Hello everyone, I am Mr. K. Today we are going to talk about: "The Rise of the Mining Circle (Part 2) - The Rise of Bitmain".

We said in the last class that there are two people who opened the door to capital and commercialization in the mining circle. One of them is Pumpkin Zhang——Zhang Nangeng, and the other is Roasted Cat——Jiang Xinyu. Although they jointly opened the gold mining circle era, but there is another person who really pushes the mining industry to its peak, and this person's name is Wu Jihan.

Compared with the early entrepreneurial environment of the blockchain, Wu Jihan can be said to be a model of elite entrepreneurship. After graduating from Peking University, he entered the field of investment banking. After two years, he was promoted from an investment analyst to an investment manager. Logically, such a person should have nothing to do with mining, but because of a chance, in 2011, Wu Jihan met Bitcoin on the BBS and fell in love with Bitcoin.

Wu Jihan said that he read Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper and wrote this sentence: “Bitcoin was a bright light to me at that time, and I knew that my life would be meaningful because of it. Change, I expect it to rewrite my life pattern. I will jump out of all my inherent frameworks to achieve my true ideals and future." He certainly didn't expect that the sentence he wrote down at that time would really become a reality many years later, and Bitcoin really changed his life.

Back in 2013, when the mining industry was on the rise, it was the early stage of the mining machine war, and a large amount of capital and talents entered the industry one after another, but what about Jihan Wu?

He met Roasted Cat as early as 2012. At that time, it happened that Roasted Cat returned to China to start a business. On the one hand, it was because of his love for Bitcoin, and on the other hand, Wu Jihan himself was an investment banker, so most people could not see it. When I knew it, I invested in the roasted cat company. Half a year later, with the mass production of ASIC mining machines, Roasted Cat became the first "miner bully" in the Bitcoin world, and Wu Jihan gained nearly a thousand times the income.

In addition, Wu Jihan was the first person in China to translate the "Bitcoin White Paper" into Chinese at that time, and he was one of the earliest blockchain evangelists in China. Under such a background, Wu Jihan is naturally not satisfied with just being an investor. Out of infinite optimism for this track, he decided to personally participate in this mining machine game.

Wu Jihan first found Ketuan Zhan, who was doing chip research at the time, through his classmate records, and described his understanding of Bitcoin in the form of an email. After Zhan Ketuan saw it, he considered it again and again, and finally agreed to Wu Jihan's request, and instead created the later famous mining giant-Bitmain.

After half a year of research and development, the first generation of Antminer came out. Because of the extremely low power consumption of this mining machine from Bitmain, it gradually gained a place in this mining machine competition.

However, the cold winter is approaching. At this time, everyone is unaware that the external environment is quietly changing. In 2014, due to policy reasons and the theft of the largest digital currency exchange at that time, Bitcoin ushered in the first time in history. In the bear market, facing a falling market, the entire mining industry is wailing, a large number of mining machines have stopped production, and mines have closed down. Zhang Jiageng, the two giants in the industry before, chose to withdraw from the market temporarily and turned to chip research and development, while Roasted Cat completely disappeared in the mining circle following this bear market, becoming a big mystery in the industry second only to Satoshi Nakamoto.

At this time, Wu Jihan chose to persevere in the Great Depression. By continuing to develop new mining machines, he took advantage of the blank market left by the withdrawal of the former giants to welcome the unknown bull market. Huang Tian paid off. After two years of long decline and silence, the market finally regained its vitality.

Since then, Bitmain has officially risen. After two years of accumulation, Bitmain has almost monopolized the entire mining machine market. With the advent of the Antminer S9, Bitmain has pushed its computing power to a new level. AntPool and BTC.com Mining Pool accounted for nearly 50% of the computing power of the entire network. So far, Wu Jihan has become a new generation of "mining bully" after Roasted Cat, and has led the entire mining circle to the next brilliant.......

Thanks to Uncle Xiao Ma for his help and guidance on the content of this episode.