ASIC mining has always been a den of thieves, scam-artists, conmen and bullshitters.

God knows how many people have been ripped off and turned off bitcoin by collapsed, scammy or outright thieving cheats surrounding ASIC mining schemes. Jihan is just the latest King Rat shithead that is at the top of the dung-heap for now ... the sooner people get used to the idea that ASIC miner producers and mining farms are generally a bunch of scumbag fucktards that have never given two shits about bitcoin the sooner we can move ahead on a sound philosophical basis.

Any devs who try to make nice with the miners is setting themselves up for fail ... the miners need to be treated like shit (mostly because they are a bunch of shit) or else they will ruin it.

Even monkeys and babies know to avoid unhelpful, anti-social individuals.

... and the truth how all the BU useful idiots have been used and pwnd badly for a covert agenda to profit off their stupidity.

Why is China dragging the chain down so badly these days? It's like one crap fight after another over there in bitcoin world.

more than most realised ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/63otrp/gregory_maxwell_major_asic_manufacturer_is/

Jihan might be choking on his breakfast reading in china about now ...

their 'spam-the-blockchain' effort is running short of funding so may have to be putting in for a new grant application, also the FUD sock-puppet 'free-shit-army' rabble rousing aka astroturfing public relations efforts is needing new money to keep the keyboard warriors funded.

Meanwhile their shorts are getting #r3kt. Keeping bitcoin down is an expensive proposition ... now if those BU idiot supporters could just pull their heads out of their backsides and see which way is up for a few minutes, we'd be able to expand capacity and get back to working on a long term fix for algoritmically-controlled blocksize and free market fee operations for the only remaining planned bitcoin HF.

As long as the banksters can keep a lid on bitcoin price via shorting, stimulating infighting and division (BU support) and meanwhile pump up Ripple and Ethereum they are winning.

The useful idiots over at BU have convinced themselves they are 'fighting the good fight' by blocking progress and encouraging bitcoiners to defect to etheruem to express their 'disapproval' at some unspecified bogeymen like 1MB4EVA. Bankster supporters are luvving it and jump on to fuel the fires of hate, suspicion, FUD and division at every opportunity, giving the useful idiots the moral and 'popular' support through a sock-puppetry crusade. See adam's cartoons for example, these are modern political satire masquerading as comic fun memes but add exactly zero to technical solutions for bitcoin tx capacity increases.

Ethereum is the scam coin that the banksters control.

Good luck laying down with the devil's dogs.

BU is a hare-brained piece of shit that doesn't even stand up to a simple first principles analysis. The code implementation is a disaster but in reality that's the least of its problems. The charlatans who wrote the "white papers" backing up it's foundations are a prize bunch of vindictive assholes. The drivel they wrote is a waste of time even reading, I'm just sorry I'll never get that time back .

Anyone pumping, supporting or god-forbid showing mining support for BU is just simply fucking not worth listening to. Sorry I know it's a favourite of yours but admit it you're mostly a drunken stoner nowadays ... you wouldn't know a good idea if it pissed in your ear.

Not looking good I'm sad to say. After this giant crap the egoists, johnny-come-latelys and sociopaths have taken on bitcoin all we can really do is wait for them to officially rage-quit and flounce off in Hearn's taffeta flowing wake .... hunker down, settle in for the long game I guess.

china just played their last card ... and it was a big fat bluff.

Stick a fork in them, they're done.

BIP 148

.... and out popped the weasel.

I am getting some deja vu to that time of a blockade at $450 that seemed impenetrable .... and then KnCMiner went tits up and up up and away we went. A dead miner in the market can be a really big drag ... I just wish they would hurry up and drag the corpses away, but if it really is commies in china propping up a dead miner that might go on for quite some time. They've been building empty cities over there sing loans from zombie banks for 15 years .... so who knows wtf they are thinking.

Excellent move, I thought something like this might happen since Winklevoos/BATS allowed it to go all the way to forcing an official refusal. I still do not think an ETF is a good idea but getting some court rulings on law enforcement shennaigans is always good to keep the rats honest.

Do any of Antpool's contributing miners have contingency plans for their businesses in the event of Antpool's insolvency?

The miners are natural shorts since they are always selling.  Exactly the same thing happens in any of the durable commodity markets, particularly precious metals, where the miners have sophisticated hedging strategies with complex derivatives plays.  Antminer e.g., can probably maximise it's profits from sales by going short on leverage at medium term tops and then dumping into the market (maybe with some associated FUD spreading).  Basically they are front-running themselves (maybe with some added insider trading climbing on) since they have knowledge of the large sales they are about to be performing as part of their regular business. Eventually their profitability and business model calculations incorporate these derivative bets as it enables them to become hyper-competitive and beat out all rivals to a position of absolute monopoly, since they are centralising all the risks of market moves upon themselves with these outsized derivative bets.

Bitcoin security model is predicated on honest miners in a constant state of untrusting competition (Byzantines General problem).  Anybody advocating or encouraging for collusion amongst the miners is inviting a shitshow since they are going directly against the underlying incentive structure that secures bitcoin's scarcity.  If a majority of bitcoin miners are colluding to enrich themselves at the expense of the majority of bitcoin users then they are ruining the primary source of value that their businesses are founded upon.  I think the colloquial term is "crapping in their feed bowls".

The bitcoin markets have had a faintly bad smelling odour emanating from the mining scene in China for quite some time. I think the full blown aggressive stance now exhibited surrounding the coup (power-grab, w/e) attempt using the 'big block' wedge issue has revealed to all how deep the problem may have already become. Maybe a large short position was taken out around $950 in anticipation of sales that then got unexpectedly bought up by a raging bull market? Now a very large Chinese miner and fabricator is actually under water to the extent that they are very desperate for a much lower price for its business survival? Such a desperate actor will do anything, including threatening to fork bitcoin or otherwise nuclear options, since it is going bankrupt anyway. Maybe it is as simple as someone who overly centralised power, and therefore risk, around themselves miscalculated with derivatives bets and now wants a bailout, again?

lulz ... Unloaded on ver, roger is under such a deep pile he doesn't know in which direction to begin digging.

You talk calmly like you know what you are talking about and you know what will happen. You don't and you can't.

It gets way more complicated and messy than that ... probably not many remember the GPU hashrate war that Namecoin and Bitcoin got locked into in late 2011, it was finally resolved by the release of a merge-mining client hardfork for namecoin (for the good of cryptocurrencies generally). The hashpower will jump from chain to chain depending upon which one has the best instantaneous profitability, there will be zero loyalty at all. All these advocating for a hard fork are clueless, they have no idea how mercenary the miners are due to the amounts of money they are outlaying continuously on electricity and other costs. The profitability calculations includes chain difficulty and price. So every difficulty retargeting on either chain will become an unstable lurch of hashpower from one chain to the other, with all kinds of pricing games and volatility on the markets associated to the lead up to it ... it will be ongoing and crazy volatility like out of chopstick's nightmares, day trading will become like a crazy feeding frenzy in a shark tank. If Ver is really crying about usability he would be running very, very fast away from a contentious hardfork to two competing hashpower chains, because it will definitely kill usability for months, maybe years.

Throw in the facts that you make about BU's crazy approach to replay attacks, orphaning and generally really, really unsafe extensions to chain-building (emergent consensus wtf?) then there is going to be chances whole fortunes will be wiped out if your coins move onto the wrong chain that suddenly disappears due to some crazy prize spike, an unfortunate timing for a difficulty retargeting and an attack on BUg, e.g. (reorgs).

Good luck, chumps. Enough of yous have seemed to welcome in Ver and Jihadi's version of hell to make this the new future ... welcome to the party you stupid fucking idiots, let's go back to blockchain grade school.  

That's the exact opposite tune you guys are singing on user fees? Hypocrite much?

Pretty sure that all recent namecoin releases are fully-segwit enabled. It is just a matter of time before the miners switch over I suppose.

... still haven't bought back in yet roach? Those sold-out-bull sour grapes rants are starting to sound really, really droney and whiney, HTF could you miss that dump to $950 you moron?