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Bitmain develops next gen Antminer-Less: GPU hardware for miners looking to mine…less

Hong Kong, 1 April 2019 – Bitmain Technologies Ltd, one of the world’s largest crypto-mining hardware producers, has developed the Antminer-Less – a middle-of-the-line miner that represents the first GPU launched by Bitmain. It has been designed by Bitmain to eradicate the power-saving and performance benefits of ASIC miners.

The Antminer-Less packs a third of the electricity efficiency of its predecessor, and delivers a 100 per cent reduction in hashing power.

Powered by the GPU-0 chip, which combines established chip design methodology with classic manufacturing processes, the Antminer-Less really shows that bigger is better, and will take pride of place in a miner’s rig – as it cannot be easily transported. When it comes to GPUs, bigger is always better.

Bitmain has decided to wind down the research, development and innovation efforts on ASICs and instead focus on keeping power where it currently resides: in the hands of GPU makers.

This new GPU hardware is by far the leading model by performance to mine cryptocurrencies in a slow and steady pace – freeing up time for miners to engage in arguments with strangers on the internet..

Bitmain understands the value of these anonymous discussions because the decision to shift gears and focus on GPU mining was made under the guidance of strongly-worded comments by unknown advisors online. The arguments that were made were incredibly compelling, erudite and well-articulated, convincing us to totally change our business plan.

Building better hardware to mine efficiently and profitably is a misuse of company time and investment, when existing technology does the trick. CPUs are still so significant in the world of mining, after all, not to mention that GPUs, can also be used for many other things: a compelling reason to buy one to mine with.

The logic of this reasoning can be seen with the timelessness of inventions like the Teasmade: a kettle and alarm clock in one device. It is for that reason, too, that clothes are frequently washed in dishwashers, and books are stored in freezers. A device is useless if it fulfils only one function.

It is widely-known that progress comes from keeping things as they are, and we do not want to change or revolutionise anything. Today’s announcement follows Bitmain’s ongoing commitment to maintaining the status quo, and is part of its aim to help keep the tech ecosystem just the way it is.

Maintaining the limited availability and accessibility of GPUs, the Antminer-Less will be released in limited quantities and sold at price-per-terahash that is comparable to that of GPUs. Coming soon to a brick-and-mortar store near you!

Disclaimer for the faint-humored readers: We made this post in the spirit of April Fools’ Day. Please never doubt our commitment to challenging the status quo of non-crypto corporations.

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2019’s Focus is on Customers

March 26, 2019 / ADMIN / 0 Comments

We are proud of how fast our business has grown since we were first founded in 2013. According to Frost & Sullivan, Bitmain is the second largest fabless chip design company in China and ranked among the world’s top ten in terms of revenue in 2017.

2018 saw significant change and growth for the business. This change and the pursuit of growth has been an important part of our journey. It has enabled us to innovate faster, optimize and streamline our business to rally behind our vision – contributing and enabling the Internet of Money. With these operational changes now in place, the priority for this year is to double-down on innovating for and serving our customers.

Bitmain’s listing application to HKex in September 2018 has reached its 6-month expiration date. We do recognize that despite the huge potential of the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry, it remains a relatively young industry which is proving its value. We hope regulatory authorities, media, and the general public can be more inclusive to this young industry. We will restart the listing application work at an appropriate time in the future.

In the meantime, the listing process has made the company more transparent and standardized. The process of rationalization and optimization has made our business more focused on the things that are core to our mission.

As part of this, at the end of 2018 we adjusted our personnel, as we aligned our focus on cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence (AI) chips, as well as products and services based on such chips. It was a difficult but necessary decision as we continue to build a long-term, sustainable and scalable business. We did our best to compensate our employees above the legal requirement.

Since then, we have established clear business divisions for mining hardware, AI, mining farms and mining pools. At the same time, we have integrated the resource lines for chip design, hardware and software to provide more effective support for our key business lines and to allocate premium resources to our major and key projects. These all help to ensure the success of our core business and commitment with our customers through a more robust lifeline and competitiveness.

Aligned to this new operational model, we have also made changes to our leadership. Mr. Haichao Wang has been appointed as CEO of the company. Haichao not only has extensive experience in the chip industry but also succesfully headed-up multiple departments at Bitmain. We are confident that through his experience and passion, he will drive better products and services for our customers. Mr. Micree Zhan and Mr. Jihan Wu, the co-founders of Bitmain, will continue to be our directors to guide the company’s strategic development.

The bear market at the end of 2018 brought both challenges and opportunities that Bitmain will work hard at addressing in 2019. In fact, we have already started with competitive products that meet the needs of our customers.

We recently released the Antminer Z11, based on our 12nm ASIC design, followed by announcement of the Antminer S17 and T17, based on our second generation 7nm chip BM1397. A single BM1397 chip integrates more than 1 billion transistors and features continuous optimization in the circuit structure and low power consumption technology. The energy efficiency ratio of the new chip is as low as 30J/TH, saving energy by 28.6% compared with the previous generation, and its overall performance is more stable.

On the AI side of our business, we have signed cooperation agreements with the Fuzhou Municipal Government of Fujian Province, China Mobile Hangzhou Research and Development Center, and China Unicom Network Technology Research Institute, while rolling out different generations of neural processors, which are fast finding wide acceptance among established tech companies, such as cloud gaming provider Ubitus.

We continue to fund open-source developers, projects and organizations. For those that we see potential and share our vision, we fund them, often with no strings attached. It means a lot to both our community and ourselves, to be able to fund exciting projects, as it gives us the opportunity to bring to life truly transformational technologies. Whilst it is our policy not to disclose our investments in the interests of privacy to those that we fund, it is safe to say we have already funded a great deal and will continue to do so in 2019.

All these contribute towards our mission to produce great hardware and software, as part of our commitment towards the security and stability of a multitude of cryptocurrencies.

We look forward to continuing these efforts for customers this year, and contributing to a distributed, decentralized world that empowers everyone. We hope you continue to have confidence in our future as we embark on this new journey with you!

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Antminer Firmware Update – February 2019

February 28, 2019 / ADMIN / 0 Comments

At Bitmain, security of end users is our top priority and we are committed to ensuring this as new risks emerge. Our team closely monitors the technology ecosystem to identify new and evolving threats. As part of that vigilance, we have recently been made aware by the open source community of a potential vulnerability relating to our firmware. In response, and as a matter of priority, our team has released new firmware updates for the Antminer S15 and Antminer T15 to fix this vulnerability.

Despite our continuous efforts, absolute protection from all possible attacks remains an elusive goal, and therefore, a collaborative effort of the global community is imperative for the strongest defence. We are most grateful to the open source community for continuing to identify and responsibly report new vulnerabilities.

As contributors and users of open-source code, we recognise and respect its ethos. To ensure continued compliance with the requirements of open-source code, we have formed a special team and created new internal procedures.

Installation guides and new firmware releases can be downloaded from https://service.bitmain.com/support/download---------------------
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Our Transparency Policy for Shipping and Mining Practices

July 25, 2018 / ADMIN / 0 Comments

As many of you have no doubt noticed, Bitmain has started to explore policies and behaviors that aim to increase transparency and foster greater dialogue between us and the cryptocurrency communities at large.

To put it plainly, we believe that communities served by Bitmain and its products should be supported and served as transparently as possible. Recent measures have included restricting order quantities, ensuring a first-paid-first-ship order of fulfillment, blocking IPs that we suspect to be hoarding, and publishing detailed shipping updates openly.

Based on the encouraging results from these early efforts, as well as our continued dialogue with the broader cryptocurrency community, Bitmain is redoubling its commitment to business transparency. Here’s how you can expect this effort to continue:

Disclosure policy on self-mining

Every 30 days we will publish data to advise community members which algorithms Bitmain is currently mining for itself and the total hashrate of Bitmain-owned hardware on each of these algorithms. The report will be available by this link: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/hashrate-disclosure/

Zero tolerance policy against ‘secret mining’

‘Secret mining’ is a practice whereby an ASIC manufacturer may mine with newly developed equipment prior to selling or distributing such equipment to customers. This has been criticized as conferring an unfair market advantage to ASIC manufacturers over individual community member miners. Bitmain itself has been unfairly accused of this practice. In the end, Bitmain values transparency and fair competition. We therefore remain opposed to this practice and maintain our long-held zero-tolerance policy regarding same.

We will never seek to mine ‘empty blocks’

While often described as the result of sinister intent, empty blocks often occur because of issues in block propagation at the protocol level rather than active decision-making by mining pool operators. We are actively working towards mitigating these issues. However, should there occur any unusual or excessive rate of empty block mining by a mining pool owned by Bitmain, we will seek out the cause and disclose the reasons why.

We will provide shipping and volume information of new miners to the public

We will publish the shipping and volume information for the first model of all new miners, tweeting the quantity and payment timestamps via the official Antminer Twitter account. We will do this for all rounds of shipments within the first batches of those models, because 1) these have the maximum impact on the network difficulty of a blockchain, and 2) these are the first miners that use our latest ASIC designs.

We present these efforts as our contribution to assuring both new and veteran participants of our commitment to a fair and transparent cryptocurrency ecosystem. Our intent is to both reflect and reinforce the philosophies that brought all of us here in the first place. We look forward to continuing the dialogue.

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The above in Chinese:

我司关于货运和挖矿相关业务政策的透明性声明

众所周知，比特大陆已经开始摸索旨在增强与加密货币社区间对话以及透明度的业务政策和行为准则的制定。

简单来说，我们坚信比特大陆及其产品所服务的加密货币社区应尽可能公开透明地得到帮助和支持。我们近期所做的努力包括限制订单数量，按先到先得的规则确保发货，屏蔽恶意囤货IP, 以及公开地发布细节性货运信息。

以上这些初步的努力已经取得显著成效，再加上我们与加密货币社区日益密切的对话，比特大陆决定将加倍致力于业务透明度的提高。以下是此项努力的预期发展目标：

自挖矿算法全公开政策

每隔三十天我们都会向社区公开比特大陆当前的自挖矿算法，并公开发布比特大陆在每个区块链上拥有的总哈希值。该数据将通过以下链接提供: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/hashrate-disclosure/

“秘密挖矿”零容忍政策

“秘密挖矿”是指ASIC制造商在向客户销售或发售此类设备之前秘密使用其新开发的设备进行挖矿的做法。这被谴责为是ASIC矿机制造商强加给社区矿工的不公平市场竞争。比特大陆重视透明度和公平性，即便曾被有失公正地指责在进行秘密挖矿，我们也会无论如何对此类行为持反对意见并将长期坚持零容忍政策。

我们永远不会试图挖“空块”。

挖空块常常被恶意宣传，然而它的出现取决于区块的广播和接收而非矿池操作人员的操纵。我们正在通过积极努力来减少这类问题。因此，如果比特大陆所拥有的矿池出现任何异常或过高的空矿开采率，我们将排查原因并公开披露。

新型矿机货运和数量信息公开

通过蚂蚁矿机官方推特，我们将公开所有新型矿机中第一批矿机的货运和数量信息，以及支付时间戳。我们将对新型号第一批中的每一个矿机进行此操作，因为1）它们对区块链网络难度的影响最大，并且2）它们是使用我们最新ASIC设计的第一批矿机。

我们愿为加密货币社区的发展贡献一己之力，努力为新老社区成员提供一个公平而透明的加密货币生态系统。我们的愿景是反思并强化那些带领我们大家走在一起的初衷。我们也对将来与加密货币社区的交流充满了期待.---------------------
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Bitmain’s Coupon Giveaway – Lunar New Year 2018

February 27, 2018 / Nishant Sharma / 1 Comment

In the past year, blockchain technology has attracted considerable attention across the world. The entire industry continues to thrive and grow. Meanwhile, we at Bitmain have also made continuous progress by keeping excellence as our focus. We would like to express our gratitude to all customers, whose trust and support have been essential to our progress. To this end, we are pleased to announce a Lunar New Year Coupons (the “Coupons”, each a “Coupon”) giveaway for all our customers (at the time of writing this).

Who are eligible for these Coupons?

Those who have successfully completed purchase (with 100% payment) of an Antminer S9, T9+, T9, L3+, L3 or D3 on our official website (https://www.bitmain.com/) before 23:59:59 on 26 February 2018 (GMT+8) will be eligible for the Coupons.

How much are these Coupons worth?

The answer to this depends on what and when you successfully placed and paid an order on www.bitmain.com. Please read below to find out.

For EACH Antminer S9 that has been ordered and fully paid for before 23:59:59 on 26 February 2018 (GMT+8) and shipped before 23:59:59 on 22 February 2018 (GMT+8) (the shipping time shall be the one specified in www.bitmain.com), a US$100 off Coupon will be issued to the buyer.
For EACH Antminer S9 that has been ordered and fully paid for before 23:59:59 on 26 February 2018 (GMT+8) but was NOT shipped before 23:59:59 on 22 February 2018 (GMT+8) (the shipping time shall be the one specified in www.bitmain.com), a US$200 off Coupon will be issued to the buyer.
For EACH Antminer L3+/L3/T9 that has been ordered and fully paid for before 23:59:59 on 26 February 2018 (GMT+8), a US$100 off Coupon will be issued to the buyer.
For EACH Antminer T9+/D3 that has been ordered and fully paid before 23:59:59 on 26 February 2018 (GMT+8), a US$200 off Coupon will be issued to the buyer.

When will the Coupons be issued?

All Coupons will be issued before 1 March 2018. Please click on “Coupon List” under “My Coupon” in “User Center” after logging into your shop.bitmain.com account, to check whether your Coupon has been issued.

When can these Coupons be used?

The Coupons can be used after they have been issued and will expire on 31 May 2018 (GMT+8).

Please note：

The Coupons will not be issued in cash and cannot be exchanged for cash. It can only be used to deduct the payment amount when you purchase our miners through www.bitmain.com.
The number of Coupons that can be used in an order should be same as the number of miners in the order. More than one Coupon cannot be used for the purchase of one miner.
During the purchase process, once the Coupon has been selected and the order has been submitted, the Coupon is deemed to have been used and cannot be used again, even if such an order is not fully paid.
Coupons can be transferred to other users’ accounts on www.bitmain.com.
The amount deducted by the use of a Coupon or Coupons cannot be invoiced.

For any queries or troubleshooting, please leave a message for our Support team at support.bitmain.com
Before submitting a message (or ticket), please remember to select the “Ticket Type” and “Product or service” that is most closely related to your request to get a response in the shortest possible time.---------------------
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Fraudulent Websites and Scams

August 29, 2017 / Nishant Sharma / 26 Comments

Since the Bitcoin price broke new all-time highs this year, there has been an increase in the number of fraud attempts targeting Antminer buyers.

Although most of these attempts fail, there have been reports of some users falling prey to these scams.

We are even more concerned for our users since one of our old servers containing our users’ information was compromised by unknown attackers last week. This could mean that you may be contacted by impostors who pretend to be Bitmain’s official representative or Bitmain’s reseller to get payment from you for Antminers that they cannot and will not deliver.

Please remember:

We do not have any official distributor or reseller anywhere

We receive various queries about whether X or Y is an “official distributor” or “official partner” of Bitmain’s products simply because X or Y claims to be an “official distributor” or “official partner” of Bitmain. We have no official representatives or distributors in any country. This brings us to the following point.

We only sell on bitmain.com

Even if a Bitmain executive wanted to order an Antminer, he or she has to place the order on shop.bitmain.com. There is no other way of ordering hardware from Bitmain. We will never send you an invoice on Skype or using a Gmail email address, both of which have been used by impostors to scam Antminer buyers before.

We have previously sold certain hardware models on www.newegg.com and, if we do so again, we will announce it on our official Twitter and Facebook account.

Type the exact URL or save the correct URL

When you want to visit our website, please type www.bitmain.com or shop.bitmain.com. You may bookmark these two websites to ensure you are not misled by a website that looks similar to our website and even has a URL that very closely resembles our real URL.

The only invoice you should trust is the one automatically generated by bitmain.com

We never send a wallet address or payment link manually on Skype or by email. All our invoices and payment instructions are automatically generated and emailed by bitmain.com after you have placed an order there. If you fear that the email may not be genuine, you can also login to your Bitmain.com account to access the correct invoice or payment instructions.

We will announce a new batch release date as soon as we know the date ourselves

If we haven’t announced the time of the next batch release of a particular product, we do not know the time yet. We announce this on Facebook, Twitter and via email to those who have subscribed to be notified about batch releases of that particular model. We do not have an Instagram or another social media account.

If you would like to subscribe to a particular model’s batch notification emails, please leave our sales team a message with your email address and name of the models that you are interested in staying notified about.---------------------
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UAHF: A contingency plan against UASF (BIP148)

June 14, 2017 / ADMIN / 1 Comment

(We have also published the translated versions of this blog post in Deutsche, עִברִית, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, русский and Español )

Definitions

UASF: User Activated Soft Fork. Developers add a mandatory rule set to change the node’ software, invalidating certain kinds of previously valid blocks after a flag day. This method requires no mining majority to support or activate a chain-split. The UASF proposal intends to make a 51% attack against the blockchain that has the majority of economic activity, and this attack is called a “Wipe Out”.

UAHF: User Activated Hard Fork. Developers add a mandatory rule set to change the node software. These changes make previously invalid blocks become valid after a flag day, which do not require a majority of hash power to be enforced. Nodes with the rule set changes will follow this chain irrespective of its hash rate. The UAHF proposal is a peaceful and voluntary departure of different community members who have different opinions or visions, and it is not intended to make an attack against other blockchain(s), even if the UAHF chain has the higher hash rate.

BIP148 node: a Bitcoin node that has implemented BIP148 consensus rule changes.

BIP148 chain: a blockchain that is valid according to the BIP148 consensus rule changes. BIP148 is a kind of UASF.

Original chain: The blockchain that uses the same consensus rules in use today. (May 26th, 2017)

Wipe Out: If the UASF chain is activated and if the UASF chain gains the majority hash rate, then the nodes following the original chain will reorganize and begin to follow the UASF chain. In such an event, a significant number of financial transaction records will disappear. This is a risk that UASF nodes impose on nodes intending to follow the original chain. In contrast, a UAHF does not threaten the nodes following a different rule set with this same risk.

Bit 1: The BIP9 version bit in a block header used to signal for SegWit activation.

Stagnation risk: A blockchain without mining support may suddenly stop being extended, because the economic incentive for miners is low. A minority fork like UASF is under serious risk of permanent stagnation.

Background

On May 24th, 2017, a significant economic majority, more than 80% of the entire hashing power and 80% of transactions’ source software or service, of the Bitcoin industry came to an agreement in New York (New York Agreement) on tangible steps to scale Bitcoin in the near future. Representatives of Bitcoin Core declined the invite to attend this meeting. This agreement is the hard work of those who sincerely believe in Bitcoin and those entrepreneurs or investors who have strong financial interest in scaling Bitcoin quickly and unitedly. Bitmain is a supporter of the agreement. We support the agreement and we want to make it happen as soon as possible.

A software project, btc1, which is addressing the New York Agreement, has been under active development and will likely deliver a consensus rule change plan called SegWit2x. The testnet5 for SegWit2x is already alive. Alpha version of the software will be released on June 16th and everything is still on time.

Follow the github here:

https://github.com/btc1

Read a reddit discussion about it here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6h1wpr/segwit2x_a_summary/

Subscribe the mailing list:

https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-ml

Despite this agreement, the UASF (BIP148) astroturfing movement continues to get lots of airtime on censored forums, many of which are controlled by single anonymous individuals. Many of the software developers who work in a software project called “Bitcoin Core” are also supporting it. BIP148 poses a significant risk for the Bitcoin ecosystem, so we are preparing a contingency plan to protect the economic activity on the Bitcoin blockchain from this threat.

The New York agreement is also continuously and intentionally sabotaged by a group of software developers working on Bitcoin Core.

We must also be prepared for the disruptive risk that UASF activation will bring to the Bitcoin network. The New York agreement is very conservative and aimed at bringing peace within the Bitcoin community on a simple but artificially escalated scaling issue. If somehow the New York agreement cannot prevent a chain split, we will have to be prepared.

The purpose of this blog post is to announce our UAHF contingency plan for UASF/BIP148.

Why we need a contingency plan against BIP148

According to BIP148, when the chain MTP is at or beyond Tuesday August 1st, 2017 12:00:00 AM GMT (epoch time 1501545600), BIP148 nodes will begin to orphan Bitcoin blocks not signaling Bit 1 at its UASF forking point. This consensus rule change makes the rule set smaller than original chain before BIP148 activation. BIP148 nodes will follow the new BIP148 chain if there is any more than zero hashing power supporting it; if the hash rate backing the chain is 0, BIP148 nodes will find their chain unable to be extended.

If there is hash power supporting the BIP148 chain, it does not need to be a hash rate majority to allow the chain to be extended. Even if there is only one person solving hashes by hands, given enough time the BIP148 chain can be extended by another block. According to the existing hash rate distribution, some well known mining pool operators have stated that they will support the UASF by allowing miners choice, although their total hash rate is not enough to secure a majority. A company hiring many crucial Bitcoin protocol developers controls some of its own small hash rate now according to its CEO. So the Bitcoin network is at a high risk of being split on Aug 1st, 2017.

BIP148 is very dangerous for exchanges and other business. There is no sign of significant economic support behind BIP148 and when it is alive as a blockchain, the economic support would most likely be based on speculation. The mining activity behind a UASF chain may stop without notice, and investors who buy in the BIP148 propaganda may lose all their investment. Any exchanges that decide to support a UASF token after the forking point need to consider the stagnation risk attached to it.

There is no replay protection on a BIP148 chain. Transactions will be broadcast on both chains and users cannot prevent them from being confirmed on both. Exchanges must stop withdrawals and deposits at the forking point for some time, and deploy their own coin splitting methods. If you want to learn more, please read from the References section of this post: Mitigating Bitcoin Forking Risk during Network Upgrade.

The UASF chain presents a risk of the original chain being wiped out. If there is no contingency plan, all economic activity that occurs on the original chain after the UASF forking point will face the risk of being wiped out. This has disastrous consequences for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. UASF is an attack against users and enterprises who disagree with activating SegWit right now without a block size increase, which is a very important clause in the Hong Kong agreement made by the global Bitcoin community in February, 2016. The chain reorg risk is more significant than imaged, as analyzed by Peter R. in BUIP055,

Rationale for Reorg Protection

The probability (P) that the big-block chain reorgs back to the small-block chain is given by

P = (q/p)^2

where p is the fraction of the hash power mining the big-block chain and q is the fraction of the hash power remaining on the small block chain [2]. With 75% of the hash power supporting larger blocks, the probability of a reorg is 11%.

Protection Plan

This plan is for a User Activated Hard Fork, or UAHF. You can find technical specs here:

https://github.com/bitcoin-UAHF/spec/

The activation time is configurable. We will do the hard fork at 12 hours and 20 mins later than UASF. The epoch time stamp will be 1501590000.

There is “must be big” rule at the fork block. The block size of the fork block must be larger than 1,000,000 Byte. Fork block means the first block which adopt the consensus rule change.

It will accept block of which the size is less than 8MB and we, miners, will soft-limit the block size to less than 2MB.

There will be a soft fork rule added into the protocol to limit the sigops per transaction within 20K.

The block size will not be a part of hard-coded consensus rule for us in the future after the fork block. Miners who generate large blocks will be punished by economic incentives, but not limiting the block size.

There will be replay attack protection that is available for exchanges and wallet developers. You can find the spec here:

https://github.com/Bitcoin-UAHF/spec/blob/master/replay-protected-sighash.md

Bitmain will use some of its own hash rate and work with the developer community to have a contingency plan based on UAHF. We will develop options for miners to voluntarily join us.

Bitmain will mine the chain for a minimum of 72 hours after the BIP148 forking point with a certain percentage of hash rate supplied by our own mining operations.

Bitmain will likely not release immediately the mined blocks to the public network unless circumstances call for it, which means that Bitmain will mine such chain privately first. We intend in the following situations to release the mined blocks to the public (non-exhaustive list):

The BIP148 chain is activated and subsequently gains significant support from the mining industry, i.e. after BIP148 has already successfully split the chain;
Market sentiment for a big block hard fork is strong, and economic rationale drives us to mine it, for example, the exchange rate is in favor of big-block Bitcoin;
If there is already a significant amount of other miners mining a big-block chain publicly and we decide that it is rational for us to mine on top of that chain. In such a case, we will also consider joining that chain and give up our privately mined chain so that the public UAHF chain will not be under the risk of being reorganized.

Once Bitmain starts to mine a UAHF chain publicly, we will mine it persistently and ignore short-term economic incentives. We believe a roadmap including the option to adjust block size will serve users better so we expect it to attract a higher market price in the long term. The economic network will expand faster, and the winning odds will be higher in a highly competitive cryptocurrency market.

We share the same belief with some very early Bitcoiners, that decentralization means that more than 1 billion people in 200 countries are using Bitcoin as a saving currency and payment network, and that it comprises of hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin services, traders, exchanges and software. We do not believe that decentralization means a 1MB block size limit or a responsibility to constrain the block size so that a Raspberry Pi can run a full node while the fee per Bitcoin transaction is higher than the daily income in most developing countries. We believe Bitcoin needs to offer people an alternative to flourish without depending on powerful authorities that charge fees that can be as high as 100$/transaction.

Software Development

Currently, there are at least 3 client development teams working on the code of the spec. All of them want to stay quiet and away from the propaganda and troll army of certain companies. They will announce themselves when they feel ready for it. Users will be able to install the software and decide whether to join the UAHF.

The softwares are expected to be ready before July 1st, and it will be live on testnet by then.

Future Roadmap

If New York agreement activates

We wish that New York agreement will be developed and carried out well. It is the last hope for Bitcoin to scale unitedly in face of the BIP148 threat. We will try our best to deploy and activate it as soon as possible.

If BIP148 activates

Then UAHF will be alive on the same day. The UAHF chain will protect the economic transactions that are under risk of reorganization because of UASF.

Later, we will support the activation of SegWit on the UAHF chain if there is no patent risk associated with SegWit and if the arbitrary discount rate of witness data segment is removed. The weight parameter, which is designed for artificial rates, may need to be deleted and we need to be frank and straightforward in the software code about different limitations on different kind of blocks and other parameters. A SegWit without the artificial discount rate will treat legacy transaction type fairly and it will not give SegWit transactions an unfair advantage. It will also help the capacity increasing effect of SegWit more significantly than with the discounted rate. We will also push for and encourage changes in code, in main block or in extension block, that will make Lightning Network run more safely and reliably than Core’s present version of SegWit does.

Extension blocks will be developed as a framework to encourage multiple protocol development teams to bring innovations and capacities into the Bitcoin protocol. Some important but aggressive innovations can be introduced without affecting all Bitcoin users or companies around the world. This will accelerate the innovation of Bitcoin protocol. Sidechains will also be encouraged after the associated security issues have been reviewed by the technical community. Miners are genuinely driven by the hope that Bitcoin will be a success.

We will encourage and help various multi-layer solutions come into production. As a very early investor of RootStock, we identified the potential of another important competing cryptocurrency. We are already working closely with authors of other multilayer solutions.

A new SPV security service by full nodes should be promoted, and further research and libraries that are compatible with the SPV model should also be promoted among wallet developers.

If Bitcoin can combine Bitcoin NG by Emin and Lumino by Sergio together, then a throughput increase of the current Bitcoin network to up to 100x can be easier to achieve with a block size of around 100KB but of a higher block generation frequency. The original Bitcoin NG is a hard fork proposal, but we can soft fork it into the protocol with the extension block framework. At the same time, RootStock, co-founded by the inventor of Lumino, is also trying to implement Lumino on RootStock. Lumino will work perfectly with Lightning Network. It will be interesting to see which implementation will bring Lumino into production first, and in what ways.

Schnorr Signature is also under last stage review.

The diversification of client development shall be promoted. Defensive Consensus concept is under development and will help in the mining industry. Defensive Consensus will help the Bitcoin network work safely while multiple implementations work together.

There are and will be other good innovations in the Bitcoin community that have not been well promoted because of various reasons. We seek to actively work with those innovations.

BUIP056 will be developed to manage the block size issue before a fully automatic and mathematical block size governance model is widely accepted. As evidenced in the past years of debate, miners have proved to be very conservative and willing to work with the wider economic community. The rough roadmap of the block size increase for the next few years is below.

Time	Block size, Byte
Now	1,000,000

2017 Aug	2,000,000
2017 Sept	4,194,304
2018 April	5,931,641
2018 Aug	8,388,608
2019 April	11,863,283
2019 Aug	16,777,216

After 2019 Aug	Depends on further research

Weak blocks will have to be developed and deployed, before the block size increase reaches 8MB.

References

For other parties in the ecosystem, we recommend detailed research on effects of the UASF. All Bitcoin businesses must be prepared on that day to mitigate or eliminate the risks that UASF carries.

Mitigating Bitcoin Forking Risk during Network Upgrade, https://github.com/digitsu/splitting-bitcoin

If you want to learn more about minority forks, please see Meni Rosenfeld’s presentation:

How I learned to stop worrying and love the fork https://fieryspinningsword.com/2015/08/25/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-fork/

A Fork in the Road: Must we Choose a Path? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkJHOpuvQo0&feature=youtu.be

Here is a letter to help you understand the history and full picture of the great debate on Bitcoin scaling, even you are not miners:

An Open Letter to Miners

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6befxw/an_open_letter_to_bitcoin_miners_jonald_fyookball/

Here is another blog help you to understand what will happen on the BIP148 fork:

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/uasf-bip148-scenarios-and-game-theory-9530336d953e

(We have also published the translated versions of this blog post in Deutsche, עִברִית, Italiano, 日本語, 한국어, русский and Español )---------------------
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Bitmain Launches Antminer R4, the Most Silent Multi-terahash Bitcoin Miner, for Home Use

August 26, 2016 / Nishant Sharma / 2 Comments

Some people hang photos of their family on their office walls. Others, might place trophies, diplomas or that huge fish they caught during their last fishing trip. Us, we’re Bitcoin miners. We finally have a miner that belongs on our office desk.

We are launching at 23:00 (GMT+8) on Monday (29 August) the world’s most silent multi-terahash bitcoin miner and a silent 2600W PSU specially designed for high-performance mining.

The Antminer R4 uses the world’s most power-efficient 16nm BM1387 ASIC chip for bitcoin mining. It can deliver a hashrate of 8.6TH/s with a power efficiency of 0.1J/GH and a noise level less than 50dB. At an ambient temperature of 35°C, the R4’s noise level is 52dB.

The Antminer R4 has been designed with great care to ensure the least possible sound with the maximum hashrate. It replaces the traditional miner fan with a centrifugal fan inspired by the fan of a silent split air conditioner. The speed of this unique fan is automatically controlled to ensure that it never produces more sound than is absolutely necessary. The slim design of the Antminer R4 allows it to be conveniently placed in a book rack or computer table at home.

APW5 power supply unit (PSU) for bitcoin miners

The APW5 power supply

The APW5 power supply is compatible with the 220V as well as the 110V mains power supply in North America. On full load, it has a power factor greater than 0.95. With a 220V supply it can deliver an output of 2600W. It comes with seven pairs of 6-pin PCI-e connectors but can easily be fitted with upto 20 PCI-e connectors. It is built for high-power performance and low noise. Like that of the R4, the APW5’s fan is automatically controlled so it only produces as much sound as is absolutely necessary.

For home users who wish to utilize R4’s exceptional noise level with the optimum performance, we highly recommends that they use it with Bitmain’s APW5 power supply.

With the release of these products, Bitmain hopes to bring bitcoin mining back to homes and continue decentralizing the bitcoin mining network.

Learn more about the Antminer R4 here.

You can download the e-brochure of the APW5 power supply from here.---------------------
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Bitmain Is Now Accepting PayPal Payments

August 23, 2016 / Nishant Sharma / 0 Comments

We have long been receiving requests from our fans and users to accept PayPal payments. And so, we have started accepting PayPal payments for certain products.

Currently these products are the AntRouter R1, the AntMiner S7-LN and the APW3 power supply.

Because this is a testing phase, there are certain limitations for those who choose the PayPal payment method for their order. These limitations are as follows.

1. We only support Paypal to Paypal payments.

Bitmain customers have to either have a PayPal account or have to register with Paypal to be able to use this feature.

2. Users can pay for only one order using PayPal.

Users can not pay for a second order using PayPal until Bitmain decides to expand the use of Paypal.

3. The order can only contain 1 unit of the each product type. For example:

The order CAN have 3 items in total: 1 AntRouter R1, 1 Antminer S7 and 1 PSU.

The order can NOT have more than 1 AntRouter R1 or Antminer S7 or 1 PSU.

We hope the inclusion of the PayPal payment method will improve the shopping experience of our fans and users.

To place your order for any of the three products, please click here for the AntRouter R1, here for the AntMiner S7-LN and here for the APW3 power supply.---------------------
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Batch 12 and Batch 13 of the Antminer S9

August 17, 2016 / ADMIN / 1 Comment

Batch 10 and batch 11 of the Antminer S9 sold out in roughly 10 hours of launch. They were considerably stocked and so we were overwhelmed by the response again.

Unfortunately many Bitmain fans and miners missed their chance to order before the two batches sold out.

So we have good news for everyone: we are going to release two new batches!

Batch 12 and batch 13 can deliver a hashrate of 11.85TH/s and 12.93TH/s, respectively.

They will be available to order after 2300 hours (Beijing time, GMT +8) tomorrow (18 August 2016).

We suggest everybody to confirm their order here (https://goo.gl/w3G2NB) for batch 12 or here (https://goo.gl/jpvZU3) for batch 13 before they sell out.

We wish all a very happy mining experience with Bitmain.---------------------
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