Bitcoin Forum

Bitmain's CEO, Jihan Wu, categorically denies the recent accusations of "hidden mining," on new models of manufactured equipment, before mass sales began. But he notes that interested persons in the market can be.

Wu made this statement during an interview with Fortune, refuting rumors and reports that after the development of integrated circuits (ASICs) for specific applications of the new hash algorithm, Bitmain secretly works with these devices for several months before the sales start for all comers.

   "No, it never was, we have a small test, we do not do it, it's not our strategy," Wu said.

Earlier in the spring, suspicions were expressed that the Chinese firm privately used its equipment before the release, which is apparently due to the fact that Monero's anonymous crypto currency held a hard drive to change the Cryptonight development algorithm and prevent the use of new ASIC Cryptonight from Bitmain. Following the fork, a significant portion of the capacity continued to produce the old chain, and consensus among observers was that most of this hash came from ASIC to Bitmain Cryptonight, which had not yet been shipped to customers.

However, Wu said that Bitmain does not have the time, resources or incentives for "shadow mining" crypto currency.

    "There is a group of people who have been controlling a lot of Monero hashing for a long time." I would say that developing this kind of ASIC is not the secret workshop that only Bitmain has, many can do. Bitmain, and especially me, I do not even have the time, the attention or the resources to have plans for it.If we develop hardware, we just release and sell it on the market. Right after we work with test machines, we start sale to the market. courage ".

source: https://bizlim.com/crypto/news/bitmain-doesnt-have-a-secret-crypto-mining-operation-jihan-wu.html

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I will certainly be grateful for the Merit
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Honestly at this point why would they need to.  They can create a miner for a couple hundred$. Sell it to us at batch one for 10k then a week later batch two at 6k then batch three and four go for 3k then 1.5k. You get the picture. If they can sell it for 10k less not more than a month later then I’d say they have comsumers right where they want them.  No need to mine before hand. But we all know they do:).  Poor wittle bitmain going on PR run before they release their ipo I suppose.  They better get to spending that 4 billion they duped from customers last year.  It’s gonna take most of it. Then again why bother. Why not just Quietly craw back into the hole whence they came.

BR

They probably set up a few shell subsidiaries to run these miners, so it wasn't really their company doing any mining. I wouldn't discount another possibility: there may also be other companies that developed their own (or contracted out the developement of) ASIC/FPGAs and had no intention of selling to the public or revealing they even have these machines, and were mining with them. Once the fork occurred, they also got kicked off mining on the new chain.

Sure they dont just look at zec difficulty graph,its the only coins whos total diff was increasing steadily from jannuary while the price was going down most of the times.Diff went up for 50% in short period of time even while most of gpu miners switched to other coins

Sorry but too much proof out there otherwise from customers receiving used and dusty miners, difficulty changes, and units suddenly being announced for sale when algo changes announced on profitable coins.

What a load of bull.
You develop ASICs that are specifically made to mine coins and you are telling me you don't have "the time, attention or resources" to plug'em and use them? He's literally lying in broad daylight.

Bitmain is a corporation.  Bitmain as a corporation absolutely DID NOT secretly mine.  This is easily provable by Bitmain and even China has some degree of business accounting regulations.  

However... private individuals, Sole Proprietorships, and even Limited Liability corporations can operate separately from corporations such as Bitmain.  Sure, Bitmain is probably correct in saying 'they' did not participate in "secret" mining ops.  But anyone can analyze network hash and realize that CPU/GPU farm are clearly not generating the amount of hash even possible on various algorithms.  

FPGA and ASICs are obviously owning network algos such as CNight, lyra2z, equihash, and several others.  

Yea I'm calling bullshit as well, these guys have basically ripped everyone off with their shady business tactics (especially the D3's) what makes us think all of the sudden they won't do anything to turn a profit like secret mining. This is bullcrap I really hope one day bitmain gets the punishment they deserve for duping millions of people into buying their almost useless mining equipment. These types of sales tactics that they engage in should be and probably will be punishable offenses in the future, nobody can hide from their karma it all comes back around eventually. That's why I try to be the best person I can be :D

Yeah, seen it first hand. plus bear in mind they need to have a significant 'warranty' pool to pull machines from, that they know for sure do work. Obviously that's not a 'secret mining operation' though, that's 'Warranty warehouse no9'... It's all semantics...

+1!
Big company's will not get their hands dirty, they got the "privet unknown" company's for that.
This is what I think about those Company's:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4464733.msg40023408#msg40023408

Bitmain is a 4 billing dollar Enterprise. They don't waste time chasing crumbs mining monero. They leave that to the bums (you miners out there crying over ROI)

If "secret mining"  was a lie then it means that Bitmain are stupid to invest Millions of $$$ on developing a product that will be useless after announcing it because of forcing the Coins to FORK?
No one thinks Bitmain  are stupid...

Bitmain as a corporation is no mining, but there are people behind every company, and those groups are mining for sure. What is he tryng to fool?  >:(

I don't believe that. I am 100% sure that they mine coins on their equipment before they send it to buyers. First of all, it's illogical. Would you wait a few months with the opportunity to earn money during this time? Moreover who could organize the attack 51% of the coins prior to the receipt of such capacity in the sale? The complexity of the network also grows before the first ASICs instances go on sale.

The entire XMR + ETN daily reward: $450k
Bitmain daily profit - $5.5m

why would they bother

we saw all the devices ordered from the factory for zero.
The air ducts of the fan baskets were completely filled with dust balls.
I think we could have believed if we had not seen them. I never believed in these explanations.

Well how they will explain the Monero difficulty increasement ,
https://i.imgur.com/lANPemz.png

They won't explain it. It's like signing an appearance at the Prosecutor's office. Bittman will deny it, of course. Potential buyers may regard this as a fraud and Bittman will lose buyers. But I think that it will still happen. Bittman will focus on the development of AI and mining will return to the use of GPU.

Funny when you know is something is clearly false but then someone claims its true.

People or companies like bitmain will always be part of our world. Hopefully in the future everything is much more honest and transparent thanks to the power of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. I am excited for what good this new technology can bring to the world.

Maybe bitmain was telling half the truth. They may not be mining crypto as a company , but who knows if they sell asics in private sales to their friends in China a couple of months before they sell to the general public. They can sell the ASIC's to beta testers and gain profit. A win win situation.

I think Bitmain is clear...they made separate company to do that, 100% owned by Bitmain...but Bitmain itself is clear

seems interesting that bitmain says that they were not using cryptonight miner in secret. So are we to believe that the new miner just so happened to be released right after monero decided to change the POW algo.

come on! baikal, bitmain and innosilicon  all had products release soon after monero's plans to modify the POW algo.

move on nothing to see here..   

What do you guys expect?
Bitmain says the truth?

I don't believe single words they say. They don't have resources? Oh, that's a big joke. They have resources and more, they aren't in a list of honest (still such thing doesn't exists) companies, their only aim is max profit and max control on everything related to crypto world. I can't believe they are kind guys and do everything honestly.

I loled

I think it is most probable.

They were not secretly mining with them, they were just testing, doing quality check..  In this case they need to run it for months to fully diagnose lol

Yep!, Chinese company's take QC very seriously!

bitmain will never admit to ripping off its customers. Whats new here?  ::)

Remember Butterfly labs and co back when asics made their debut to run sha256, customers waited months to get their hands on their miners while these crooks were mining with the hardware and eventually handed it over when it was near impossible to roi.
Its the same with Bitmain, they just covering their tracks more elegantly, anybody that believes otherwise are completely oblivious to these heinous activities.