ASIC and Bitcoin



TransCrypt



Chinese mining hardware giant Bitmain has reportedly made higher profits in 2017 than long time American graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturer Nvidia.





The Bernstein analysis reports that Bitmain holds 70 to 80 percent of the market for Bitcoin miners and ASIC cards, with most of the revenue made from selling the mining rigs, “and, to a much lesser extent, by collecting management fees from the mining pools it operates and renting out the mining power of its mining farms through cloud services.





Cøbra — a Bitcoin developer and co-owner of bitcointalk.org and bitcoin.org — wrote an open letter to the cryptoverse on February 23rd calling for Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm to be changed.





“We don’t want our transactions being decided by the Chinese government. The solution is to adopt a new hybrid PoW system, possibly with a PoS combination, and choosing algorithms that are very easy and simple to build ASICs for. The playing field needs to be even again, and structured in a way where it’s harder for one entity to dominate it.”





And when Cøbra speaks of “one entity” here, he is clearly referring to Bitmain