Published 3 years ago by Maria Konash

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Sequoia Capital and IDG Capital are investing $50M in Bitmain Technologies Ltd., created by Wu Jihan and Micree Zhan, and considered by many to be the world’s largest bitcoin mining organization. To understand the role of Beijing-based Bitmain in the $74 billion bitcoin economy, its necessary to keep in mind the company’s profile. Firstly, Bitmain designs the silicon that goes into its bitcoin mining rigs. Apart from this, Bitmain runs vast bitcoin mines, which it rents out to others. And last, but not the least, it manages several of the world’s largest mining pools, together controlling 29 percent of all the processing power on the global bitcoin network. These include: Following the currency’s and the market value’s rise, Bitmain now is planning to cash in on artificial intelligence (AI) and invest in mining facilities in the U.S. Speaking about AI, Bitmain’s newest product – the Sophon is poised to challenge the likes of Google, Nvidia, and AMD in the deep learning techs’ competition. According to Michael Bedford Taylor, a professor at the University of Washington, these types of chips, called application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, designed to perform a single function extremely efficiently, could create the next wave of distributed computing: Wang, a veteran of Baidu and Google, states that Bitmain has several advantages over other competitors in deep-learning race due to the fact that deep learning industry is now going through the same evolution that bitcoin miners already experienced: mining technology evolved to graphics cards, and then to custom silicon from individuals using desktop computers. For the record, Bitmain has already been criticized by many experts for pursuing legal action against companies and threatening startups with large-scale lawsuits within the bitcoin sector.