On-site at the Chengdu Miner Conference

From new miners to the BTC Pool, speakers address all things bitcoin

The Chengdu Miner Conference.

Bitmain and Huobi Exchange welcomed bitcoin miners to the first Miner Conference at the IFC building in Chengdu, China, on October 22.

Bitmain sales manager Xiaojung Fan introduces Bitmain at the Chengdu Miner Conference.

Bitmain sales manager Xiaojung Fan opened the event with a brief introduction to the company’s Antminer bitcoin miner, the BTC line (pool, blockchain explorer, and wallet), AntPool, and cloud mining platform Hashnest.

During his speech, he summed up the previous generations of Antminer, and unveiled the 0.1J/GH low-consumption 14T power S9 and the quiet family workshop R4. He also thanked the Bitmain development team, which maintains a presence in the US, The Netherlands, China, and Israel, for its R&D efforts in reducing ASIC miner power consumption. The Antminer’s low power consumption is the reason why the company’s commands over 70% market domination.

The conference also showcased the company’s first Litecoin miner, the L3, officially declaring Bitmain’s ambitions in the Litecoin mining industry.

“With Bitmain’s technological supremacy in high-performance computing chips, the company also opened a new AI line. Brand-new products in this area can be now expected,” Fan added.

Prominent developer Kevin Pan introduces the Unrivaled BTC Pool.

As the China team’s BTC.com brand leader and a bottom-layer core tech architect, Kevin Pan introduced the tech highlights of the BTC Pool, noting that the pool operating KPIs are orphanage rate, lucky rate, empty block rate, and connectivity, with orphanage rate staying at the core.

Since its September 13th debut, the BTC Pool has suffered no malfunctions, providing real-time visualized computing power and revenue information.

“As we are all aware: big mining farms, in pursuit of max profit, will deploy their devices in the energy-rich provinces such as Sichuan and Inner Mongolia,” Pan said. “Though the electricity costs are low there, the internet infrastructure is weak. Unstable connectivity will cause a frequent high rejection rate of bitcoin miners in the area.

“Obviously it is of great importance to keep a stable network connection, so a vast sum of money had gone into it,” he added. “In light of this, the BTC team has introduced the stratum proxy, the BTCAgent, to large farms. Our data suggests that the bandwidth is under 150kbps and RAM under 64M in a 10,000-miner case. This is the core highlight of the BTC Pool, and it meets the most practical needs of miners.”

Pan addressed the shortcomings of the current mining protocols, such as long latency and unstable chain connection, adding that the next-gen protocol will be optimized for reducing network jitter and collective maintenance.

“The BTC.com team is expanding with great desire for talent, we need PHP and C++ senior developers and business managers,” he concluded.

BTC.com senior product manager Chris Zhu called miners the ‘guardians of bitcoin.’

BTC.com senior product manager Chris Zhu addressed lingering fears of new bitcoin users, such as whether they chould trust the currency, its safety, and the possibility of a 51% attack.

“These have been some of the most frequent questions our users have had since I joined the community,” Zhu said. “It’s simple math: the current bitcoin network has 1800P of computing power. To launch a single 51% attack, you would need about 125 million yuan (approximately US$20 million) — it’s simply impossible. That’s why we say miners are continually safeguarding bitcoin.”

Bitcoin writer Shiliang Huang also spoke at the event, coming out in support of on-chain scaling, which would enable current miners to run for another eight years.

Bitcoin writer Shiliang Huang speaks at the Chengdu Miners Conference.

Mining means seeking more profits, he said. But the revenue is affected by various factors, such as total computing power, block reward, farm operating cost, miner cost, miner life expectancy, bitcoin price, and transaction fees. The ideal form of the bitcoin network is one with a vast number of users, servers, and nodes, he said. Huang suggested on-chain scaling to obtain this “utopia.”

“The current block size is 1M, with a full block you have 1479 transactions recorded,” Huang said. “Transaction fees account for BTC59.14 of revenue for miners each day. But the ratio is way too low. With the limited block size, miners can only buy the latest generation miners. Should on-chain scaling prevail, the total transaction fees will be much higher, in which case old miners can maintain their profits as long as they can mine high transaction fee blocks. The life expectancy of the miners will also be prolonged.”

Antpool business manager Xin Tian, sales manager Feng Zhou, and Huobi COO Jiawei Zhu also delivered speeches on improving their respective products and promotions. The conference also featured a miner lottery segment, with several lucky guests winning.