Our Transparency Policy for Shipping and Mining Practices

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:

1. 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/

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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：

1. 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/

2. “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。

3. 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。

4. 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.