The currency war behind the chip supply cut-off: Bitcoin's two-line attack on finance and industry.

A fiery virtual currency "digital game" is impacting the financial order and industrial resources in the real world. In the past few days, the prices of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin have skyrocketed and plummeted. At the same time, after the virtual currency exchange launched OTC trading and futures contract trading products and services, various so-called "financial management", "borrowing" and "fixed income" products around virtual currency have also emerged. The popularity of virtual currency "financial services" provided by licensed institutions is unprecedented. In addition, the original means of directly obtaining virtual currency - "mining", has also become the focus again. The "mining machines" that were closed in the bear market in the past few years have become popular again, and there are also A-share listed companies that have spent tens of millions of dollars to deploy the coin mining market. However, under the competition for computing power between major mining pools (collection of computing power) and mines (collection of hardware equipment), not only resources such as chips, hard disks, and graphics cards are quickly swallowed up, but also power resources such as firepower and hydraulic power in various places are also annihilated in " Mining machine" in the booming operation sound. An "involved" coin mining market is having a serious impact on the real world... The "rise" of financial derivatives in the currency circle began with the upsurge of opening virtual currency exchanges around 2015. The virtual currency-related derivatives launched by the virtual currency exchange mainly use futures-like contract trading methods to go long or short virtual currency and other virtual currencies. But what followed was the continuous high-pressure supervision and control of virtual currency transactions, including the central bank and other seven ministries and commissions in 2017 strictly banned virtual currency fundraising and issuance and closed domestic virtual currency exchanges. Under continuous supervision, a group of virtual currency exchanges have gone underground and are quite "low-key". However, since 2021, after the price of Bitcoin has continuously broken through the US$50,000 and US$60,000 mark, the major platforms known as "digital financial service providers" can't hold back, and they have not yet obtained regulatory approval. Solicit customers in a high-profile manner. Insiders of Bitmain: TSMC has not yet confirmed the matter of 5nm encryption mining chips: Today, relevant insiders of Bitmain said that the company has not yet officially confirmed that TSMC will be an OEM of cryptocurrency mining chips. It said that the company's supply chain capacity has always been confidential information. It was previously reported that TSMC has received an order from Bitmain, and will use a 5nm process technology to manufacture chips for cryptocurrency mining for Bitmain, which is expected to start production in the third quarter of this year. (Financial Associated Press) [2021/5/7 21:34:32] A leaflet of a virtual currency trading platform obtained by a reporter from "China Business News" from an offline promotion meeting shows that it conducts investment and financial management around virtual currency. , leveraged trading, lending and other financial services, including DeFi mining, debt, options and other multiple asset portfolios. Different from the simple contract trading speculation in the past, the virtual currency trading platform absorbs the virtual currency in the hands of users on the grounds of providing dual-currency wealth management, pledged loans, zero-interest loans, funds, and current deposits, claiming that "it can help users complete the following The virtual currency earns interest or borrows money for the underlying investment.” In its claimed lending business, the principal and interest are denominated in TEDA currency USDT (a currency that links the virtual currency to the legal currency U.S. dollar). Users can pledge virtual currency to borrow money. The purpose of the loan includes purchasing mining machines, daily consumption, Decoration, tourism, medical treatment. The reporter checked the loan agreement and found that it was an overseas company that signed the loan contract with the user. Regarding the business content-zce declared above, lawyer Peng Kai, a senior partner of Beijing Jincheng Tongda (Shanghai) Law Firm, told reporters, “First of all, this is a lending business, and it is a cross-border lending that bypasses foreign exchange supervision and involves financial transactions. Licensing (lending business qualification) and foreign exchange supervision; secondly, the use of USDT for decoration, daily consumption, etc., such borrowing purposes are unimaginable and self-deceiving. For domestic life consumption scenarios such as decoration and tourism, only domestic legal circulation can be used Nvidia will acquire the British computer chip design company Arm Holdings for US$40 billion: Nvidia will acquire the British computer chip design company Arm Holdings from SoftBank Group for US$40 billion. Nvidia said in a press release that it will pay SoftBank in cash and stock in the deal. In 2016, SoftBank acquired Arm for $32 billion. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the acquisition has the potential to create "the premier computing company in the age of artificial intelligence." He added that Arm would remain headquartered in Cambridge, England, and retain its brand. GPUs produced by Nvidia are mainly used in video games, but they are also used in crypto mining, such as ETH, XMR and ZEC. Arm's technology is the backbone of most existing smartphone technology. Other companies, including Apple, Samsung Electronics and Huawei, develop Arm's designs into custom chips. Its technology is also starting to make headway in cloud data centers. Arm says 180 billion chips based on its designs have been manufactured so far. (Bitcoin.com) [2020/9/18] When talking about the boundary between this kind of coin-raising behavior and illegal fund-raising, Peng Kai said bluntly that there is no boundary between the two from a penetrating point of view. It is unrealistic to bypass legal currency and achieve the goal of not involving legal currency transactions. From the source point of view, the virtual currency held by the vast majority of people is obtained through legal currency purchase rather than original acquisition such as mining. It is too naive to hope that "currency transactions" will achieve a detour of fund-raising criminal regulations. "In addition, it should be noted that most of these exhibition owners are currently established overseas, but there are also 'branches' in the territory. This 'branch office' may be a newly established company, or it may be an office location without a corporate entity and The obvious purpose of opening such 'branches' in China is to develop business for domestic customers, which is exactly the same as when ICO moved overseas but still mainly targeted domestic customers." Peng Kai added. Dynamics | TSMC: Encryption mining chip sales will be weak in the fourth quarter: According to Reuters, TSMC expects its revenue to grow moderately in the fourth quarter, while sales from high-performance computer chips used for encryption mining will be weak. Weakness will partially offset gains from strong market demand for smartphone chips. [2018/10/19] When this "financial" game of chasing wealth intensifies, the price of a bitcoin in the secondary market has reached hundreds of thousands of yuan. Therefore, the "mining" operation located at the most upstream of the virtual currency industry has naturally entered the public eye. As we all know, the key to digging out virtual currency is the calculation speed, referred to as "computing power". That is to say, with more powerful and advanced hardware and low-cost and stable electricity than others, more virtual coins can be allocated, and the computing power is proportional to the possibility of miners (investors) successfully digging out new coins. Under the lure of hundreds of thousands of yuan a virtual currency, "mining machine" has become the best choice for capital and public companies to rush into this virtual currency game. First, there was a typical case of an A-share listed company spending tens of millions of dollars to invest in cloud mining, which was cited by the "mining circle" as a typical case to evade supervision, and then there was a U.S. stock listing around the entire "mining" industry chain by issuing additional stocks and cash. company. "We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the layout of many hydropower mines, and have also acquired manufacturers that have developed 7nm 'mining machine' chips, and are racing against time to buy a large number of second-hand 'mining machines'." A person from the investment department of a listed company told reporter. However, such an investment is not a big deal in the Bitcoin mining industry. "This is one of our mines in Hami, a prefecture-level city in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region." The founder of a mining pool took out a photo and said that the spacious square in the photo has a capacity of 120,000 kilowatts. If it is priced at 500 yuan per kilowatt , The construction cost of this mine plus the cost of electricity alone needs 60 million yuan. If it is filled (full), the highest-end "mining machine" needs 2 billion yuan, and the "mining machine" that is almost (relatively small in computing power) needs 500 million to 1 billion yuan. Sound | Ethereum Foundation security chief: ASIC mining chips should be quickly removed from the Ethereum platform: According to Coindesk, the Ethereum Foundation security chief Martin Holst Swende said at a developer conference held on Friday that he Support swift action to remove ASIC mining software from the Ethereum platform. Thus preventing powerful ASIC miners from obtaining a majority share of the platform's digital currency. [2018/9/29] Wang Peng, an assistant professor at Renmin University of China, pointed out, "In the field of virtual currency mining such as Bitcoin, the requirements for computing power and algorithms are strict, and the update and iteration speed is fast. This means that even if you spend a lot of money to buy The mining machine may also lose its advantage in a short period of time, and the machine wears a high degree. The operation of the "mining machine" business requires a long-term relatively good performance in the "mining" field in order to be able to mine Issue new coins to cover costs and obtain benefits." Wang Peng also emphasized that in addition to financial strength, there is another threshold for entering the "mining" industry-control of the supply chain. For example, Wang Peng said that the current bitcoin market is hot, capital is rushing for professional "mining machines", and companies all over the world that are interested in investing want to buy professional "mining" equipment. "Whether the company can purchase and acquire computing power equipment in the fastest time will directly determine the size of its income. At the same time, the cost of the 'mining' industry will become higher and higher, which will force 'mining machines' to be more expensive." Iterating in a short period of time, the input cost will also rise." "Everything depends on the price of the coin. If it reaches 100,000 US dollars or one million US dollars, the competition in mining will only become more crazy." Industry insiders said. It is obvious that the "involution" competition invested in this competition has not yet come to an end, and the carnival of chasing each other and ebb and flow has begun to have a huge impact on the industry. Neusoft: The Beidou chip is expected to be taped out by the end of the year: Neusoft said on the interactive platform that the Beidou chip is still under development and is expected to be taped out by the end of the year. The company pays attention to blockchain technology, and there is currently no research and development plan on whether this technology can be used in smart homes and smart grids in the future. In 2018, the company will focus on promoting the sales of intelligent products. [2018/3/27] "Our company can no longer buy graphics cards, and we can't receive twice the original price. The supplier said that they have been ordered by the virtual currency mining machine manufacturer." A purchaser of a game company Ask the Reporter: Isn’t Bitcoin a String of Codes? Why do these invisible and intangible things in the virtual world occupy industrial resources? On February 9, data from the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers showed that in January, the production and sales of automobiles were 2.388 million and 2.503 million, respectively, a decrease of 15.9% and 11.6% from the previous month. The association reminded that the rapid decline in production from the previous month reflects that the insufficient supply of automotive chips has affected the production rhythm of enterprises. In stark contrast to the worries of industries such as games and automobiles, mine owners are a little happy about the shortage of chips. In their eyes, the global shortage of chips is beneficial and harmless to "mining", as long as the computing power does not rise in the bear market, "mining" can also make money. "Right now, the entire production line of car companies is shut down due to the lack of a few chips, but we have mining machines (no shortage of chips), and we can always make money." A mine owner said. "At that time, everyone was not optimistic about ×× coins, but our family (optimistic), so we hoarded a lot. Now everyone thinks that the bull market is coming, and they flock to mine coins. Of course, they are trying their best to collect the 'raw materials' of the mining machine , The gross profit of the mining industry is more than 200%, (graphics cards, hard drives, chips), we calculate the shutdown price of Bitcoin mining machines (mining machines dedicated to mining Bitcoin) (the revenue cannot cover electricity bills, hardware costs) at 20,000 US dollars per piece Right now, the price of Bitcoin is $50,000 per piece, what price can we afford?” Just after chips were out of stock and the price of graphics cards as the “raw material” of mining machines soared all the way, hard drives were also doomed. "The hard disk is directly supplied by the manufacturer, and it is in stock, and the payment will be made on the same day." - This is an advertisement of the mining pool in Moments. Recently, the "mining" of Chia coins has suddenly become popular, which uses idle hard disk storage space instead of graphics card computing power for "mining". Due to the large-capacity reading and writing involved, the larger the storage space used by users for "mining", the greater the probability of obtaining native token rewards, resulting in an increase in hard disk prices. In mid-March, the Chia mainnet was launched (the mainnet launch means that the blockchain project will open the blockchain to the public and start to use it on a large scale), and the sales of large-capacity hard drives on major domestic e-commerce platforms have surged. However, after the price rose sharply, it fell sharply, trapping a lot of "miners" hoarding goods. According to media reports, with the enthusiasm for Chia currency mining, the prices of hard disks and SSDs have skyrocketed and plummeted in the short term. "The price of 8T (hard disk) has reached 1,730 yuan, and it is changing every day. It was as high as 2,999 yuan before." With the soaring price of "raw materials", the power product companies and chip manufacturing companies that originally supplied to other companies in the industrial chain have also Competing to cooperate with mining machine manufacturers who can give high prices. According to the reporter’s incomplete statistics, more than ten listed companies in the domestic A-share market have begun to provide services or output products for virtual currency mining machines, and many of them have virtual currency mining manufacturers among the top five customers. In addition, there are data centers that cannot escape the claws. Previously, there was a data center announcement stating that the company's cloud hosts are not allowed to engage in activities that violate national policies and regulations, because Bitcoin mining has not been recognized by relevant national laws and regulations, and mining will also cause a lot of loss of hardware resources, resulting in an impact on the cloud. The stability of the server, in order to ensure the stable operation of the user's cloud server and avoid legal risks caused by it, please do not use the company's cloud host to engage in related activities. If found, it will be closed directly and no refund will be given. More important than raw materials to the "mining" industry is electric energy, and mines full of roaring machines consume huge amounts of electricity. According to the “mining machine” manufacturer’s disclosure to reporters, the annual electricity consumption of virtual currency mining in 2020 is equivalent to the total annual electricity consumption of Thailand in 2020. According to Bit Deer's statistics on the electricity consumption scale of virtual currency mining, from 2013 to 2021, ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) mining electricity consumption will be 1.8 billion kWh, 2.3 billion kWh, 5.4 billion kWh, 13 billion kWh, 41.5 billion kWh, 55.3 billion degrees, 71.3 billion degrees, 137 billion degrees. From 2017 to 2021, GPU (a more powerful "graphics processing unit", usually used for games and 3D rendering) mining power consumption will be 6.2 billion kWh, 16.9 billion kWh, 7.9 billion kWh, 9.1 billion kWh, 20.1 billion degrees (Note: 0 degrees before 2016). "What is the local electricity price?" A VC investor in the currency circle mysteriously asked a local city investment company that was attracting investment. When she got the reply of 0.26 yuan per kilowatt-hour, she was a little excited but worried to the reporter and said: "If the local government does not agree, they can only dig secretly, which is too unstable." Departments are on the alert. On December 24, 2019, the People's Government of Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in the west of Sichuan Province issued the "Work Plan for Cleaning and Regulating Bitcoin Mines in Ganzi Prefecture".

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