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martes, 6 de febrero de 2018
febrero 06, 2018
How To Buy And Trade Cryptocurrencies (Guide)
Unlike the stock market, which makes it possible to buy pretty much any stock available with traditional currency (£, $, € etc.) it's often difficult to directly purchase the Cryptocurrency you want. (I'm not going to go deep into why that is)
So, in order to begin trading Cryptocurrencies, you first need to purchase one of the bigger coins (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin) and then exchange that into the currencies of your choice.
While there are many different sites that offer exchanges services like this, there are two that I use regularly and would recommend: Coinbase and LocalBTC. Both are well known and have trusted escrow systems, so there's no need to worry about not getting what you paid for. Cex.io is also one I have used in the past.
While I registered my accounts many months ago, I have heard that Coinbase's ID verification process can take a few days. While it is definitely annoying having to wait (Possibly missing out on $$$) it's incredibly important that sites like this stick to the rules. (I'll mention some exchanges that don't need ID right away later on)
Where Can I Trade Cryptocurrencies?
Now that you have got your Bitcoin/ Ethereum/ Litecoin, you can begin to trade the hundreds of other Cryptocurrencies out there. Just like traditional stock brokers, there are many exchanges out there that allow you to do this.
It's probably a good idea that you read the next section before picking an exchange, but here's a list of ones I would recommend:
Bittrex
Binance
Bitfinex
Polinex
Bithumb
Kuxoin
You can find a list of the biggest exchanges (For the last 24 hours) here.
While I would definitely recommend that you verify your accounts with your ID, I understand that some people don't want to wait.
Binance allows you to withdraw up to 2 BTC's worth of any coin every 24 hours without adding an ID & Kucoin don't have any limits (That I have found).
Where Can I Buy [X] Coin?
So you've got set-up on an exchange, but you can't see the coin you want to buy? That's because different coins are listed on different exchanges. It's annoying I know, but once you get an account set up on a number of the bigger exchanges, it shouldn't be much of an issue.
In order to see where you can buy a specific coin, navigate to the appropriate Coinmarketcap page and select the "Markets" tab just below the pricing information.
This should show you most of the markets for that coin, sorted by volume. TRON's market page, for example, TRON's page would be https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tron/#markets
How Do I ACTUALLY Trade?
This is the important part, as messing up could see you lose $2m with the click of a button.
So after deciding which exchange you want to use and the coin that you would like to buy, you need to find the appropriate page on that exchange. Let's use Bittrex as our example here. They offer Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT markets. Imagine we bought BTC earlier on and we want to buy NEO.
From the Markets page on Bittrex, you can see the top 20 coins, sorted by 24hr Volume. If the coin you want to trade isn't in the top 20, you can search it in the top-right. (Use the abbreviation, not the whole name i.e BTC not Bitcoin)
Now you should be able to see the actual trading page. This may seem a little daunting, but it's actually pretty easy to understand. The graph is usually a candlestick chart that shows what price the coin opened/ closed at for every interval. You can change the charts all the way from 1-minute interval candles all the way up to monthly
Assuming that you now know what price you would like to buy your coin at, we can move on to how that actually works. Somewhere on the screen, you should see a box containing the LAST, BID, ASK, 24hr High, 24hr Low prices.
The ASK price is the lowest offer a seller will accept. The BID price is the highest price that buyers are offering. The LAST price represents the price at which the last trade occurred. 24hr High/Low is obviously the highest & lowest price that a coin has been traded within the last 24 hours. Unless stated otherwise, prices are set in the currency you are buying with - in this case, BTC.
Depending on whether you are selling or buying the currency, you need to look for the BUY/SELL NEO box. (This should all look a little different if you're using another exchange but it's all pretty similar)
Here we want to enter the total number of NEO that we would like to buy. In this case, let's get 10. In the bid box, we are going to pay the price we are willing to pay for EACH NEO. (Make sure this is not the total, especially when selling) Clicking on the "Price" box allows you to enter the LAST, BID, or ASK price. Typically, I just enter the LAST price.
I won't explain what the time in force means here. Usually, I just leave it on "Good 'Til Cancelled" (Read more here) If you enter your BID first, you can then click on "MAX" to buy the maximum number of NEO that you can, with your current balance.
Once you're happy, press the buy button. You should then be met with the confirmation screen. DO NOT SKIP THROUGH THIS. It's important and could stop you losing a lot of money if you entered something wrong.
Assuming you have the funds in your account (Read the next section) you should be good to place the order. Your order will then be filled, partially filled, or missed depending on the prices you chose & the volume at that time. You can cancel an order at any time from the Orders page.
Where Do I Keep My Coins?
Assuming that you purchased a bigger Crypto, as I talked about earlier, you will have automatically been assigned an internal online wallet from the broker. It's definitely a good idea to move your money out of there, but where too really depends on what you are doing with your money.
If you would like to exchange it right away (and it's a relatively small amount) then you can send it straight to your exchange wallet. By default, you won't have been assigned a wallet so you will need to open one. (This is very easy on an exchange)
Navigate to the Balance/ Wallets/ Assets/ Deposit etc. page of your exchange and then find the coin you want to deposit. Press the + / Deposit (etc. etc.) button. Some exchanges will create a wallet for you right away, others will ask you if you want to make one. Just select yes and wait a few seconds.
You should now see an address and maybe a QR code, depending on the coin. For example, 17A16QmavnUfCW11DAApiJxp7ARnxN5pGX (Wish this was mine). Make sure to make a note of this address (Seriously)
From whatever site you used to purchase the coin (Coinbase etc) you should now be able to withdraw your funds directly into your exchange. MAKE SURE YOU SEND YOUR FUNDS TO THE RIGHT ADDRESS. Seriously. Again, I know it sounds obvious but I have seen many people make this mistake. Also, make sure that the address you are sending to is one from the same coin. You can't send Bitcoin to a NEO address directly.
Don't be worried if it doesn't show up in your account directly. Depending on the coin, it may take a few hours to appear. If you're sending BTC (Same process with any other coin, just use their explorer instead) you can navigate to https://blockchain.info/address/[YOURADDRESS].
Warning: Don't keep all of your money in exchanges. Don't keep all of your exchange money in a single exchange. Spread your assets.
There are various online wallets, like Blockchain.info that offer secure, online wallets.
You can also store coins on your computer. Jaxx Wallet is a well-known one for the bigger coins, but you can also use the officially-released wallet for your coin of choice.
I would recommend having a number of hardware wallets, like the Ledger Wallets, if you have a large amount of money invested.
You can even use a paper wallet, but that's really just a novelty.
That's it!
23+ Ways To Earn BitCoins, bitcoin, Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin miners, Coinbase, crypto trading, cryptocureency, Faucets, ICO, ICOs, Monero (XMR), Ripple
febrero 06, 2018
★20+ WAYS TO EARN BITCOINS★
How To Earn
One can earn Bitcoin the same way u earn any other
currency, by exchanging your labor, goods or services for it. Analyze and
figure out what you can offer of value to people and then do that, but offer a
discount if they pay in Bitcoin. Or you can simply buy Bitcoin outright using
the currency you've already earned.
Let's Start
These websites or sources are useful for beginners,
intermediate users who have enough spare time and also for advanced users who
would like to know about some more resources.
Feel free to remove "Thanks" if you don't think it's worth it.
1. Faucets
Bitcoin faucets are a reward system, in the form of a
website or app, that dispenses rewards in the form of a satoshi, which is a
hundredth of a millionth BTC, for visitors to claim in exchange for
completing a captcha or task as described by the website. Following are some
Faucet websites :
2. PTC Websites
PTC websites act as middlemen betweenadvertisers and consumers; the advertiser pays for displaying ads on the PTC website, and a part of this payment goes to the viewer when he views the advertisement. Following are some PTC websites :
3. Completing Tasks
Free Bitcoins can be earned by doing some tasks on certain websites. Typically, tasks can range from watching YouTube videos that somebody is paying to promote, to clicking ad links and spending 30 seconds on a website, to filling out surveys and completing offers, or even doing a little bit of basic data entry. Following are some Task oriented websites :
4. Content Creation
Bitcoins can be earned if you can create premium digital content which you can then sell it over the internet. The more creative you are the more you can earn. Following are some of those websites :
5. Surveys
Bitcoins can be earned by taking surveys in your free time. Some following websites provide such opportunities :
6. Tipping
Some websites provide tips through bitcoin. Following are some of those wbsites :
7. Freelancing
The following are the top websites for earning free bitcoins by doing any freelancing work :
8. Video Streaming
If you are creative and can produce some good videos in your free time, or by just watching some of the videos, you could earn free bitcoins. Following are some of those websites :
Earn free bitcoins by sharing files of any type. Following are some of those websites :
10. Shortening Links
You can earn bitcoins by shortening your link and sharing it. Following are some of those websites :
11. Ad Networks
Following are the best Ad Networks for earning bitcoins :
12. Gaming
If you are a videogames lover, then head to the following websites for earning some free bitcoins by playing the games :
13. Mobile Apps/Games
Top and best mobile gaming apps for earning free bitcoins both on Android and iOS. Log into Google Play store or App Store to download the following games :
14. Bitcoin Mining
Mining is another way where one can earn bitcoins. Following websites give you insights into the mining process to earn bitcoins :
15. Affiliate Marketing
One of the best and most easy and free ways to earn bitcoins is by affiliate and referral programs. You can do this even if you don’t own a website. The links can be referred on Facebook, Twitter and any other social media site. If you own any websites that will be a bonus. Following are some of those websites :
16. Social Media
Bitcoins from social medias can be obtained from the following resources :
17. Auction Sites/Sell Anything
Below are some top websites which offer bitcoins for selling anything on their websites. If you have anything to sell log into their sites and earn some bitcoins as handsome commissions :
18. Interest Payments
Some websites do offer good interest rates for deposits with them. Because the loans are usually very short-term – often just a few days and sometimes less than 24 hours – lenders also enjoy a high rate of compounding. All of them pay in bitcoins. But use them at your own risk, as in most of the cases they are very risky. Following are some websites :
19. Reading Books
From some following websites you can get paid for reading books :
20. Gambling
If you are searching for a simple way to earn Bitcoins online, you may try gambling. However, while it might seem to you as easy money, gambling has a high number of risk. Following are some websites :
21. Trading
A good way to make an earning with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general is to do it through trading. Sometimes, however, Bitcoin trading can be very similar to gambling – high risks are involved here too. Following are some websites :
22. Bitcoin Forums
Forums are another best place to earn some bitcoins by participating in their signature campaigns or by posting some valuable messages or by doing some services in the forum community. Following are some forums :
23. Wages
Some following websites are providing bitcoins as wages for the employees :
domingo, 4 de febrero de 2018
Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin miners, cryptocureency, Ethereum (ETH), ICO, ICOs, Litecoin (LTC), Monero (XMR), Ripple, Ripple (XRP), Top 5 Best Cryptocurrencies, Top 5 Cryptocurrencies to Invest in
febrero 04, 2018
Top 5 Best Cryptocurrencies & Alt-coins Investment:
Ripple (XRP)
Bitcoin (BTC)
Monero (XMR)
Litecoin (LTC)
Ethereum (ETH)
Top 5 Cryptocurrencies to Invest in:
Don’t you wish you can go back to February 14, 2011 and buy a thousand Bitcoins for the price of $1,000? Then wait around until November 25th, 2013 to sell all of them and make a million dollars! Yes we all do. Unfortunately we can’t go back, but what you can do; is make a new smart investment. Always remember something; every currency in the world has a country connected to it (even though cryptocurrencies aren’t officially currencies yet). The population of each country and the economical state matters and go hand in hand. Although, a cryptocurrency doesn’t have a country. It has the internet. Adding all the currencies in the world into one. Expect to see over 3 billion people use cryptocurrencies, because over 3 billion people use the internet every day. Here are the top 5 cryptocurrencies that are predicted to skyrocket:
1. Ripple (XRP)
Ripple is based on shared, public database or ledger, which uses a consensus process that allows for payments, exchanges and remittance in a distributed process. Ripple tries its best to keep it free of charge for any sort of exchange or trade. They will have a hard time with third-parties, but why go to third parties when the officials themselves are offering to trade or exchange with no fee. Ripple has been successful adapting big banks to their system. Professionalism and high quality development is being put into this cryptocurrency. Currently Ripple has teamed up with biggest banks such as RBC, CIBC and more. These banks are currently using Ripple as a Interbank blockchain, but later on it is expected that these banks will be transfering funds more often through Ripples gateway. Ripple is considered to be the best cryptocurrency for long-term investment.
2. Bitcoin (BTC)
Yes, we all know Bitcoin and its nothing new. Although, people started to see that its flattening out anywhere in the $500’s. Sorry to tell you, but it’s not stopping there. This cryptocurrency has the most merchants that accepts bitcoin. With large volumes through companies such as Tesla; we could see bitcoin double in value. Bitcoin is the mother of all cryptocurrencies and many of the upcoming and startup cryptocurrencies are revolving around Bitcoin itself. Think about it like this. If you are gardening, and would like to plant tomatoes from scratch you’d need to put the seeds (new cryptocurrencies) into the soil (Bitcoin). The more the seeds grow into a tomato plant the more space it takes up. You’ll need more soil for the other plants just to grow just as healthy. Which means more soil (bitcoin). Even though many of you are hesitant to invest into bitcoins due to the high price, it is still worth investing into because it won’t stop there.
3. Ethereum (ETH)
Ethereum is a public blockchain platform with programmable transaction functionality, and a cryptocurrency itself. It provides a decentralized virtual machine that can execute peer-to-peer contracts using a cryptocurrency called Ether. Many other cryptocurrencies are using Ethereum’s system to run there cryptocurrency. Ethereum has been doing great at representing a professional image to the cryptocurrency and a strong foundation. Many of the major banks have been looking into ways to adopt the blockchain effect. Ethereum is at the top of the list. With many Chinese, Russian and Canadian private investors backing up the cryptocurrency; we will see a bright future in our daily lives involving Ethereum. The cryptocurrency Ethereum is attracting the eyes of the investors, banks, politicians, and consumers. You might be looking at the future mainstream cryptocurrency.
4. Monero (XMR)
Monero has been known for continuous successful effort to make the most anonymous cryptocurrency. Monero has been known to be used on the Dark nets largests marketplace where millions of sales transactions are processed every month. Businesses and Organizations have been using Monero due to its healthy value and anonymity for its trace. The Monero development team has been working on Paybee. A payment processing gateway for users and merchants to accept a variety of payment methods and get settled and converts instantly to Monero, Bitcoin or Fiat. This will ease the process for more merchants to use Monero and become much more comfortable with the cryptocurrency. Slowly but surely this will be a cryptocurrency that will start branching off to investment firms that do large sums of transfers to dodge public awareness and Darknet Marketplaces and will sky rocket the value. The biggest factors also include the supply and demand. Currently there is approximately 13,00,000 coins available for supply (which is not a lot). Which means there is not enough coins for the demand, so grab your coins while you can. It’s bound for the price to go up, to create difficulty in creating a positive demand or the little supply. The supply is bound to decrease every year.
5. Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin has been around for a very long time and has shown success at keeping a healthy value to its cryptocurrencies. Also the largest Bitcoin wallet provider Coinbase has added the cryptocurrency to GDAX for trading. The longstanding trusted cryptocurrency has been a safe long term investment for quite a while now. Picture Litecoin to be the 5 dollar bill compared to the 100 dollar bill (bitcoin). To have a successful cryptocurrency it needs three things: professionalism, quantitative flow, and trust. Litecoin has it all.
bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin miners are making nearly $7 million a day, Coinbase, cryptocureency, cryptocurrencies market, facebook, hot news, ICO, ICOs, What is bitcoin
febrero 04, 2018
As we watch the price of Bitcoin sore over $20000, breaking old records, people are often looking for the next big opportunity. It’s hard to say if or when existing coins will ever see anywhere close to the gains we’ve seen in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and others, and chances are they’ve already had their price spike (many followed by a crash) or they may never see another significant price spike. ICO’s seem to be the next venture for people looking to make a quick buck.
Although many, if not most, of the current and upcoming ICO’s will likely fail or simply not deliver what they claim in the future, there will be some that will rise to a great store of wealth and those who got in early will reap quite the reward.
But with the hundreds of new ICO’s popping up how would one know which ones are worth investing in? There are of course several key things to consider when choosing an ICO to invest in, such as: market buzz and pre investor excitement, positive and abundant press, a solid whitepaper, credible business or partner affiliations, a competent development team, the total amount of circulating coins and how those coins will be distributed and used, and the ability to illustrate that they will actually solve a real world problem with their vision and technology.
Researching these factors can be a daunting task when considering how many ICO’s are currently in the works, how many more are upcoming, and how many more will spring up over the next few years. Much like the dot com bubble in the late 90’s which burst a few years later, the ICO market will almost inevitably experience the same type of collapse. However, just like before the dot com bubble burst, a lot of people made a lot of money, and ICO’s are no different in that way. It’s hard to say exactly when the ICO bubble will burst but for now it can be a good place to speculate and invest to make some incredible returns.
So, for those who wish to gamble in the ICO market, make sure to do your research and never invest more than you are willing to lose. And with that said, I’ll mention from my research my top picks for upcoming ICO’s and which ones I’m still on the fence about.
Top 5 ICO Picks:
#1 - Flixxo
https://www.flixxo.com
I first heard about Flixxo from a Coinspeaker article. They also just had a nice write up in the Huffington Post Technology section. Since I’ve always been very much into large scale video sharing platforms, including apps like MovieBox and Popcorn Time, etc., the project quickly caught my attention. And once I learned they were partnered with Popcorn Time I was sold. But I had to keep an open mind so I kept reading.
Essentially, Flixxo is looking to disrupt the YouTube virtually monopoly on video sharing by offering more incentives to video creators through their platform that will have a better reward system than YouTube currently has. The idea is to build a decentralized video sharing platform that will hopefully attract more quality content and built a community around that. The users can use the FLX token to gain access to the content they want and contributors can be rewarded for helping to seed content. Users can also obtain FLX coins by viewing ads to support the advertising aspect.
There will be a total of 1 billion FLX tokens that will be issued, which usually for a coin is quite high when looking to see large returns on investment, however, considering the nature of this product and how the FLX tokens will be used within the community, having a relatively large amount of coins like this isn’t necessarily a bad thing since, it would seem to me, that there will be a lot of transactions happening on this platform so the need to keep costs and fees low will be important.
The ICO will begin on Oct 24th and there is a day one bonus of 30% extra coins. The base cost is: 1 ETH = 4000 FLX (or 1 FLX = 0.00025 ETH). They are hoping to at least raise about 7,500 ETH to get their project on its feet. The ICO will run for 30 days, and if you’d like to contribute, you can check out the ICO page.
#2 - Winding Tree
https://windingtree.com
Another passion I have is travel so Winding Tree also peaked my interest. Winding Tree’s mission statement is to make travel cheaper for travelers and more profitable for the travel providers. They plan to accomplish this by using a decentralized blockchain distribution platform to reduce fees for the industry which savings should be passed onto the consumer and end the price gouging by middle men. Here you can read the Winding Tree whitepaper, which says that the market will decide the number of tokens generated, which is a bit of a rare concept in the ICO world, but should prove to be interesting.
The price of the Winding Tree token or LIF will range from 9-10/LIF per 1 ETH depending on the price of ETH on the date of launch, which will begin Nov 1st, and end November 15th. Not only has Winding Tree been mentioned in major press publications like Nasdaq and Forbes, but they have official partnerships with several airlines including Swiss International, Australian Airlines, and Lufthansa (who was also an early investor).
This project has a lot of potential, and if successful, can target a real world issue within a very large industry. If you want to keep updated on the upcoming ICO you can visit their token event page, and signup for their mailing list for emerging details.
#3 - Universa
https://universa.io
Universa is a new blockchain platform built on their own network that will attempt to compete with the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, and boasts much higher scalability (20,000 transactions per second), and lower transaction costs. Their ICO is set to launch on Oct 28th and are hoping to raise $100 million to get their project off the ground.
ApexFree will invest $7 million in the Universa platform, and their initial target market seems to be for businesses.
And the most notable thing about Universa is that John McAfee is not only one of their listed advisors, but will also build his own coin called McAfee Coin on their blockchain platform:
Another cool thing is that for simply signing up to their platform they are giving away 50 free coins; you can register for your free coins. This ICO is sure to attract a good amount of investors and may be quiet successful in the near future.
#4 - Dether
https://dether.io
For many crypto traders we know how difficult it can be to convert between crypto currency and fiat currency. There are not as many avenues for converting fiat to crypto as there are for converting crypto to crypto, so this is a definite marketplace need.
According to the cofounder, you can buy ETH using the Dether app with your fiat currencies and of course sell ETH back to fiat as well by utilizing a system similar to UBER that allows you to see who is buying and selling ETH in your area. But apparently the transactions will happen much like a craigslist transaction, in that buyers will have physical meet ups to swap currencies. The buyer will be able to use Telegram to communicate with the seller to organize the transaction, and to essentially meet up in a public place to make the swap.
Although there are plenty of things that can go wrong with such a transaction like theft or hacking, the app uses a rating system, much like an Ebay profile (or Uber driver rating), that rates users based on their successful transactions. So if you get robbed I suppose you can give your robber a bad review, but unless there is wide scale use of this app it may not have much of an effect on deterring theft initially.
There is an extensive Dether whitepaper, and they say the purpose for the Dether tokens (DTR) will be to help gain more Dether map visibility for trading zones. This however begs the question: will the large stake holders dominate the seller market leaving the smaller stake holders holding the their bag of ETH? I suppose time will tell but they will also offer a DTR buyback program to help regulate the amount of circulating coins on the market.
Users can also use physical locations as a selling shop, similar to a crypto ATM. By staking larger amounts of DTR coins a user can take advantage of their already existing business, like a pizza shop, and sort of advertise their business via the app which will also make their physical business a sort of exchange teller, much like how certain convenient stores offer other services like money transfer (Western Union).
They will “mint” a max of 100 million DTR tokens and the actual crowdsale doesn’t appear to have been announced yet but could likely happen later this year or during Q1 of 2018. All in all Dether seems to be an interesting idea and, if adopted successfully, could promote a whole new approach to expand the mass adoption of Ethereum and the overall OTC marketplace of crypto currency.
#5 - Hacken
https://hacken.io
Another interesting project I came across is Hacken. Hacken wants to create an ecosystem where white hat hackers can keep up with the ever expanding world of cyber security to help their clients prevent exploitable vulnerabilities by using the blockchain and smart contracts. Here are some good articles about them here and here discussing their partnership with Neuromation to help prevent blockchain cybercrime.
Although they seem to be in the early stages of their road map plan, they definitely have potential and are trying to address a legitimate use case. Another interesting method they will use for their tokens is the Burning Principle, which you can read about in the Hacken whitepaper.
Their total supply of Hacken coins (HKN) will not exceed 20 million and the initial price according to their website will be: 1HKN = 1USD. The token sale should start on Nov 1st and you can signup for more information.
miércoles, 31 de enero de 2018
Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin miners are making nearly $7 million a day, cryptocapmarket, cryptocureenc, cryptocureency, cryptocurrencies market, hot news, Ripple
enero 31, 2018
Two years ago, a Chinese chip-design expert named Micree Zhan was reading China’s seminal science-fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, while wrestling with how to create a new processor. He had already designed custom chips for the company he co-founded, Bitmain, that had made it into the world’s leading bitcoin miner, allowing it to dominate the new, hyper-competitive industry of unearthing bitcoins. Now he needed a chip that could launch Bitmain onto a new trajectory, one that would help it master a world-altering technology called deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence.
While performing his nightly meditation, a practice he has kept up for nearly a decade, it suddenly came to Zhan. “It was late at night, and something inspired me—Sophon!” he recalls. A sophon is a fictional proton-sized supercomputer from The Three-Body Problem that is sent by an alien civilization to halt scientific progress on Earth. It’s capable of causing strange phenomena—such as inscribing flashing words on the retinas of elite scientists. The aliens use it to take over Earth when their own planet is destroyed by the chaotic gravitational forces of its three suns.
Bitmain’s newest product, the Sophon, may or may not take over deep learning. But by giving it such a name Zhan and his Bitmain co-founder, Jihan Wu, have signaled to the world their intentions. The Sophon unit will include Bitmain’s first piece of bespoke silicon for a revolutionary AI technology. If things go to plan, thousands of Bitmain Sophon units soon could be training neural networks in vast data centers around the world.
Bitmain could pull it off, says Michael Bedford Taylor, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied the bitcoin mining industry and its specialized chips. Taylor says these types of chips, called application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, that are designed to perform a single function extremely efficiently could create the next wave of distributed computing (pdf). “This will invigorate the hardware field,” he says. “We are about to see the emergence of all kinds of ASICs clouds, and the bitcoin hardware community has demonstrated that under the right conditions this can happen rapidly as a grassroots effort.”
China’s shadowy colossus
To grasp how a Beijing startup is poised to challenge the likes of Google, Nvidia, and AMD in the deep learning arms race, it’s essential to understand Bitmain’s pivotal role in the $70 billion bitcoin economy. Incorporated in Hong Kong as Bitmain Technologies Ltd, Bitmain’s controlling shareholder is a trust registered in the Cayman islands.
Bitmain co-founder Micree Zhan explaining the significance of the word “Sophon.” (Quartz/Zheping Huang)
The company is a marvel of vertical integration. Bitmain designs the silicon that goes into its bitcoin mining rigs, assembles the machines, then sells them to customers around the world. It also operates the machines for its own account, runs vast bitcoin mines that it rents out on contract to others, and, finally, manages several of the world’s largest mining “pools”—agglomerations of processing power so huge that they greatly improve the odds of successfully mining a bitcoin block.
Bitmain may now be the most influential company in the bitcoin economy by virtue of the sheer amount of processing power, or hash rate, that it controls. Its mining pools, Antpool and BTC.com, account for 28.9% of all the processing power on the global bitcoin network.
Hash rate is critical because bitcoin is in the midst of a messy “civil war.” Controlling chunks of hash rate provides miners with a public vote on the bewildering array of technical proposals dictating bitcoin’s future. At the crux of the technical debate: How to increase the number of transactions the bitcoin network can handle at any given time. The recent split of bitcoin into bitcoin and bitcoin-cash illustrated one way to do this.
Bitcoin mining is the process of checking and adding new transactions to bitcoin’s immutable ledger—its blockchain. Miners must compete with one another to be the first to find a new block. In return for performing this work, which requires massive processing power and incurs hefty electricity costs, miners are rewarded with a certain number of bitcoins for each block they add to the blockchain. Currently, that’s 12.5 bitcoins per block, and a new block is found roughly every 10 minutes. At the current bitcoin price of about $4,000, that’s $50,000 up for grabs every 10 minutes, or $7.2 million a day.
Controversy and criticism over blockchain
Wu, the business brains behind Bitmain, is a polarizing figure in the bitcoin world. He has been a vocal and vociferous proponent of one particular technical approach to increase bitcoin’s transaction capacity, one that would increase the size of bitcoin’s blocks by eliminating the 1 megabyte limit imposed by the bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitmain is among the signatories of the so-called “New York Agreement,” which calls for doubling the block size under the Segwit2x proposal. Some see this as technically risky, and philosophically fraught because it concentrates power in the hands of miners—like Bitmain. “In France, nobody likes him at all. He is despised,” said Sosthène, the pseudonym of a Parisian bitcoiner I met in Beijing.
Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu in the lobby of his headquarters in Beijing. (Quartz/Zheping Huang)
Critics of Bitmain suspect that Wu was behind the recent, somewhat related split of bitcoin called the bitcoin-cash hard fork. That split was supported by a miner in Shenzhen named ViaBTC—which happened to be a company that Bitmain has invested in. Wu denies he was behind the split and Bitmain has publicly said it’s neutral on the matter. “If we had such an influence,” he laughs, an earlier scaling proposal called Bitcoin Unlimited, which he and other prominent figures had backed, “would have already been activated.”
Jack Liao, who runs a Shenzhen-based mining firm called Lightning ASIC, has clashed with Bitmain. He says Wu is trying to dominate the bitcoin economy and shape it for his own ends. “He wants to control the code, he wants to control the environment,” Liao says. “Then he can design the entire bitcoin ecosystem.” Liao has clashed with Wu on social media in China, claiming that he’s prepared to take legal action against Wu for bad-mouthing his company, Lightning Asic.
Wu, 31 years old, spars with his critics on Twitter, where he says he is inundated by professional trolls. He famously published an expletive-laden tweet in 2016 in response to users who he believed were trolling him during one debate about bitcoin’s future. It was promptly turned into memes and held up as evidence that Wu was unqualified to lead the conversation about influencing the future of a protocol worth $70 billion.
Wu says he regrets that particular Twitter outburst. “If I had a time machine I would not have posted that,” he says. Fixing his image problem is partly why we’ve been invited to Beijing to meet him—he rarely grants interviews—and why we were invited to visit his firm’s bitcoin mine in Inner Mongolia the day following our meeting.
Another split for bitcoin is looming in November, when the community must again decide if it will raise the block size limit. Wu, who favors the new split, says such schisms shouldn’t be avoided. “The core developers don’t own bitcoin as a whole,” he says. “Maybe they own the bitcoin-core software project, but bitcoin is not software, it is a kind of social agreement that is implemented by software. And if people do not agree with each other, a fork will be inevitable. It is only a matter of time.”
A chance encounter with a chip designer
Bitmain and Wu’s power would never have come about had it not been for a chance encounter on a Beijing street. Zhan, the Sophon chip designer and the technical brains behind Bitmain, was running a startup called DivaIP in 2010 that made a set-top box that allowed a user to stream a television show to a computer screen. One of Zhan’s staff was canvassing for customers when Wu walked by.
Employees at Bitmain’s Beijing headquarters. (Quartz/Zheping Huang)
Wu was then in private equity, armed with a degree in economics and psychology from Peking University, China’s most august institution. Zhan, a graduate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, famed for its technical degrees, was trying to raise funding for DivaIP, so he asked Wu for advice. Ultimately Wu couldn’t help, but three years later it would be Wu who needed Zhan.
Wu had discovered bitcoin in 2011 in a blog post, and one line stuck in his head. “They described it as the most dangerous open-source project ever,” he says. Bitcoin was envisioned as a form of stateless money that could be owned by anyone but controlled by no one—with no central bank, and no government in charge. “Such a monetary system is possible. It doesn’t have to be government-backed. It doesn’t even have to be gold-backed,” he says.
In short order, Wu emptied his bank account to buy bitcoin, then just a fringe idea. One bitcoin could be purchased for under a dollar in early 2011. “I spent all my life savings to buy bitcoin in 2011,” he said. “Most people thought it was risky or a scam.” Two years later, bitcoin exploded, soaring from about $20 at the start of 2013 to $900 by the end of the year and, in the process, it captured mainstream attention. Wu realized that he could make money not just by trading bitcoin, but by creating it. At the time, a miner could earn 25 bitcoins every 10 minutes.
Wu had capital from his 2011 bitcoin investments. But he needed a chip designer. Remembering Zhan, Wu set out everything he understood about bitcoin in an e-mail to him. “I spent two hours reading up on bitcoin on Wikipedia,” Zhan said. “I knew it was a good thing. I decided to do this business immediately.”
Bespoke silicon for bitcoin
Zhan’s first task was designing an ASIC that would run SHA-256, the cryptographic calculation used in bitcoin, at maximum efficiency. The development of bitcoin mining ASICs escalated the race to devote greater amounts of processing power to bitcoin mining.
Where bitcoins are unearthed. (Aurelien Foucault for Quartz)
“In the beginning it was very tough for Micree [Zhan],” Wu says. “He complained it was impossible,” to create an ASIC for bitcoin. But Zhan, 38, got the job done, and at record speed, taking just six months from idea to finished product. Time was critical, because bitcoin prices fluctuated wildly, meaning Bitmain could miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to profit from the ongoing rally. Other players were already on the scene; early ASIC makers like ASICMiner and Butterfly Labs crowdfunded their projects in 2012 to create the first generation of bitcoin ASICs.
In November 2013, Zhan’s first mining rig, the Antminer S1, was ready, and Bitmain opened for business. Sales took off. “We had very good sales during the whole of 2014,” Wu says. Indeed, bitcoin hit a historic high of nearly $1,200 in November 2013—only to crash months later after fraud was discovered at Japan’s Mt. Gox, then the largest exchange in the world.
By the end of 2014, the Mt. Gox-spurred crash put Bitmain in dire straits. Nobody wanted to be paying expensive electricity bills to mine a digital currency that was falling in value. “The price fell too low, and the whole business plan was made when the bitcoin price was high!” Wu laughs. “So when the price fell there was not much demand for our bitcoin mining rigs. Our toughest time was at the end of 2014.”
Surviving the bitcoin crash
Wu and Zhan clung on. “It was very tough,” says Zhan. “I thought if the price continues to drop maybe Bitmain will break down.” But by 2015, the cryptocurrency appeared to have bottomed out. There was increasing interest in the technical idea behind it—the immutable ledger known as the blockchain—from some of the world’s biggest banks and financial institutions.
At the same time, Zhan began working on the Antminer S5, the fifth iteration of Bitmain’s mining rig, which slashed power consumption by about a third compared to the S1. As bitcoin’s price crept up, miners returned to the scene, seizing on the Antminer S5 as their equipment of choice. “That chip was amazing,” says Wu. “It helped our company a lot.” Bitmain had a 50% profit margin on the product, according to Zhan.
The Antminer S5, which contained the BM1384 chip, turned around Bitmain’s fortunes. Wu won’t disclose the company’s revenue and earnings, except to say that it is in “a very good financial position.” He claims it is cash-flow positive, and that it has over 70% of the market for bitcoin mining rigs—effectively providing 70% of all the processing power on the network.
The firm sells hundreds of thousands of Antminers each year, according to Wang Jun, who leads work on the algorithms in Bitmain’s new deep-learning chips, and the bitcoin mining rigs are the firm’s major source of income. Wu told Bloomberg (video) that the mine in Ordos generates about $250,000 in revenue daily, and that he is planning to invest up to $200 million building new mines in the US.
Bitmain has few competitors for the Antminer. Because chip manufacturers must depend on a rising bitcoin price to sell their wares, many were unable to stay afloat when prices dropped in 2014 and 2015. Today, Bitmain’s chief competitor is San Francisco-headquartered Bitfury, which makes its own chips, sells them, and maintains mines in Georgia, in eastern Europe. It has about 6% of the global bitcoin hash rate.
Bitmain now employs 600 people headquartered in a four-story building in a high-tech park of the sort favored by tech companies in Beijing. It’s renovating the building next door because it’s running out of space. Inside, barely anyone looks older than 25, as circuit boards jostle for space with company-provided cans of Coke and other soft drinks. The majority of employees don’t have a personal interest in bitcoin, says Nishant Sharma, Bitmain’s communications manager, doing their jobs without being invested in the debates, squabbles, and philosophizing of the cryptocurrency world.
ASIC clouds: The future of deep learning?
As the price of bitcoin skyrockets, Bitmain’s future in the cryptocurrency markets seems assured. But in the artificial intelligence race, it’s a minnow in a field dominated by giants. Why should a Beijing bitcoin startup be able to compete with Google, Nvidia, and AMD?
Racks of Bitcoin mining machines inside Bitmain’s Ordos mine. (Aurelien Foucault for Quartz)
Wang Jun, who heads the AI program under Zhan, has spent two years working on Bitmain’s deep learning chip. The idea is to etch in silicon some of the most common deep learning algorithms, thus greatly boosting efficiency. Users will be able to apply their own datasets and build their own models on these ASICs, allowing the resulting neural networks to generate results and learn from those results at a far quicker pace. This is a technique that Google’s DeepMind unit, based in London, used to train its AlphaGo artificial intelligence, using its own Tensor Processing Unit chips.
Bitmain plans to sell these chips to any corporation that wants to train its own neural nets—which means a vast swathe of the economy. Wang says tech firms like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are among his target customers. Bitmain may eventually build its own data centers containing thousands of deep learning rigs and rent out that computation power to clients, just as it does with its bitcoin mines.
Wang, a veteran of Baidu and Google, argues that Bitmain has an edge in the deep-learning race because its mining technology evolved from individuals using desktop computers, to graphics cards, to custom silicon. The deep learning industry is simply going through the same evolution that bitcoin miners already experienced. So what’s next? “ASICs,” Wang says. “In the bitcoin ASIC area, who’s the best in the world? Bitmain.”
A nimble, highly focused, effort could take on the best efforts from the field’s giants, says Taylor, the professor. Bitcoin mining, with its focus on razor-thin margins and cost calculations, could have spawned a formidable competitor to the Googles and Nvidias of the world. “The companies that excelled in bitcoin mining have developed the skills to survive in an ultra-competitive, highly commoditized industry; have superior system-level design expertise and know how to keep data center costs down,” Taylor says. “The victors in the bitcoin [chip] design competition handily defeated US-based efforts.”
Money is just a story we tell each other
Zhan may have solved the problem of naming Bitmain’s deep learning ASIC, but he still has plenty on his mind. He’s months away from launching Sophon, which is due on the market before year’s end. Even after surviving the bitcoin crash of 2014, he says he still feels beset by crises and business challenges.
He turns to philosophy for guidance. Around the same time he read The Three-Body Problem, he read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. In it, Harari argues that storytelling is the human attribute that allows groups, society, and civilization to form. “If we believe in the same story we can work together,” Zhan says.
I ask Zhan if he remembers that Harari argues that money is among the most powerful stories humans have told each other for centuries.
“Yes—money, countries, democracy, even companies—all of these things are just virtual,” Zhan says. “After reading that book, I thought, yes, he is right. It impressed me so much. It’s a very good book.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article said Micree Zhan graduated from Tsinghua; he completed work on his thesis at Tsinghua, but graduated from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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