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Bitmain’s Antminer Says Bitcoin Rig Sales Will Go on Despite CEO Jihan Wu’s Departure

Posted on by Bob Coiney

Bitmain’s Antminer says that Bitcoin rig sales will go ahead following former CEO Jihan Wu’s sudden departure. It is also to be noted that last year due to corporate infighting, chip shipments were temporarily halted.

A news post on cointelegraph stated that Bitmain, a Bitcoin mining rig manufacturer, has said that business operations will continue despite CEO Jihan Wu’s untimely departure from the organization. 

It can be recollected that Bitmain’s ASIC mining rigs operations were stopped briefly last year in 2020. That was because of infighting and politics among the top leaders in the company. The Beijing-based hardware company saw their main founders Micree Zhan and Jihan Wu, trying to oust each other of the company.

Zhan had temporarily stopped one of their subsidiaries in Shenzen from shipping products. Crypto Coin Growth is a portal on cryptocurrency had this to tweet on the departure of Jihan Wu. 

Jihan Wu left the company abruptly on Wednesday after buying shares from Zhan and other shareholders worth $600 million. The team released a statement saying that business will go on as usual. 

Bitmain’s Antminer wants to inform you that sales and services will go on as usual despite the internal changes that have happened in the company. Micree Zhan and Jihan Wu founded Bitmain in the year 2013. 

They both managed to take it to new heights because, in 2018, it was the largest manufacturer of ASIC machines that were used in Bitcoin mining. Bitmain also runs two mining pools, Antpool and BTC.com.

Antpool and BTC.com collectively account for 20% of Bitcoin mining and 30% of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) mining. Bitmain influence has seen its share of drama internally. In 2017, hard fork saw Bitcoin Cash broke away Bitcoin. 

The company then sided with Bitcoin Cash during the hard fork. It was a problem because there were disagreements on the size of the blocks used in Bitcoin’s design. Additionally, they also managed to get a massive contract of $35 million from Riot Blockchain.

Riot Blockchain placed an order for 15,000 of its Antminer S19 series machines. Riot Blockchain is a Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency mining firm. According to BitInfoCharts, investors were concerned about the unsold merchandise from the New Year period. 

However, those fears have been evaporated, with Bitcoin mining’s profitability rising by more than 300%.

Australian Regulators freeze assets of BitConnect Promoter

Posted on by wiredshut2

Australian promoter, John Bigatton, has had his assets frozen and hit with a travel ban outside Australia. Bigatton is accused of floating a crypto-Pyramid scheme that saw investors lose $US2.6 billion ($3.7 billion).

The directive was issued by the Federal Court in conjunction with international authorities after an investigation into his business affairs. The investigation was requested by Australia’s equivalent of the U.S’s equivalent of the Securities and Exchanges (SEC) – Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

Bitconnect’s Collapse

Mr. Bigatton has acted for several firms as a financial investments advisor and a wealth management trustee. Most of the companies he is affiliated with are located in Sydney and Melbourne. His involvement in these firms has had him linked to the collapse of Bitconnect which saw US investors make huge losses on their investments.

Bitconnect’s collapse called attention to the massive risks that threaten the cryptocurrency industry. Due to its largely unregulated nature, security on investments tends to be low hence susceptible to theft. This has seen a series of class action suits instituted against Bitconnect.

The now defunct firm has been accused of pump and dump schemes in which investors were promised returns of up to 40 per cent by promoters and that people could “turn a $US1000 investment into a $US50 million return within three years”, according to a class action filed in Florida.

Mrs. Bigatton’s disappearance

In addition to the charges levelled against Mr. Bigatton, ASIC records indicate that a company registered under his wife was also involved in underhand deals. The court also froze assets linked to JB Investment Management. The firm is registered solely to Mrs. Bigatton as the sole shareholder and director. She has since been on the run. Mrs. Bigatton is alleged to have fled and sent the funds linked to the investigations in an offshore account.

Mrs. Bigatton went missing in March sparking fears she had met with foul play or had taken her own life. She has since been considered a missing person and a homicide suit instituted. This has helped her escape from being named as a defendant in her Husband’s case and no suggestion has been made to the effect that Mr. Bigatton was involved in his wife’s disappearance.

The investigations against Bitconnect keep opening new cases against suspected scammers. CRYPTO IS COMING!

Samsung To Integrate Crypto Cold Wallets in Upcoming Galaxy 10

Posted on by wiredshut2

SamMobile, the biggest online Samsung community recently announced that the company is planning to integrate cryptocurrency cold wallets in its upcoming mobile phone Galaxy S10.

Samsung leading the way

Adnan Farooqi, the editor of SamMobile, stated:

“After hearing about Samsung’s blockchain and cryptocurrency software, we resolute to dig around a little deeper. We can verify that the company is indeed developing one and that it may be launched with the Galaxy S10.”

The crypto services will come in two parts; a cold wallet for saving and storing cryptocurrency and a crypto wallet for transfers, viewing account information and transaction. Samsung’s new wallet is expected to support Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Ethereum (ETH), and Ethereum-derived token ERC20.

Why the cold wallet

Samsung ventured into the cryptocurrency market about ten months ago with the focus on bitcoin mining. The company started creating mining equipment from its factory based in Suwon, South Korea to ship to international distributors.

Reportedly, the company has been working with Halong Mining in China and Squire in Canada. However, as of December, the partner distributors of Samsung’s ASIC mining chips remain unclear. With increased mining activities, it seemed that cryptocurrency wallet would be the next step for the company.

If the company is to enter the cryptocurrency exchange market, which nearly every major company in the country including telecommunications, gaming, financial, and insurance companies are involved in, it will have to build a new infrastructure from the ground up, similar to what Shinhan Bank has done with Gopax.

However, Samsung is not fooling this line of thought. The company has decided to use its existing line of products to strengthen the infrastructure surrounding cryptocurrencies as an asset class.

How it will work

According to SamMobile, if the wallet is integrated into the Samsung Galaxy S10, users will be able to import their data from wallets such as MetaMask and Trust Wallet to transact natively with the mobile phone. Customers will also be able to create a new wallet in the cold wallet app.

The news comes when the cryptocurrency market has fallen below everyone’s expectation. Many have to halt their operations until the market becomes favourable.  If Samsung and other companies integrate cryptocurrencies support, many companies that focus on creating mining hardware stand to become irrelevant.

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Interested in more crypto content? Check out South Korean Government Hold First Crypto Debate and Bulletproof Bitcoin – Will Private Bitcoin Transactions be a Game Changer?

Mining Wars – Bitmain vs Halong

Posted on by Conor Maloney

Cryptocurrency mining is a huge global industry, with Bitcoin mining alone generating over $2 billion in revenue last year.

Such a field is obviously highly competitive, and while there is one giant monopolizing the lions share of the industry, a number of other companies are stepping up to the plate as well leading to a global power struggle for one of the fastest growing industries in the world.

Bitmain

Bitmain caters to the majority of Bitcoin miners with their innovative ASIC miners, specialized hardware engineered specifically to solve the computational puzzles on the Bitcoin network in a process required to verify transactions and generate new Bitcoins.

The company is based in China and headed up by Jihan Wu, a controversial figure in the Bitcoin space accused by BTC advocates of supporting the BTC/BCH fork in order to try and centralize the currency in order to consolidate power for his own personal gain. His detractors often feel that he is far too powerful a figure in what is supposed to be a decentralized movement, with his mining pool Antpool controlling 16.4% of the BTC hashrate and transaction-verification power.

However, many BCH supporters view him as a champion of their cause in supporting what they consider to be the version of Bitcoin originally envisioned by Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakomoto.

Wu’s Antminers are very powerful hardware, with an ever-expanding range of models designed to deal with the increasing difficulty of crypto-mining. In May of 2016, Antminer S9, the world’s first consumer-grade bitcoin and most power-efficient miner based on a 16nm process ASIC chip was released by Bitmain.

Antminer S9 is estimated to have the capacity to significantly reduce the cost of mining Bitcoin and make it profitable, something which may prove crucial to the network now that many Bitcoin miners are beginning to mine at a loss due to falling prices and rising electricity costs due to competition and increased difficulty.

Halong Mining

Halong is a far more secretive organization, in ways that are only really accepted in the cryptocurrency world. The identity of the CEO and team as well as the location of the company headquarters is unknown, leading to prominent Bitcoin figure Cobra Bitcoin calling the project a scam in a Medium post in March 2018. The project was however endorsed by Blockstream CEO on Twitter:

The interests of Blockstream and Bitmain are at odds due to Wu’s support of BCH which arguably contributed to Back’s endorsement.

So which company has the better hardware?

Antminer S9 (Bitmain)

DragonMint 16T (Halong)

So the Antminer S9 comes in at just under $2,900 with a capacity of 1.5 TH/s with a power draw of 1375 watts with an annual return of 2%  while the Dragonmint T1 costs $2,700 with 16 TH/s capacity and a 1480 watt power draw and an annual return of 6%, making the T1 faster and more profitable.

According to cryptocompare the S9 will return the original investment after 4804 days while the T1 only takes 3,138 to pay back the $2,700. These numbers are subject to change as hash power on the network adjusts. The T1s are currently sold out with no info as to when the next batch is due in. The announcement on the site reads:

The DragonMint 16T miner is the world’s most efficient Bitcoin miner, running faster and cooler than any competing miners. It’s the culmination of over 12 months research and development which has resulted in major advancements in mining technology including a brand new generation of ASIC mining chips. The DM8575 ASIC runs at a staggering 85GH per chip with power efficiency of around 0.075J/GH.

Other miners

As you might expect, it’s not all down to Halong and Bitmain.

Crypto Compare lists a number of mining setups with price tags ranging as high as $30,000 (although those models have longer ROI periods of around 17,000 days with current prices).

BitFury is another company worth keeping an eye on – a US-based company aiming to compete with the giant that is Bitmain along with the newcomer Halong.

Crypto mining is currently in a bit of a rut due to the inverse relationship between the bear market prices and the competitive industry creating higher mining costs and lower ROIs, a far cry from the early days when even a basic setup could net $5 a day.

Cloud mining projects have started to pop up offering people unrealistically high ROIs of 2% a day or even higher, the vast majority if not all of which are scams.

It seems likely that the days of the individual miner are drawing to a close as industrial mining becomes the only viable way to make a profit. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said:

“We’re at the institutional scale today. We’ll see investments grow to billions of dollars in coming years. We’ll see the mining pools move from being run by hobbyists to being run by large companies.”

OddoCash, Terraminer, and Miner One are all companies offering investors a stake in crypto mining without having to front the cash for mining equipment individually, but the current consensus is that industrial mining will take over small-scale operations as the only viable way to profitably mine cryptocurrencies and continue to validate transactions on PoW currencies, arguably enhancing the use case for PoS currencies that don’t require high-powered mining operations at all.