Who is Bitmain?
Bitmain was originally founded in 2013 by Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan. This founding coincided with the rising of Bitcoin’s price to almost the top of the market. This helped Bitmain rise to the top of the Bitcoin mining market. Even after Bitcoin prices dropped, Bitmain remained in business thanks to smart practices and a steady supply of their staple mining products.
In fact, the market drop arguably solidified Bitmain’s market dominance even further. Their flagship mining product at the time – the Bitmain Antminer S5 – quickly rose to become the most popular cryptocurrency mining hardware around.
Today, Bitmain is now at the top of the ASIC – application-specific integrated circuit – market. It’s one of the largest cryptocurrency-related companies in the entire world, with millions of dollars hanging in the balance.
What Do They Do?
Technically, Bitmain fulfills several roles with different goals, each of which complements one another to help Bitmain maintain an effective cryptocurrency mining empire.
Antminers.
The first of these is fulfilled through their Antminer products. These ASIC computers are designed from the ground up to mine cryptocurrencies and only those things. They aren’t designed for other computing tasks, although they aren’t necessarily limited to mining Bitcoin. Other digital currencies like Dash, Litecoin, Ethereum, and so on can also be mined from Antminer machines.
Without getting too technical, Antmining machines use popular and well-tested algorithms to mine cryptocurrency quickly and efficiently. Most of them can also mine multiple types of currencies depending on how you set the machines up. The S9, as an example, can mine both regular Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash.
To date, Bitmain is the most successful producer of ASIC computers, even in the face of bigger technology giants like Nvidia. Because of this, it’s estimated that Antminer users (called “Antminers”) are responsible for about 70% of all Bitcoin mining activities in the world.
All of this is because Antmining computers are very effective and efficient. This, in turn, allows miners to acquire more and more cryptocurrency in shorter time spans. This also makes Antminers the most competitive crypto-mining computers available today.
How Do Antminers Work?
Antminer bitcoin mining machines work the same way as any other automatic mining machine, but here’s a breakdown in case you’re not aware:
Cryptocurrency and its value are dependent on transactions being verified by neutral third parties.
Essentially, a Bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) miner acts as an auditor. A miner is able to earn cryptocurrency by completing different blocks of certain verified transactions.
These are added to a “blockchain”, which is essentially an extended history of transactions that becomes more and more reliable the more data is added to it.
To verify a transaction, you have to complete a hashing puzzle. In many cases, it is easier to brute force your way through a hashing puzzle by adding more processing power to the task.
Those who can drive more mining or processing power to discover the solution for verifying a blockchain has a higher likelihood of receiving a Bitcoin reward.
Thus, cryptocurrency mining machines like Bitmain’s Antminers are highly specialized computers that can process puzzles quickly and efficiently.
You can set up multiple Antmining machines if you want to work on a single blockchain hash problem, or you can tackle multiple problems at once. It’s all up to you and your priorities as a cryptocurrency miner.
Additional Products
Bitmain also sells additional devices. For instance, they sell a somewhat odd Wi-Fi router that ostensibly also has the ability to mine Litecoin at the same time as providing Internet access. This gives you a highly versatile router that can accomplish a wide range of tasks thanks to its generalized design.
Furthermore, Bitmain supplies several computer parts, like PSUs, that are designed to work well with their running machines and other hardware. You can sometimes use these for other computers or devices as well.
Antpool and BTC.com
Both of these are two of the largest mining websites and Bitcoin pools in the world, and both of them are owned by Bitmain. As such, Bitmain makes up approximately half of all Bitcoin mining power and potential at this time. The company itself takes in quite a profit from using their own products for Bitcoin mining.
Hashnest
This is a cloud mining service operated by Bitmain. It allows would-be miners to rent some Antminer machines from Bitmain for cheaper prices, similar to how you might rent storage space from companies like Dropbox. All the “rented miners” are maintained and operated through Bitmain on behalf of the renters, and mined as part of the Antpool site mentioned above.
