
China’s Bitmain dominates Bitcoin mining, wants to cash in on AI - amelius
https://qz.com/1053799/chinas-bitmain-dominates-bitcoin-mining-now-it-wants-to-cash-in-on-artificial-intelligence/
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scottlegrand2
Just last week I was saying that the AI gold rush needed its own version of
"Bitboys Oy!" to add comic relief and occasionally good ideas. After all, you
can't spell Bitmain without A I.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitBoys)

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pcr0
Aren't machine learning workloads more variable than crypto mining? How would
ASIC users cope with that?

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matt4077
The big advances in neural networks stem from the use of GPUs that are
themselves less flexible than CPUs, but allow extremely good parallelisation
of (some) linear algebra (mostly matrix multiplication). This seems like a
logical next step, and it's probably similar to those "tensor processing
units" of the newer Tesla chips and whatever Google's custom hardware was
called.

~~~
hetspookjee
Google indeed calls them Tensor Processing Units and NVIDIA used the name as
well iirc, thus the birth of the TPU.

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aaron-lebo
How great would it be if AI advances ended up controlled by an authoritarian
Chinese government built off of the profits of libertarian Bitcoin users?

It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos and interest
in them has been dependent upon China.

~~~
Tenoke
>How great would it be if AI advances ended up controlled by an authoritarian
Chinese government built off of the profits of libertarian Bitcoin users?

Bitmain is a private company. And even if you can describe bitcoin as a
libertarian technology, I wouldnt think that most of Bitmain's profits come
from libertarians based on who uses their hardware.

>It's kind of fascinating just how dependent the value of cryptos and interest
in them has been dependent upon China.

Nothing special in the biggest part of the market dominating the price the
most, really.

~~~
digitalzombie
I think most libertarian see it as libertarian because it is not issued by any
government and so it isn't affected by gov when they change interest rate.

It is purely dictated by the market of supply and demand.

This is just what I think why Libertarian see it as libertarian; I'm not one
in any real sense nor do I subscribe to any of Ayn Rand's reasoning.

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m3kw9
The issue with ASIC is that when there is new AI algorithms that gets
developed, they may not be even able to use those. General purpose hardware
will be able to. You are stuck and need to upgrade.

~~~
tachyonbeam
Depends what the ASIC does. The bulk of deep learning is still matrix
multiplication and scalar operations on matrices. GPUs are, as the name
implies, general-purpose. They aren't as optimized as they could be for
optimal performance on matrix ops. This is part of what Google is capitalizing
on with the TPU.

Further speedups can be gained by going with lower precision ops (eg:
float16). A chip specialized for deep learning could support f16 only, which
would allow it to have more compute power using less area and less power.

So, in short, there are ways to make ASICs that are more efficient for deep
learning while still giving the ASICs flexibility. ASIC doesn't mean there is
no programmability.

~~~
zakk
> GPUs are, as the name implies, general-purpose.

???

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davemp
The ol' General Purpose Unit

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digitalzombie
Good.

Nvidia stuff 1080ti cost too much for a graduated student.

AMD is working on their own stuff supposely later this quarter we'll get
tensorflow and other support on their card.

Google's TPU is not for consumer, only for cloud.

If bitmain can sell ASIC for consumer with reasonable price and support
tensorflow, pytorch, etc... then it'll be good for the deep learning
community.

~~~
bpicolo
I suspect they'd be designing for datacenters rather than consumers. That's
essentially what they already do with bitcoin rigs too. It's a rented mining
cloud.

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jstanley
> It's a rented mining cloud.

That's not _all_ it is. They do sell actual hardware as well, which you then
run yourself.

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bpicolo
Sure, that's entirely fair.

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spupy
Is that a spoiler for "The Three-Body Problem" in the second paragraph?
Thanks, QZ!...

~~~
aaron-lebo
Had never heard of it, but it looks really interesting:

[https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-
Liu/dp/07653...](https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-
Liu/dp/0765382032)

~~~
xinyhn
I know everyone says it's good, etc. I just want to reinforce the point. It is
really really good. Definitely one of the best scifi I have read. The story
just gets bigger and bigger as the books progress as well as the imagined tech
and physics. I know it's cliche but it definitely caused me to think slightly
differently when looking up at a night sky.

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pdog
_> [Bitmain] has over 70% of the market for bitcoin mining rigs—effectively
providing 70% of all the processing power on the network._

It's incredible that one company accounts for the vast majority of the entire
Bitcoin network's hash rate.

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loserboss
Can't they now take over the market and generate bitcoin until everything
crashes?

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Mtinie
In this case, no. They produce ~70% of the hardware used by other miners. If
they kept the hardware inhouse it would be another story all together.

If history is an indication, selling the "shovels" to others during this
digital gold rush is more lucrative for Bitmain than mining would be.

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sillysaurus3
Also, even if you controlled 99.99% of the hashing power, you still couldn't
"generate bitcoin until everything crashes." You can't give yourself an
arbitrary sum.

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nosuchthing
with 51%, you just give yourself the entire sum of network rewards not an
arbitrary sum.

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sowbug
At which point the exchange value of Bitcoin plummets, so you turn your $3.5
million in daily block rewards into nothing.

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Mtinie
Not necessarily. A smart actor with massive hash power (enough to stage a 50%+
attack) would gain the most by using a Sybil variant to subtlety take control.
There is no reason to be overt if you can conceal the connection between
"independent" mining pools.

~~~
sowbug
We might disagree on what a 51% attack means.

A single actor controlling a majority of hash power isn't a problem. Double-
spends are a problem. If anyone double-spends, it _will_ be noticed because
there will be a permanent record of it in the form of orphaned blocks, and
bitcoin value will decrease because Bitcoin transactions will have become less
trustworthy.

Thus, even in the case where a single actor has 51% hash power, that actor has
a strong financial incentive not to conduct a 51% attack.

The Sybil-style independent mining pools you describe aren't really hiding
what people would be looking for, which is a coordinated preference for the
fork that causes the double-spend. (Plus miners would have to accept the
relayed second transaction into the mempool to begin with, which today nobody
does. RBF might have changed this, but even then you should still be able to
reason about whether anyone is even contemplating allowing a double-spend.)

I'm not sure if I'm talking past you -- am I correct that we disagreed on what
a 51% attack looks like?

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nosuchthing
Double spends attacks aren't the only issue when you have access to a large
portion of the network.

Malicious pools can prioritize their transactions and manipulate activity in
the network to grant them as many block rewards as they want.

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du_bing
Incredible story, thanks for sharing!

