Jihan Wu, CEO of the Bitcoin mining giant Bitmain recently announced the new 7nm Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) miner BM1391 at a mining conference(World Digital Mining Summit) in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Wu revealed that the new generation of mining chips equipped with BM1391 will be launched soon, according to Bitmain’s blog. The blog also mentions that the new SHA256 algorithm acceleration chip will use advanced semiconductor manufacturing technologies, 7nm Finfet.

Wu also claims “The ASIC chip integrates more than a billion transistors and is optimized for maximum efficiency”, according to the tests conducted Wu further says the chip “can achieve a ratio of energy consumption to the mining capacity that is as low as 42J/TH.”.

Bitmain Tweeted:

@JihanWu of just announced Bitmain's new 7nm ASIC BM1391 to mine #BitcoinCash #Bitcoin, at #miningconf in Tbilisi, Georgia; informed that mass production and the next #Antmimer coming soon! Learn more here: https://t.co/Zp8mdsQlOr — BITMAIN [Not giving away ETH] (@BITMAINtech) September 21, 2018

Competition and Criticism

The mining industry is seeing fierce competition with new players entering the space, although the price has declined since December last year the hashrate seems to grow exponentially. Bitmain had announced its plan to go public with a staggering $18 Billion valuation, although there has been criticism on their financials.

It is interesting to note that BitFury revealed a 14nm mining chip just a day before Bitmain’s announcement. BitFury’s ASIC is said to have a power efficiency up to 55 mW/GH and a hashrate up to 120GH/s. Earlier in June this year, Japanese IT Giant GMO had also announced their 7nm ASIC planning to knock out Bitmain.

Samson Mow of Blockstream took on Twitter to point out that the announcement is not impressive but misleading, inferring that with heavy competition in the industry Bitmain’s monopoly will be broken.

Some of the points mentioned by Samson:

Bitmain will “soon” produce the chips when will be soon? what is the timeline?

“the chip will include over a billion transistors.” is not that impressive as 8nm and 10nm could also have a billion transistors

He is skeptical on the 42J/TH number mentioned by Jihan as he says these are lab tested numbers where the environment is highly conditioned, and the number reflects the efficiency of chips and not necessarily the miners

Bitmain previously claimed the S9’s chips to be 75J/TH but in reality was 98J/TH with 30% more power consumption, so the number presented which is 42J/TH could just be marketing and the real miner would be 55J/TH at best.

The Whatsminer M10 showed a live demo with stats showing 64.2J/TH, M10 is a 16nm chip, 7nm chips would be 2x as costly to produce as the 16nm. So what would be the cost per TH?

Finally, he concludes saying The new miner is being released after two years which is not that impressive compared to the M10 miner.

https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/1043183310606753792

The anonymous account on Twitter BTCKING555 who claims to be an insider has criticised Bitmain saying that investors are threatening to sue for misrepresenting the financials.

BTCKING555 Tweeted:

BREAKING: Rumors – recent investors threatening to sue Bitmain for misrepresenting financial info & MATERIAL OMISSION. Warrantors in the Agreement defined as Jihan Wu and Ketuan Zhan. Also Liable – Group Companies: Bitmain Technology, Blocktrail, Hashnest, Tospring (to name few)

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