Today, I am going to through one of the biggest and most influential cryptocurrency companies known as Bitmain. Famous for their ASIC mining rigs as well as one of their founders Jihan Wu, I am going to go through the history of this company and why they are so influential.
A little history behind Bitmain.
Bitmain was founded in 2013 in China by two people named Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan. The company has offices in several cities across China, United States, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Israel. They are a private company, and specialize in creating mining equipment; mainly ASIC chips. The Antminer products are among their most famous, with there being ASIC miners optimized for several different cryptos. Yesterday, the Antminer E3 got released, which many say could potentially change the Ethereum mining scene from one that uses GPUs to one that uses ASICs. The company is also known for operating one of the largest mining pools known as Antpool, which as of today represents 13.7% of the total hashrate distribution.
Why is Jihan Wu so famous and why has Bitmain attracted a negative reputation?
Jihan has been credited as the brains behind Bitmain, and was reportedly the first person to translate the Bitcoin whitepaper from English to Chinese.According to himself on his Twitter page, he studied Economics and Psychology at Peking University. Being a powerful person in the Bitcoin mining space, he is often blasted for making mining more centralized by controlling the ASIC market. The fact that he is a very open supporter of Bitcoin Cash makes many people wonder about his motives. There have been many different unproven theories such as Bitcoin Cash being controlled by Wu and Bitmain. One common talking point is that BCH nodes are mostly in China, and therefore Bitmain controls them.
-Jihan Wu.
My thoughts on the matter.
Through the research I've done, there are actually more nodes in the United States than there are in China, representing 27 and 24% of the total node population respectively. There is another criticism of an "attack" in November where Wu and other influential miners diverted hashing power from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash, driving up fees for BTC for a temporary amount of time. You can read more about this in its entirety in my "Why did BCH spike in price" article I wrote. Wu has denied these allegations of an attack, but nonetheless, people believe Wu is conspiring to bring down Bitcoin. I don't believe these large conspiracy theories at the moment, but I also cannot deny that Wu is very pro-BCH with Bitmain's website only accepting BCH as payment for their miners. Also, Wu is a big crypto-Twitter personality, and often makes tweets about BCH.
Overall, I believe Bitmain is one of the most, if not THE most influential company in the crypto space. Their ASIC chips have completely changed the mining space, and whether their changes have led to a good or bad outcome is up to the reader.Now that the company is experiencing funding from outside investors and dabbling in AI tech, their level of power will only increase. The main founder Jihan Wu has been very famous in the crypto space, and without his input, we perhaps would not see BCH being as influential as it is today.
Sources