business opportunities and announced that they will support Bitcoin payments. In China, Bitcoin has also begun to circulate. Beijing Garage, Guoke Electronics, and Baidu Accelerator have successively announced support for Bitcoin payments. Shenglv Real Estate, a real estate developer under Shanda Network, has even launched a physical property in Shanghai that supports Bitcoin purchases.
Today, for most people, the greatest value of Bitcoin is that it can be exchanged for US dollars and RMB for speculation.
Why is Bitcoin valuable? Bitcoin benefits from the basic credit brought by its own rules and technologies: the system itself is not controlled by any government, organization or individual. Cryptography technology and P2P distributed network management ensure the security and privacy of transactions. At the same time, the core rules limit the total amount of Bitcoin to 21 million.
The first miner is worth over 100 million yuan. At the end of 2008, Bitcoin was born in a little-known cryptography discussion group. A mysterious man who claimed to be from Japan and named Satoshi Nakamoto excitedly explained his idea. In 2009, he established an open source project for the system, officially announcing the birth of Bitcoin.
The "old birds" in the circle were quickly shocked by this rigorous and imaginative Bitcoin system, and began to track down the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, but found nothing: his email address was German, his name was Japanese, there was no information on Google, and his IP address was difficult to trace... To this day, he has never shown up, and some people even suspect that there is a team behind this.
In a Bitcoin chat channel, someone conceitedly thought that "Satoshi" means "wisdom" in Japanese, while others suspected that it was a combination of the names of four technology companies: Samsung, Toshiba, Nakamichi and Motorola. Even his (her) nationality was questioned because his (her) English was so authentic that it was almost flawless.
According to foreign media reports, computer scientist Ted Nelson revealed on YouTube that the founder of Bitcoin, who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, is actually Shinichi Mochizuki, a mathematics professor at Kyoto University.
Shinichi Mochizuki entered Princeton University at the age of 16 and completed his doctorate at the age of 22. He is currently a full-time professor at the University of Tokyo at the age of 33. 33 is an absurdly young age in the academic world.
For most people, as long as Bitcoin can bring them wealth, it doesn’t matter who Satoshi Nakamoto is. What they care about most is that since the day Bitcoin was launched, there has been a computer mining Bitcoin, and it is rumored that this machine belongs to Satoshi Nakamoto. Today, the owner of this machine is already worth over 100 million.
Mining is the combination of a special decryption software and chip computing power to crack irreversible cryptographic puzzles. The reward for completing the task is Bitcoin. At first, a novice could mine several Bitcoins in a day by downloading the program directly from the Internet and running it on a personal computer.
However, because the difficulty of cracking Bitcoin increases at a geometric rate, this method has not been able to mine a single Bitcoin in several years. Nowadays, the only ones who are truly capable of mining are a group of organized and disciplined Bitcoin "coal bosses."
The circle is hot with "coal bosses" who earn 250,000 yuan a day. When talking about Shanxi coal bosses, people will think of a wealthy man who spends money lavishly, drives a nice car, lives in a luxury house, and likes to make a high-profile appearance in front of the public.
However, in the Bitcoin circle, there are also "coal bosses" who may have more wealth than small coal bosses, but these people are very low-key and do not stand out in the crowd. They are no different from ordinary engineering geeks.
Chengdu entrepreneur Long Yujiang is such a "coal boss". With coal in hand, he is not worried. He has invested tens of millions of yuan in professional mining machines. Apart from the electricity bill, Long Yujiang does not have to worry about anything else.
Simply put, a "mining machine" is a bare-bones computer that has been stripped of all unnecessary functions and can calculate at maximum power. It has a rather rough appearance.
The output of these mining machines is quite high. They can mine 55 bitcoins every day. According to yesterday's market price of 4,700 yuan per bitcoin, they can earn 250,000 yuan every day.
The days of making a lot of money just by sitting back are really enviable and hateful.
But how did Long Yujiang focus on Bitcoin, which was totally unknown to the general public four years ago and was worthless, and now has become the most expensive currency in the world? His vision is really too sharp!
"Back then, I wanted to make my own virtual game currency. My foreign friends told me about this thing called Bitcoin and suggested that I check it out. I thought it was fun, so I started to get involved." Long Yujiang described his motivation lightly.
Facing the sharp rise and fall in the past week, Long Yujiang, a veteran player who entered the market at a low price and holds a heavy supply of goods, is in a particularly good mood. "None of our friends who play together does not make money. Many of them have made millions, and some have cashed out tens of millions in the past few days. As everyone speculates, the price is getting higher and higher, and we can only laugh dryly."
As a player who firmly believes that Bitcoin has a brighter future, Long Yujiang did not sell all his Bitcoins at once when the market was good. "When the price was high, I sold some of it, and when the price dropped to a certain level, I would buy some back."
According to Long Yujiang, the richest coal boss in China is Li Xiaolai, a former New Oriental teacher, who is worth 600 million RMB and once lost power while mining. Another big coal boss is a mining group called "Baomao", which once accounted for 30% of the world's mining rate, making it the world's largest mining group.
Many people would love to make a fortune in a low-key manner, but not all early and experienced players have the opportunity to become rich overnight.
An American player, when Bitcoin was just a "toy" in a small circle, exchanged 10,000 Bitcoins for a pizza, which has become a joke in the circle to this day. "If he had held on to it until now, he would have been a millionaire."
The industry is worried that small miners will have to wait two years to mine bitcoins. "I started mining bitcoins last year, and I have already mined about 36.37% so far. I estimate that I will be able to mine one in early 2015. My mother's computer, which plays online Landlord, starts up as soon as it is turned on. On average, she mines for 5 to 6 hours a day. It's not enough to pay for the electricity," said small miner Guo Feifei.
Guo Feifei learned about the existence of Bitcoin by chance on a foreign news website last year. Although she did not understand the principles of Bitcoin, out of her professional sensitivity as a financial worker, she judged that Bitcoin could be used for investment, so she immediately downloaded a mining program from the Internet and started her gold rush.
"I still suffered from not understanding IT," Guo Feifei smiled bitterly. All she could do was to use the software on her personal computer, using the computing power of the CPU. Later, she learned that this was the most primitive mining method. From 2011 to 2012, professional miners used graphics cards to mine, which could increase mining efficiency by a hundred times. In February this year, ASIC chips designed specifically for mining appeared, and their efficiency was increased by a hundred times compared to graphics cards.
"She can actually join a mining group," Long Yujiang said. Hundreds of thousands of mining machines can be connected to the Internet to mine together, and Bitcoin can be mined quickly, and then distributed according to the computing power of each mining machine.
However, some industry insiders said that professional mining groups might not accept novice players like Guo Feifei. People who don’t understand IT can buy shares and dividends from professional mining groups. For example, the above-mentioned BBQ company sells shares to the public, and then distributes the mined bitcoins as stock dividends according to shareholdings. At the same time, stocks can be freely transferred.
It is understood that "Baked Cat" announced the IPO and established ASICMINER on the Bitcoin Forum (Bitcoin official forum) in August 2012, issuing a total of 400,000 shares, of which 163,962 shares were held by the public and 236,038 shares were held by Shenzhen Bitquan Company. The original shares were 0.01 BTC per share, and the current market value has exceeded 100 million US dollars.
The circle feels that selling mining machines is more profitable than mining, and today's Bitcoin market is strikingly similar to the "gold rush" of that year.
More and more people are pouring into the Bitcoin market. Some are working hard to mine, some are buying low and selling high in the Bitcoin market to earn the difference, and others are starting to focus on the business behind mining.
According to the design of founder Satoshi Nakamoto, the total amount of Bitcoin is only 21 million, and the current Bitcoin currency production rate is 25 new Bitcoins every 10 minutes. However, every 4 years, the number of Bitcoins produced will be halved until the upper limit is reached. As more people mine, each participant will be able to mine fewer and fewer coins.
Renren co-founder Yang Yaorui saw this crisis and thought that the good years for mining were numbered, so he formed the ASICME team to focus on the sales of mining machines. According to the mining machine parameters announced by the ASICME team, a minimum configuration mining machine priced at 3,000 yuan can pay back the investment in more than 30 days at the current Bitcoin mining speed. From the launch on June 2, 2013 to the end of June, the total price of the mining machines sold has reached several million yuan.
There is also a mysterious person nicknamed "Pumpkin Zhang" who specializes in producing exclusive chips for such mining machines. Now Long Yujiang has also started to sell mining machines while mining, and the most expensive one is worth 580,000 yuan.
Just like gold mining, the more gold miners there are, the more water they sell. Now that more and more people are mining Bitcoin, it is hard for these "water sellers" not to make money. |
