From Liberalism to Dictator, Wu Jihan's Bipolar Life
This article is from:A blockchain (ID: yibenqkl)This article is from:
A blockchain (ID: yibenqkl)
, author Ratchet, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
"Preacher", "careerist", "villain"... In the currency circle, there are few people who bear so many labels with mixed reviews like 33-year-old Wu Jihan.
He is an evangelist of Bitcoin in China, the founder of the world's largest mining machine company, and a frightening generation of "mining tyrants".
In the eyes of many people, he is now the opposite of liberalism and has become an awesome "dictator".
What will welcome Wu Jihan and Bitmain this winter?
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01 "Avoid Cold"
The word "Jihan" seems to have predicted Wu Jihan's situation in advance.
BCH fork, company layoffs, self-operated mines liquidation... In this winter, Bitmain has been in trouble. On December 28, 2018, Odaily announced that Wu Jihan and Ketuan Zhan would jointly resign as CEO of Bitmain, causing a public outcry.
Regarding this, Wu Jihan chose to remain silent. His last tweet was on December 3, 2018. The employees who were laid off by Bitmain complained on "Maimai": "The company laid off employees, and the boss didn't show up, and didn't say a word."
This doesn't quite match Wu Jihan's previous style.
Despite his baby face and soft-spoken voice, he has always presented himself as a warrior on social media. "A wounded and bloody warrior in the blockchain industry" - this is Li Xiaolai's evaluation of Wu Jihan. Facing attacks from the outside world, Wu Jihan will always respond forcefully.
In the past six months, most of Wu Jihan's remarks on Twitter were related to the BCH fork - on November 15, 2018, BCH hard forked at block height 556760. The BCH ABC camp led by Wu Jihan and the BCH SV camp led by CSW have since parted ways.
During this period, he took the initiative and repeatedly called for kicking CSW, the "fake Satoshi Nakamoto", out of the BCH community. And every time the opponent throws muddy water, he will always fight back immediately to clarify for himself.
Jihan Wu's last utterance on Twitter on December 3rd was also related to CSW. In this speech, he scolded CSW for "humiliating" the term "side chain".
But in the comment area, a comment that ridiculed him was pushed to the top—"It's better than creating the word 'computing war'."
When Bitmain encountered an unprecedented crisis, this "wounded and bloody soldier" chose to keep silent, which was suspiciously silent.
A number of Bitmain employees broke the news that on the eve of this wave of layoffs, Bitmain deployed a tool called "Appia" among employees. It can monitor employees' remarks and work status.
"Don't use the exact words I said in the article. The company has surveillance and can find out about me." A Bitmain employee told a blockchain reporter.
Wu Jihan, who personally founded Bitmain five years ago and regards liberalism as his standard, may not have imagined that one day, his company would establish such a monitoring system.
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02 "Freedom"
In 1986, Jihan Wu was born in Chongqing, the youngest municipality in China with the largest gap between rich and poor.
When he was young, his family may not be rich. He posted an old yellow photo on Renren.com, with mottled walls and colorful advertising paper. The shooting location seemed to be in a certain village.
However, Wu Jihan has received an excellent education, at least since high school. He studied at Nankai Middle School in Chongqing, the best high school in the area. In 2005, he was admitted to Peking University, the top institution of higher learning in China.
While studying at Peking University's School of Economics, he made no secret of his belief in the Austrian School. This is a school that regards liberalism as its creed, believes in a completely free market economy, opposes all forms of government intervention, and advocates deconstructing economic theory with personal consumption psychology. Perhaps this is also one of the reasons why Jihan Wu minored in a degree in psychology at Peking University.
At that time, he wrote on Renren.com that he yearned to be free and easy, and hoped that one day he could "tour the mountains and rivers and return home having fun."
In 2011, Wu Jihan, who had become an investment manager of an investment bank, came into contact with Bitcoin for the first time, and was moved by the latter’s liberal core.
"Welcome to the Bitcoin network. Here is a financial free port, a duty-free trade zone and an anarchist paradise on the Internet." In November 2012, he wrote such a text on Weibo.
At that time, he was undoubtedly a staunch liberal. On Weibo, he scolded Ripple for not being open source and a centralized currency; he bluntly said that he hates Apple, and that cool projects like Google X can really change the world.
He translated the white paper of Bitcoin and co-founded Babbitt with Changjia. Under the screen name "QQAgent", he became one of the most well-known Bitcoin evangelists on the Chinese Internet.
In early 2013, Dr. "Pumpkin Zhang" of Beihang University developed the world's first ASIC bitcoin mining chip - Avalon. It was also in this year that Wu Jihan quit his job in an investment bank and became a full-time Bitcoin practitioner.
After receiving the investment, he began to recruit troops and try to develop mining machines based on Avalon chips. But an accident brought him an unprecedented crisis.
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Jihan Wu's team handcrafted a mining machine based on the Avalon chip
Wu Jihan ordered a batch of Avalon chips in the hands of Pumpkin Zhang. But unexpectedly, the delivery of Pumpkin Zhang's chips was delayed. Angry customers and investors came to his door, and Wu Jihan was helpless.
"If you don't pay attention to business rules, you have no commercial credit at all." This was Wu Jihan's evaluation of Pumpkin Zhang at the time.
As a young man, he experienced the pain of being controlled by others for the first time.
The later story is well known: Wu Jihan brought in technical partner Ketuan Zhan, and founded Bitmain in the College International Building next to Pumpkin Zhang’s alma mater.
An empire quietly appeared. As the most dazzling front-office trader in this empire, Wu Jihan was dubbed the "Mine Tyrant".
In the blockchain world where computing power determines everything, he has achieved the myth of a generation of miners getting rich, and has also become an enemy in the eyes of many blockchain believers.
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03 tear
On Bitmain's road to becoming the overlord of the mining circle, Wu Jihan's image gradually became blurred.
In 2016, the expansion of Bitcoin has become the consensus of almost all miners. Wu Jihan and his Bitmain are no exception.
In the early years, Satoshi Nakamoto set a block limit of 1M for Bitcoin. But with the continuous development of Bitcoin, the capacity of 1M blocks can no longer meet the needs.
The proposal given by the Bitcoin Core development team is to establish a separate "Lightning Network" outside the Bitcoin blockchain to process small transactions. But the miners don't buy it - as a result, they will not be able to package small transactions, and thus lose this part of the transaction fee.
Wu Jihan also tried to compromise. At the Hong Kong Consensus Conference in February 2016, the miner group he represented agreed to continue to support the Core development team. Several members of the Core development team also said that in the future, Bitcoin will be expanded from 1M to 2M.
But then, the Core development team refused to recognize the Hong Kong consensus. This may have deeply stimulated Wu Jihan. A year later, at the New York Consensus Conference led by Bitmain, members of the Core development team were rejected by miners.
Perhaps most Bitcoin community users have never opposed expansion, but they cannot tolerate any behavior that may split Bitcoin. Wu Jihan thus became a "bully" in the mouth of Bitcoin players.
In May 2016, when communicating with Wu Jihan, Bitcoin big V "Mr.Hodl" deliberately wrote fork (fork) as fuck to show his ridicule.
This move angered Wu Jihan, who disregarded his image and counterattacked with "fuck your mother if you want fuck". To this day, this curse is still one of the tools used by Wu Jihan's opponents to attack him.
In the Bitcoin expansion debate, Wu Jihan was not a staunch supporter of hard forks at first. But in the end, he became the one who pressed the hard fork "nuclear button". Because he knows that the computing power in his hand is the best weapon to launch a fork.
On August 1, 2017, Bitcoin hard forked, and the BCH of the large block scheme was born. The Bitcoin community was in an uproar.
Wu Jihan's name, Jihan, is similar to Jihad (Islamic jihad), a word that scares many people in the Christian-dominated Western world. Many people even link his actions with the centralized ideology that China has formed over thousands of years.
Wu Jihan didn't seem to want to deny this either. "In China, open source culture is not popular. I can't understand it myself," he wrote on Twitter in April 2017.
But people are always fickle. He said he hated Apple, and now, he uses the iPhone.
From a liberal preacher to a "dictator" who launched a bifurcation, Wu Jihan finally became the person he didn't want to be back then.
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04 Gambling
In the comics drawn by Coindesk, he stands in front of a row of mining machines, wearing Loki's golden battle suit in Marvel comics, holding a horn helmet, and showing a weird smile.
His eyes glowed with the same green light as the power light of the mining machine behind him.
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Picture from Coindesk
In this year, Wu Jihan launched a fork of Bitcoin. Coindesk therefore labeled him a "villain".
Wu Jihan declined an interview with Coindesk, but Coindesk still pointed out that some people still regard Wu Jihan as a "hero" and "passionate Bitcoin rich".
“What kind of person Wu Jihan is depends on the judgment of different people.” Coindesk wrote.
Wu Jihan’s growth experience filled him with contradictions: On the one hand, he studied at Peking University and worked in an investment bank. His background of elitism allowed him to stand at the top of the pyramid and examine China. At the same time, his other foot is still stepping on the bottom soil in China, which makes him deeply aware of what the bottom society in China looks like.
After entering the Bitcoin industry, he may find that in this virtual electronic world, the social division of labor and class stratification in the real world that people want to escape still exist. And the mob, no matter where they go, is still the mob.
Therefore, when he cannot get the chip he wants, he will resolutely choose to develop it himself.
Therefore, even though expansion has become the consensus of most people in the Bitcoin community, he still found that as long as the Core development team opposes expansion, most people will still choose to remain silent in order to avoid splitting, and stay in the "cradle" of 1M forever.
Creating Bitmain, developing self-developed chips, forking Bitcoin, and supporting BCH are two big bets in Wu Jihan's life. The only difference is that in the first gamble, Wu Jihan won a big victory; but in the second gamble, Wu Jihan started with victory, but fell into deep trouble after that.
The bifurcation of Bitcoin made Wu Jihan bear the infamy of "split consensus". It is also reported that Bitmain needs to spend 30 million BCH every day. After the BCH computing power war started in November 2018, Bitmain once needed to invest millions of yuan in computing power support every day.
Wu Jihan may still hope to fight to the end, but Bitmain's funds are no longer enough to support him to continue fighting.
In December 2018, Bitmain was exposed to layoffs. Except for the mining machine department with good profitability, other departments were hardest hit.
The layoffs also affect BCH, which is supported by Bitmain. It is reported that the "Copernicus project team" responsible for the development of the BCH client in Bitmain has all been laid off. Among them, the souls - "Two Jiang Brothers" Jiang Heping and Jiang Jiazhi also left.
The GitHub page of the Copernicus project also confirms this rumor. There have been no updates for this item since December 16th.
"Bitmain is going through the winter. Surviving with a broken arm may not be a bad thing." A commentator said.
Wu Jihan, who has a deep understanding of the blockchain, will never forget that one of the biggest advantages of a decentralized structure lies in security. Today, Bitmain has become the largest node in the entire blockchain world, but no matter how large the node is, it cannot be more secure than the entire network, let alone support the entire network.
It is still a mystery what the fate of BCH, which is supported by Bitmain alone, will face.
It's just a gamble, Wu Jihan has no time to care about it.
From being a Bitcoin evangelist to tearing up the consensus and blatantly forking, Wu Jihan has embarked on a path that most people have never imagined in just a few years.
