A caravan of miners is headed towards the remote regions of China joined by an army of Bitmain personnel with the aim of doubling Bitmain’s current 120,000 mining machines by adding 90,000 new ones to give BitcoinABC the upper hand in any hashwar.

“‘Half of its marketing staff have gone to Xinjiang to talk with local mining operators about deploying equipment,’ source familiar with the matter said. But the Beijing-based mining conglomerate refused to comment on this issue,” says local media.

They have spoken to all mining farms in the region, asking them to take 5,000 machines per farm. Some don’t have space, so it may be part of the caravan will have to head towards Inner Mongolia, if it hasn’t already.

“AntPool requested that a single mining farm should host over 5,000 machines,” they say, with the region attractive for its cheap electricity rates of 5 cent per kWh.

Bitmain is the world’s biggest asics manufacturer and holds one million BCH. They back BitcoinABC in an upgrade this Thursday. Calvin Ayre and Craig Wright have threatened to 51% attack it. It appears Bitmain is taking the threat seriously.

This deployment means Bitmain’s hashrate “will be two or three times higher than the current one.”

Their current hashrate is not very clear. Bitmain’s Antpool, for example, has 11.4% of bitcoin’s hash. Their BTC.com pool has nearly 20%.

Bitmain has claimed these are actual pools, stating their current hashrate is just 2339.21 PH/s, or about 5% of bitcoin’s network.

If this now doubles to 10%, then it would be more than BCH’s entire current hashrate of about 8% of bitcoin’s network.

Meaning they would easily gain the upper hand in any 51% attack by Calvin Ayre or anyone else.

Jihan Wu, Bitmain’s co-founder, has apparently left his position from Bitmain’s board of directors to join the board of supervisors.

That may be related to the IPO or in preparation for the chain-split fork with Jihan Wu telling Trustnodes:

“It is a subsidiary of Bitmain group and it will save management team lots of time if not all board members are in every subsidiary.”

Article updated with Wu’s comments.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com