Today's episode of the Hatchery podcast is brought to you by Luxor technology North America's largest mining pool lectures goal is to operate enterprise-class mining pools with professionalism and an intense customer focus. They provide a top-notch user experience and have a great selection of pools for you to mine to from a variety of notable altcoins to Big Daddy Bitcoin for which they launched their mining pool in October. So be sure to go and check them out. We are incredibly grateful that Luxor is chosen to sponsor this show going into 2020. We would love it if you as listeners would support the show by Ting them you can find them online at Luxor dot Tech and give them a follow on Twitter at Luxor Tech Team. Hey, everyone Thanks for tuning in to the Hatchery podcast the best crypto mining podcast in the history of the world on today's show. We're joined by Kristy Lee. Minahan to discuss Hardware fpgas gpus Asics and how they are dominating certain coins in the space. We also talked about what some of the projects out there are doing to keep their network decentralised and to stay away from nasty fpgas and a Absolutely ruining the fun for all of the GPU miners out there. Hopefully you guys enjoy this episode. And if you do, please make sure that you leave us a rating and review on your preferred listening platform. And as always today's episode of the hash rate podcast is presented to you by hash rate OS hash rate OS is a Linux based operating system designed to help you increase the efficiency of your mining machines and maximize your overall profitability now with Asic and GPU support hash rate OS provides the best experience in crypto mining allowing you to manage your facility fully from any mobile device and take Click control of your mining operations. Hash rate OS is mining as it should be be sure to head over and check out the hash rate operating system at OS dot hash rate.com. Again, that's OS dot h a sh are eight.com. Alright without further Ado on to the show. Hey everyone, welcome to the hash rate podcast. I'm the Bitcoin Broski here today with crypto Chris Walken mean hash and special guest host Christie Lee Min Han. Miniheader - Han. I always miss? Yes. I got it. Finally got a girl man. Cool. So welcome to the show again. We're happy to have you back. Yay. You know, we were talking two minutes ago before we hit record about the new wave of a six and some of the drama that's going on specifically around kadena. I don't know how much you're able to share but love to open the conversation there and talk about it. Yeah, I mean the katana or kadena they get very upset by the way when I mispronounce number one their kicker or misspell their ticker. You can mispronounce their coin. So three people have said that this is proof that I'm not intelligent because I can't pronounce their coin correctly and I will continue to mispronounce it as is my right as an Australian, what could that uh their Community it has been very upset because all the GPU miners have started saying hey, you know, we're not profitable anymore. What was interesting was the fpga miners were also coming in and saying Hang on we're not making any profit, but at the same time the see a coin developers in the city of I'm mining Community have been tracking this massive hash rate increase that started just about in November or December last year. I mean there was evidence of a new machine coming online in October 2019, but only became really pronounced. What's the end of the year? So both of these communities independently have been facing, you know new machines on their own that are heavily centralizing the mining the interesting thing about these two coins. Is they both share the same algorithm. Well not quite they share Base called Blake to and there's Blake 2s and Blake to be one is designed to work with 64-bit CPUs and be more performant on 64-bit CPU. Use one is designed to be more performant on 32-bit CPUs. So some smart motherfucker out there decided. Hey, I'm going to go make a machine that just mines Blake to that has currently been terrorizing both chains and taking away all the profits from both the GPU and the fpga community. So I've been working with the Adana devs to actually do the notes analysis and there's some pretty strict bending that we can see that's come I would say in the last two months has started to appear and there's evidence of the mining pools actually having these devices pretty early on those as well specifically ice mining. I think it's cold and other mining pool as well. So yeah, it's been interesting what I want to try and do however is we're definitely going to release a report on this but overlay. The hash very own see according with the hash rate on kadena and specifically the notes patterns because right now with these machines the only way that we can reverse engineer this and give undeniable proof that there's these machines on the network is actually by just doing this Munson Alice. So with that undeniable proof and the nonce analysis that you're doing, what are the options that could enter than has moving forward. So I always say that you go to have an algorithm that fits the specific mining Community, right? So Kadena doesn't actually have an issue with Asics. But the problem right now is that the Asics are inherently centralized. There's there's only two people that have access to them. And so one person has you know, 73% of the network hash rate right now and the rest belongs to another party. That is the problem when you have a six really early on in your chain, so I know they were doing some analysis of crumpled and they're looking into that they may end up building their own algorithm. I'm not really sure. Disappointed because their original choice of Blake 2's came from David Warwick of Obelisk. And this is what happens when you have a six very early on in your coin Network. I mean if we had a Bitcoin a seek available in 2009 2010, the entire thing would have been I centralized force not that it would have mattered. It was no liquidity them. But I mean now how centralized is it speaking of there is an increasing number of people including Including a no it was on the podcast minor update. There's like five different research firms that have popped that are all claiming to give you know research on mining and what I find amusing is that not a single one of them has original information. They just parrot. Well the publicly available information and they charge for this I did not know you could do this. I know that like like token Insight they put out their report and by report what I mean is they sent a questionnaire out to the mining pools, but I'm sure they sent a similar question are two Service providers within the mining community and then they compiled those answers and that then became the research, but did you read the report? It was so bad. Yeah, like everything in there was incorrect horribly Incorrect and I'm sitting here going do I do I do something about it or do I just like ignore it when they made a lot of assumptions that didn't make sense to me. You know, they said things that were just yeah, I mean, yeah, they could be true, but they're assuming like specifically when they were talking about Cloud Mining and the growing In prevalence of cloud Mining and how there would be more demand from retail for cloud mining Services. Yeah, that could be true. But there was no information to substantiate those claims. It was just little things like that. They caught me there were some of the stats that because they're all drawn from a similar information pool. They're all going to line up right like when they talk about the centralization of Asic manufacturers and how there's roughly 95% of the industry controlled by for big companies. That's not Necessarily up for debate whether it's 95 exactly it's in that ballpark. So I mean there's some things that they're obviously spot-on with that you can't argue with and the you know, the information is publicly available. Then a lot of it is just click bait just in a long form and they missed so many manufacturers like I was so in there they have like a specific page on mining Farms. There's five mining Farms there. That's all they've listed there is well over that. I worked for one of the largest ones and then on the mining Hardware They barely had anything. They have AC minor on there, which was very interesting. Lost coin is Adam basic minor is a scam. They had a Halo on mining which hasn't been selling out any new hardware since you know their earliest nine days, very very outdated information. Yeah, I was disappointed because this combined with coin chairs is the other one. I think that makes through report and there's been three others that have popped up in China. They're all just circulating the same information like it would be great to have a real mining research firm that actually Goes and consults with the mining Farms individually and you know works with the mining farms and that was how they collect their data. Now, what would that be? Would that be possible though? I mean that's what I see is the potential challenge. I mean, yes, someone who has access to all those companies could do that, but then the question comes would someone with access to all of those companies do such a thing because how much is your time worth? And are you spending it properly if you're writing research reports as opposed to Consulting on the continued expansion? Each of the Bitcoin Network. I mean, you know, I mean I consult with a few of these but mostly it's VCS and which are publishing research reports because right now I guess you make a good point the information is competitive. So if you have understanding of you know, what is the distribution and what are the potential entry points into mining you want to keep that close to your chest and never actually share I would bet that the mines would probably not be truthful with their data to that's why you have to be actually managing the Farms. Then right who cares if they are truthful, that's yeah, you've managed well and one of the things that stood out to me in the token Insight report was they made a claim that major pools were going to add more support for altcoins, which I mean is true enough, right? There's going to be more support added for altcoins, but then they double down on the fact that there's 64 coins with over $100,000 in Daily volume what they did unknowingly as they brought in GPU mineable coins and major pools into the same conversation. Action and like I'm reading it as I'm sitting in slush pulls office. We're just talking about how practical it is. Like if you've got the Bitcoin having very close and you've got a limited amount of Dev work that you can put towards a project. You're not going to throw up support for a pool. That's you know, the total volume on that coin is $200,000. It doesn't make sense because the minute profitability shifts all of those miners are leaving. These don't know mining. They don't and their claim of 5 nanometer right now. There's this big myth going around that bit means making I've nanometer chips. So tsmc isn't making 5 nanometer chips in any sort of volume yet how these news reports always work is that in some random corner of the lab tsmc has managed to create a five nanometer chips that functions well great. There is a big difference between making, you know us very small batch of chips and making mess mess fly 7 nanometre still isn't fully matured. And right now there's about I would say 40% Performance that you can squeeze out of a 7 nanometre Bitcoin chip with some more optimizations. Mikrobitti is fully focused on working on this bit man is chasing the news of being able to say. Hey, we were the first five nanometer manufacturer, but it doesn't actually mean that much and we're not going to see five nanometer in large-scale Supply any time soon because all of the dedicated consoles your Xbox your PS4. For PS5 now, you're intending to switch. It's all using either 7 nanometre or some other phone factor and the gaming industry as well as the handheld Market Mobile phones laptops Etc really dictates. What is what the silicone supplies going to be like so this frustrates a lot because they were like, oh, yeah five nanometer chips are already in the tape out stage and 5 nanometer remaining Hardware will be released this year and I'm like, wow, that's a bold statement. Yeah. I mean, there's so many new HVAC manufacturers. Popping up to it seems like now everyone is trying to get into the a six-game who are the major chip manufacturers tsmc and Samsung. So you have globalfoundries as well. So every Asic manufacturer actually, this is just a global thing in Silicon. You have your main one. So like Nvidia is Samsung AMD is tsmc and you have your backup Fab. So if the main Fab, you know has an explosion or a fire or something major happens you switch to your backup fat and so you work on the Silicon libraries and work on. Chip designs for both Fabs in parallel, but main is tsmc main they use on a culmination of Intel as their backup as well as globalfoundries and they also have a supply chain within China at see em, I see which coincidentally is the same manufacturer that Obelisk their silicon from very early on SM. I see is only inside of China. So it's where most of your old coin a sixer Maine including the A second The Raven coin hasten mikrobitti is all in with Samsung. They have a backup at tsmc. I believe it is but it's only a very small allocation there. Kanaan is an absolute horror and just goes for with everyone. They've got somebody in fell Summit tsmc. I should probably stop swearing. Sorry. It's called this diversification. That's that's safe safeguarding your company. It's really okay. We swear on this podcast not putting. That's not safe for work tag for a reason. Yeah, right. I would double click explicit on the on the podcast post if it would let me there's even is entirely Chinese as well as there's another one within China that I forget the name of but they are silicone supplies just in entirely in China and then you have in a silicon in a grabs a little bit from China, but mostly they What's known as an aggregator? So the aggregator when you go to make anything with silicone you always buy 10 or 20% extra. This is because all sorts of things can happen. And because if you all of a sudden overproduce or you need more you think you know sales might be great. It's very hard to go back to the silicone manufacturing say hey, can you give me some more of those Wafers? They're going to be like no you have to wait another year until the allocate till we Do the allocation so you always buy a little bit extra whatever you don't use of your allocation. You can either keep and you still have to pay for it, or you can sell it out. And usually you sell it to an aggregator an aggregator is basically just a giant broker and all they do is they just aggregate all this Supply from the different companies and then they go sell it out to whoever is the highest bit of just like a regular broker, you know silicone actually just uses that which means they're false and their chips come from all these other different fathoms, so they need to find They're aggregator. Then for this grin Fiasco. Ah, we're going to get into that. So, you know silicon has a very strong history of self mining, you know, keeping devices that they make for about 9 to 12 months and just self mining with it. We know through someone else's leaked documents that were leaked that their ethereum Asic they have kept for almost a year and a half and I've been self mining with it. I was able to independently confirm that so yeah, I wager what's happened with that. Grin Asic is they've taped out a very small amount and they're keeping it for themselves because in that specific report, let me pull it off because the way they talked about this it's just yeah my bigger issue. We kind of talked about this on our last podcast that we had just the four of us, but they took Bitcoin as payment and this was back when Bitcoin was like 4 grand and now they're offering to pay people back, but are they paying people? I can Bitcoin or USD because if it's USD than they also made money and they have a 6 that they're mining on their own. They were probably do it in USD. Most likely here's the really interesting thing though. You have to pay the Fab to like get anything done the percent that you pay though is defers like 20% might be 40. It can be 80% from within a solar cones reputation. I wager they would have had to do at least 60 percent up front at the fam. So the fact that you know, they've already been doing these designs. It means some money had exchanged hands. Like if the Fab is doing work on testing money was exchanged. So how does it know so I'm constantly have all the money to do the refunds kind of weird more than likely and someone a lot smarter than me could probably just do an analysis on growing and track these devices they'd be mining with them for quite a while and with the new upcoming Fork they realized oh, it's probably more profitable if we just keep them to ourselves. I need the c29 fork c31 was super profitable for like 12 hours because it is still trying to fix this parity. So if you have a six that are making a hundred forty dollars a day and no one else has I mean, I think that made some money that day here's their statement that I want to touch on very quickly. It took us three more months to complete the verification which is impossible with any fpga. That is not true. So what they're building is literally a, you know, another GPU card there. They're building a GPU card clone GPU cards get verified with big fpgas. I've got to see them. You can look them up online. There are the synopsis machines. Sometimes it's the Cadence machines. They're pretty badass. They look like something out of Doctor Who and so that I take issue with all of your designs are verified about these really really giant fpgas. They're just large-scale the worldwide shortage of advanced Foundry capacity. Is really weird. They're not doing anything events with their chip if epic blockchain isn't doing anything Advanced. Neither. Is it a silicone the new wafer fabrication? That's fine. You do need to wait for that but then they've been stating that hey there was a weight. And by the way, this report came out when in 2019 this was their statement they made they said hey, we're going to deliver everything in January 2020 now felt like they were just pushing this out and their latest statement. They say that the Fab still has a verified things even though in their previous. A statement they said hey, they've done all the verification now Fabs specifically tsmc have their shit together. They are not this clumsy. They don't just magically lose customers. They don't have delays like this unless there is number one that there is part of The Foundry down do to you know, a chemical explosion that did happen with globalfoundries and it was why AMD moved all their production over the SMC for the Vegas and you don't just you know, magically have these delays of four to six months. That doesn't happen in a very controlled environment with one of the three big players. Well, my other thing is I would bet that they're mining on them solely because of the fact that I migrant forever and on 1080i. So I have a bunch of c31 was way more profitable to see 29 forever and then within the past couple of months, it's actually more profitable in mind c29 on 1080i is it is c31 by a bunch. So I would think that they've got them online and difficulties up on c31. I bet you we can easily track them as well. Well, there's this myth going around that, you know, you can fool the notes discrepancy that shows up. It's a very specific fingerprint when you do this. It's malice and yes, it is possible on certain chips, but 99% of the time you're just going to leave the chip as is because how this analysis works is you're finding the number of sold Melissa's like what is what is it in the specific height and your clustering those together and that specific pattern is formed from Number one the speed of the chip operating and number two how many notes has successful notes as you're solving per second you are not going to deliberately cripple your chip to try and hide your device. Especially not in an Asic friendly algorithm like Grim. So when I get some time, I'll do a bit of an analysis on that but I bet you we'd start seeing that pattern. I mean I had evidence that they had the had some test samples in September 2019, but I bet you will see the mind. I'm back in August 20 19. So it'll be it'll be interesting to see going back to bitcoin Asics. There's some new players that are coming on the scene SBI s so SBI and layer one would be the to the jump out to me. I don't know the layer 1 is actually they actually have an Asic planned. I know they have a hard some dude from NASA I kid you not. Okay because I'm there a sick. Here's the problem with all these new Asic. Books are all going to get their ass kicked because they're competing with 10 years of tribal knowledge and 10 years of research with bit Main and mikrobitti. It's like trying to say you're going to go make a GPU that beats out a video or AMD and after having dealt with both of these players and dealing with a ton of new people trying to make a 6 they'll do the exact same thing. They make over exaggerated claims on their specifications and then when they finally take out the chip, it's often underperforming by 40 or 60 percent. I mean the same thing happened with Tara minor back in the day, which I've had to revisit recently. So while SBI crypto is going ol in part of that is fueled by they have their own whining forms. So they want their own Supply and number two. They think they're really going to be able to beat out mikrobitti and bit me and I'll make a prediction now and I'll bet one Bitcoin on it. I reckon that their machine will come out thirty percent under their specifications or they would Cancel the project and Hartley layer one might be able to pull off a competitive chip. But I bet you will happen is they'll announce a release and then two days later either mikrobitti or a bit mainly start selling their device. If you talk about history and experience from building Asics. What about if you had someone like Samsung just start building their own Asics, you think they could jump into a market and easily compete with somebody like that then there is someone running Hang around that claims to be from Samsung designing a success all for the industry to know Samsung might be able to only because they've been working with the different manufacturers globalfoundries. Try this back in 2015 to 2017 Intel tried this from 2016 to 2019. Both failed the trick to designing a Bitcoin has tickets different from any other kind of basic you have to sit on the edge of the process node, specifically the edge of the wafer you're looking for leaky chips, which means you have to do. Your specific processor to get these high leakage quality, which you never wanted any other device, you know leakage means that you can overclock the chip to an insane amount but it also opens yourself up for a lot of errors and it opens yourself up for a lot of waste as well. No other industry won't stop except for Bitcoin Miners and then the other piece of all this is the optimizations around sha-256 T do require a bit of study at East one to two years of study. I think if we were going to take all three of the manufacturers and figure out who could beat who probably globalfoundries because while Samsung has been trying to make their own chip internally globalfoundries has been studying this religiously and silently acquiring some of the top basic developers from bit Main and from Canal in the background for the last three years. And so they're gearing up to do something but it remains to be seen if they will. Successful, there's also patents involved which I know China doesn't care much about but we seem to take it seriously in the u.s. So, you know, that could be a whole issue as well. There's also another kind of design you could do on a Bitcoin AC no one's been able to pull it off. It's round approximate Computing and you could ease there's a really great white paper floating around but you could easily get 20 to 30 percent increase just using that method so we might see some of the earlier ones the basics using that Covid so that's the white paper and I'm going to try and put this in as lime and terms as possible. But when you say roundabout it's basically trying to guess for the solution randomly rather than trying to start at the beginning and solve for it all the way that the one you're talking about. Exactly. Yeah. It's 30% Sorry. It's a 30% increase in performance. So it's pretty cool and it's approximate Computing only really works for Bitcoin because we're so fault tolerant and because you know, Sort of allow for most of these guesses. Yeah, if someone put that into play they would have a very very competitive basic. I bet you SBI is trying to implement this as well and they will most likely fail. I mean your first chip is always terrible. I remember my first one it was terrible as well. It means first one was terrible. So it was condolence and the other thing is you just can't take random people out of the industry if they haven't grown up designing crypto Asics. This is the one point I I agree with David wark on you can't take a random average Asic designer and have them make a Bitcoin Asic. There's just such a gap in knowledge. It's the same reason you can't take a CPU Asic designer and have the make a GPU Asic. They're very specialized Fields with lots of tribal knowledge that is only gained through working in the industry. So we've been talking about all the all the public Asics. Let's talk about the ones that aren't so public special with you on here. So I started tracking all this I think It was with your tweet from the the raven a sick and his back like July or something like that. But uh, so that's when I started tracking all this but it started get out of hand. So with my tracking so I've seen Raven got wrecked by a 6 and a fort then they were profitable for gpus for a while and then everybody moved to Vail and bailiffs completely fucking wreck right now. Like I remember when I was mining asking like 200 a day if you go on what's a mind it's like 13 a day right now, so they don't right now is using Prague Palin. To Max but they only switched I think a week ago. I'm a seen that announcement yet. Yeah, they just switched a week ago because I'm being they moved off Raven coin. Yeah, it was this Monday was when they officially formed but my big thing with Raven right now is Raven was good, and then they got completely wrecked again because right now you can go on my nipple stats and 75% of the hash rate is on secret pools that are even track right now. Yep. So now in the hell are people going to fix this shit. Let's talk about this because it's really interesting so full disclosure. I was asked to write off a potential algorithm design for Raven coin. There's five different proposals right now, but only for a new algorithm for Raven and they're trying to make gpus have parity with fpgas, which is doomed for failure from the start. We'll get into why and the second one is called. Old x16 dag are also known as altered hash that is created by altered. I think they're called Ultra hash or something. Yeah, Dave Collison's new new new company. He made where he brought a bunch of BCU 1525 decided. Hey, I'm going to go use those for the AI industry and then realize that no one uses fpgas at scale of the AI industry. So that plan did not work out. Those are the guys. It actually made the x 16 RV to bit strings. Also they did they did and so they've designed a memory part and Asic resistant proof of work and no one on the podcast can hear my air quotes, but I'm being very sarcastic it out with my hands and then you have white fires algorithm, which is called e16 are which aims to really keep the spirit of what Raven coin is your 16 different algorithms. I haven't reviewed both in enough detail. Well, there are glaring errors in both and I can tell you right now that it's not going to stop the new devices. So let's talk about the new devices full disclosure. I have both of them. I also manage a large farm that uses them. So I'll get that from the way now because it's it's going to leak eventually the o w one was the very first device. This was created by pain. I dear who decided to Market this under a different name. Can I dear for those of you who aren't familiar with them? There are Chinese only. They only deal with Chinese Miners and they built the very first Monaro a scene and I got to become familiar with them during my time at Genesis soap in idear built. This o w 1y this is different from a traditional asec is it uses something called EF PGA think of this like a flexible Asic, it's fpga cores embedded inside of an Asic packaging. So you get all of the Power Savings of an Asic with the flexibility of an fpga the restrictions on this are you can't change Iraq. Architecture as much it's really the benefit of fpgas being able to change your architecture on the fly. So the o w one has been mining since March last year might have been a little earlier then they decided to make their new tech hold the ow2. So the ow2 uses something called are chronics has speedcore. It's also an embedded fpga and it's think of it just as a little bit bigger, you know, it's a bit beefier and they're able to fit more of Raven coins algorithms inside one of them. Gasps so this is currently dominating or even pointing right now. It's pushed down all of the BC use pushed out all of the pcie fpgas entirely. And of course all the porter GPU miners when there was that switch that fork for Raven coin. All that meant was that it took about two weeks for the Nui fpgas to have a new extreme and get reconfigured. So a lot of the new algorithms right now that are being designed are trying to create parity between the fpga in the GPU. You in terms of performance the problem with this is when you're designing a mining algorithm. You have to create parity around three points hash what $10 if you only tuned for a long you're going to get from the other two. So while it's going to end up happening is Raven point a fork to this you algorithm and I can promise you those new fpgas have the capacity also switch because they also have a giant chunk of memory on the board which is going to be able to fit any sort of dag file, which is One of the components of new algorithms there thinking. Oh my gosh did this and they're Asic resistance. Why don't I just put that in so I'm guessing they're on hbm. They're not on HP. Mm. You don't need H BM for to do some really cool stuff diag. All you need is a ddr4 which is in plentiful Supply in China or they might be able to cram semester am into an e fpga once I've actually moved. I have a know W to that I'm going to be doing a big tear Town of and ID capsule will know exactly what's inside. And these are the ones that we've all been talking about that are only in China, right? Yes, all of the you all kind of Isis are only in China. And so there's a new trend. I've actually seen and it's one of the reasons I've stepped into being this mercenary role. You can't get your hands on any of these new devices unless you're best friends with the manufacturer. That's it there. No one is selling anymore. The new strategy is find a private investor. And here's the really cool part sometimes. Local government find a private investor that funds the initial tape out and you only need about sixty to a hundred units completely dominate chain for the ow2. They've only taped out 250. That's it. I'm so it's a very small amount pow1 they mass-produced but I think that's just because they intended to eventually sell a little but they self mine with it for about six months recoup all their money and then they will choose to sell it to a very private Forum within China. And for those of you who don't I know know that on the podcast you've talked a little bit about the mining strategy as it is in China. Most of it is really, you know, you'll have a mining Farm in a big region and then the local government will come knocking on day and say hey here are your two options either Let's either you get arrested now and I sees all this equipment because you haven't been making your taxes or you've made too much money or it's illegal Rah, or you cut me in on the deal and everyone takes the second option of course and the local government becomes your friend in this so You know now that they have skin in the game they go and fund your projects. They support you they help you with electricity prices and this is pretty common spread. If you go and talk to any of the big mining pool operators in China, usually, you know face-to-face on over text. They're going to Old confirm us. It's something that happens and it's natural what the local government in China wants contrast heavily with the Chinese the central government, but you know, the central government has had to put their foot down and say hey all crypto is a lie. Eagle or mining is illegal and then stuff just happens in Shadows. The local government knows all the facilities make no mistake. They have like internal Maps. But here's the thing. They're not paid as much as we'd like to think so partnering with these mining farms in China. It's great. They don't want to shut them down. They've got skin in the game when they partner with them. They want to keep them alive surprisingly. I was at a retreat last weekend. I think it was and it was it was pretty cool. I got to meet some really good friends. But I also got to meet someone who's been working for the last eight years in China working with the government specifically on cryptocurrency strategy over there and I hadn't confirmed something for me. So in in 2015 to 2017, I got hired by a company to do some independent research on it means investors because at the time they had an IPO it a lot of it was pretty shady. And we found quite a few number of their investors and private Equity was going from government sources, but we were unable to confirm whether the central government or local government because one's kind of normal ones kind of scary and this the source actually confirmed that it was the central government which terrifies me that man is the only company right now that reportedly has central government investment versus can on, you know, like a lot of the others which have local government investment. So it's good that they're opening facilities in the United States. Yeah, and you know, it's great that Firmware is closed source, and that we're all on board it onto their pool infrastructure. Absolutely. Nothing wrong with that when you're trying to build an independent World Financial system. No problem whatsoever. This all just keeps showing how far China is ahead of us. Like that's like you said with ow2 like you said, they didn't produce very many but there's 75 percent of unknown hash rate on Raven right now. China is so far ahead of us right now. Like we are playing catch-up and this is going to keep happening the katana. So the CEO sashka Dada Asic the like to Asic has been in effect since last year would I say like roughly November also another Chinese Isaac, there's ones who built all the time for these old coins. There's one being built for what is it going? There's one being for random X they're just popping up all over the place and you're not going to stop them and this is going to keep happening and what I find amusing is everyone saying, oh, let's just go and embrace Asics they still fail to realize that you're mining. This is how you onboard users. No one wants to go on a chain that you know is controlled by one part because then the game is over. It's just not follow. Yeah, and people thought I was crazy. I told people that they were making stuff for random acts as like they're going to have either fpgas or Ace Ace not gonna be that hard. They're going to get them all random eggs. Yeah. I've told hyc my design it's possible to mine it on an fpga. But remember I sent about the three little dials. It gets skewed heavily on the cost because obviously you see BU is going to be dirty. I keep I think we'll see some of those it might take a little while but it's not that hard. You know, the myth that you know, if someone designed an Asic for random X it would just mimic a CPU doesn't really work. The reason it works for Prague cow is the Press Bar for you is absolutely ridiculous to replicate their is 30 years of Ip sitting in that thing and AMD and Nvidia at neck-and-neck constantly invent. It's very hard to replicate Lindsay's Asic the etherium classic one or at hash one. Tries to create their own kind of cross bar and you know, no one's heard about that shit because supposedly it's failing. Miserably they've tried to push way too much power and way too much speed through a poor PCB. So I don't think we're going to see a nice account from them anytime soon either. I was gonna bring up ETS to because didn't sign a release an Asic for easy hash. That's better than a 10. Yes. That's the V10. That's Canal. Oh, there's there's a few things so, you know silicon has Revision, so they had their like 250 Mega hash. They have a 500 Mega hash one. Now. I think false coin did a review of that one. Yeah, the eighth sense 500. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And so then there's your kanaan one, which is called the V10, I believe so. What this is is an independent friend of canals has built the a second built the design and can on will distribute it but not worldwide only to Chinese Chinese poems. They already made that statement. It's set in stone. You're going to meet lots of buyers on the internet that will claim they can get access to them. No one can get access to them. I have to physically go to China next week to pick up on which is a pain in the arse like they're not getting out of charm or anytime soon part of this is because of Poppy. Actions, so we saw this in bit means a sick as well in the III. It was restricted for distribution in both China and Taiwan because there was a specific part number inside the box that's restricted from distribution to those two countries. The can on a stick is going to have a very similar part with the same issue you get this a lot in memory products and since all at hash Asics are going to have some form of memory unless you're trying to do Lindsay's Crazy Design This is going to keep cropping up. So yeah. Yeah, a centralized A6 be great if we just all adopted gpus as long as there's money to be made there's no way that everyone's going to do the right thing. You've got too much emphasis on the amount of money. They can be made right now. We're talking about that the other day, it's funny how the ideals on which the whole movement were started have pretty much faded within 10 years. So then 10 years we've gone back to a system where greed dominates people do everything that's in service of the the bottom line and Frankly Speaking probably the last Country that we would want to have any kind of involvement has control over the entire. Well 60% of the network. Well, I made that sweet that we need to decentralize the centralization but it's so bad. It's only going to honestly happen if people start either adopting gpus or CPUs, that's it. There is you have to piggyback off the supply chains of the really really big manufacturers building your own supply chain for Hardware is Is difficult most people think it looks easy but there's a reason there's five different what we call Distributors just dedicated to building out Supply chains Avnet our Electronics future Electronics Etc. This is a very difficult industry to break into and so it becomes much easier when you have an Asic friendly coin to just build it all over Italy in China and not deal with the rest of the world and they're just salt and other Chinese miners. You only need one buyer. don't need men but so Christy to jump in on that when it comes to the growth right now where the projected growth in the United States and North America and South America for that matter at places outside of China how realistic is it to think that these facilities are going to be able to scale at any kind of rate that's competitive with Chinese facilities considering that they've got a by the machines and then wait, I mean what sixty to a hundred and twenty days to go to receive them is the is everything so you're saying that there's no way to To now so the desire to distribute hash is it's a novel by dream. Yeah. It's a noble goal. Don't get me wrong and you're going to have players like Fidelity doing this because yeah, it's for the good of the network, but they're only going to be doing it for Bitcoin. They're not going to do it for a while your other old coins. And so the only way that you can force decentralization is through your algorithm and choice of Hardware a lot of random X getting people to the u.s. From China you want to play on Very specific things one, you know, you want to encourage the Chinese miner. Hey, we can diversify your assets that excuse work before President. She made his big announcement about hey, we're going to be blockchain forever because now the regulatory environment in China has kind of changed they do want to commercialize and centralized money. And I mean CZ even made that statement the local government is getting a lot smarter now and they're very supportive of being the dominant Bitcoin miner and the central government is behind the scenes as well because I mean control of World Financial system. That's great. You have an advantage over anyone and it specifically control all the world financial system that Jack Dorsey of Twitter is building on top of and some of these other, you know, the big players are building on top of them talking about so you try and play on that part to get miners away from China and you try and say hey, it's more friendly over in the US. My answer to that is always it's not necessarily more or less friendly in the US. In terms of regulations, it's unclear. It's unclear. But it's also different doing business in China is very hard for a foreigner the first time when you still learning but it's very easy for the Chinese and things move a lot faster over there. If you have a dispute, it's usually clear about within a matter of hours and you know, most people are going to just deploy in China, even if 10% of their machines go missing every year. They're just going to keep deploying in China because it's easier it's faster things get stood up. A little faster. There's no stress and you can often get right meals from the manufacturer and the whole argument about diversifying your assets doesn't really work anymore. The only other reason to move over is if you have some sort of secret Souls that gives you you know, 20% extra hash rate and it's only available to u.s. Or which was the stick we tried to real dat core and that works to a degree but brains OS is probably going to kick their ass a little down the road with their open source firmware. So again that argument Melt away you might have a 6 that you know SBI carbon might decide to only sell to the US but that would be really stupid. Then they'd only be selling to like 20% of the entirety of Bitcoin miners. So I think it is a pipe dream and I think it's slowly be going to become more centralized within China until you know, they're not going to 51% attack the network where we're past those days of anyone doing a 51% attack. It's to detectable and do stupid. They're just going to quiet Release it control the supply and here's here's the great thing about controlling Bitcoin. If you control the monetary Supply specifically the Virgin coins and the exchanges and the flow of money. You've already taken control of the network just in a different way. Well, the other issue is we don't have any polls either like the number one u.s. Pool is Nova block and is number 12. It has 28 times less a short than pulling. This is number one. So we're getting our ass kicked. Yeah, the whole situation and I'm not going to share it on this podcast maybe on a later one, but after speaking with the slush pool guys and you know Luxor and Nova block you get a real sense of what's going on with the pools and I'd argue that there's probably in the top 12 actually only three pools. Yeah, maybe for Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. That's what yeah, it's on talking about. Yeah. I mean the big reason why You end up running a pool in general in China is it's it's with friends, right? It's deals with friends, you know, someone has a bunch of minors someone else has a bunch of minors and you decide to start a pool together. So the Chinese cartel. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it is right. I mean it's not exchanges pools miners government. It's the pain is incredibly clever. They learn from the US. How do you do how to spin up all of these shell entities? So all of the pools really for the Bitcoin Network or just a bit main subsidiary. So when you first look on paper, it doesn't seem like it but they have very strategic investments in all of these other pool operators and Farms, which will coalesce is up to them at the end of the day. So they've been very smart about it. They're basically proxies. Yes. Yes. I love how they pretend that ampoule and BTC.com or different divisions. Like if you talk if you talk to someone from ampoule and you're like wow. Having an issue for it with BTC.com. Oh, we don't handle that here. No, you need to talk to the CEO of BT c.com. You're going to need to go to the next office over even better the next desk over. Yeah. Hey man, I'm gonna transfer this call. Hold on puts on a different voice Tom. It's for you. Yeah. Yeah. Wow, I'm not gonna lie kind of fucking sucks. You know and I yeah got like what I appreciate is Squire mining. They've rebranded the tall now there now like they're trying to pull some of that hat straight out of China which I again I think is a noble goal. But at the end of the day, why would you ever go to the US you have to pay extra on taxes? Maybe not for bit main miners, but for the rest you have to deal with very very slow workers. It's just amazing what you can get from China. So you have to deal with the slow lazy workers. That won't help. Care and you know, they won't benefit surprise else. They want, you know, like Fair pay and livable wages and watch brakes. Yeah, you look great I kid you not when I was building one of the facilities in China in 2015. I had to negotiate with the operator for for toilet breaks and a toilet. It's just it's a different world over there and he looked at me like I was a moron. He's like what their workers you expect them to like live like officers and I'm like I expected to be able to use the toilet. It's moments like this when I'm really glad well Behrman isn't on this podcast with us why there's you know ghosts. I'm here for yes. Yes. Every Asian accent done by will bear man. Just sounds like jinyang. Silicon Valley. Yes, all of them. That's it. I love that. I think we're going to see a big Rise by the way in Carl's extent a really big prize. How about his Becca Stan launch the nationalized mining pool that they just said that they're launching at anyone that uses it as going to get basically and a subsidy on their electricity bill. Yeah, that might be that might be possible possible. But as a US citizen say you're doing business and is Becca Stan and Have a look what happens. Yeah, there's a whole area of opportunity that can't be touched by people in the US, right? You've got I mean obviously Iran is a huge Nono but kazakhstan's okay, though. Kazakhstan is is okay for the u.s. Right and it is fine for the u.s. It's some of the best Farms over there the people that run it The thing about Kazakhstan e culture is they're very honest and loyal they're really loyal to a fault but they kind of joke about really horrible things like murder and part of their family, you know disappearing overnight. They just joke about it, even though this actually happens to them one of the largest armed operators over there. He runs about three Farms. He's fantastic guy. He must be in his 30s and he's already lost a big chunk of his family to either, you know War. Or politics or the child or the Kazakhstan e-government and he's so casual and nonchalant about it and you know, he drinks but he he drinks like I say little sailor. He always host these really big parties when I go over he's such a great person and he really puts his whole heart and soul into know running the farms and taking care of the equipment. That's awesome. And also fuck that. It's a different world over there and you need to the other thing with Kazakhstan is that you can actually own your own assets fun. The fact you are you Minor that wants to host in Kazakhstan. What ends up happening is the Kazakhstan e Farm claims ownership of your assets on paper so that when the government comes around for their, you know regular due diligence or the tax guys look into it. It's like oh there's a fault, you know, there's a farm operator here that has all these assets. Nothing abnormal foreign countries are not allowed to operate there without having their own Kazakhstan identity and most people do not know how to south of Kazakhstan identity. Yeah. It's problematic. Look for public companies that were mine in Kazakhstan hate. Most Americans don't know how to set up an American entity. Like let's let's not even get into Kazakhstan. There's a couple of other countries that will soon be lets say gaining more exposure to bitcoin that area of the world is it's Rife with opportunity as we end of the day though. It comes to the supply chains. How are you going to get Transformers electrical equipment and the minor is into some of these countries that that becomes the bottleneck. And in mining that scale even the materials to build your own damn fault. I mean, we think it's pretty easy when we're sitting across across the world. But how are you going to get, you know a bunch of high voltage Transformers into Turkmenistan or God getting low voltage and medium voltage Transformers into Mongolia was hard enough. There is there's a lot of logistics involved in doing so on a list somewhere like I'm about it. You're talking that's all I'm thinking as you're talking. I'm like, oh my God. This is has just got me flag. I don't know sure. You are definitely the Dennis Rodman of mining got about and you and you got pink hair. Yes hair is fabulous. Yes, definitely definitely better than the drop tears a hole the Chinese boys. So it's like an intimidating. It's how I get access to these miners. I just go into the farm and I'm like I'm taking the they don't want to keep this if you don't want to, you know mess with me, so It's the system. Well Christy. Thanks for coming on the show. We appreciate it always happy to you know, you have about mining impart some knowledge. You're a fan favorite. You're the most requested repeat guests. So we're definitely gonna have you on again as many times. You'll come back on the above to have you. All right. Well for everyone that's listening and thank you for tuning into the show and we will talk to you all again very soon. Thanks for tuning in to the Hatchery podcast. We appreciate your continued support. Please do us a favor and leave us a rating and review on your preferred listening. Platform and head over to Twitter and give us a follow at hash rate. That's at h4s hr8.
We're joined by guest host Kristy-Leigh Minehan, who shares her experiences working with ASIC manufacturers and managing some of the most exclusive mining hardware in the world. Previous episodes: https://hashr8.com/#podcast Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/h4shr8 ----------------------------------------- HASHR8 Podcast is presented by HASHR8 OS. HASHR8 OS is a Linux-based operating system designed to help you increase the efficiency of your mining machines and maximize your overall profitability. Now with ASIC and GPU support, HASHR8 OS provides the best experience in crypto mining, allowing you to manage your facility from any mobile device. HASHR8 OS is mining as it should be. Take complete complete control of your mining operations today at https://os.hashr8.com HASHR8 OS Discord: https://discord.gg/McuRgwR Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/hashr8os ----------------------------------------- About our sponsor:  Luxor Technology is North America's largest mining pool. With a focus on enterprise solutions and an intense focus on customer experience, they provide a premier mining pool platform for bitcoin and altcoin miners. Visit them today at https://luxor.tech, and follow them on Twitter @LuxorTechTeam. https://www.meetup.com/Baltic-Cryptocurrency-Mining-Meetup/events/267886784/ 