Bitmain embezzled customers’ miners to block SegWit

[h4x3rotab]

I'm posting this on behalf of the original author vexz in 8btc.com. Link to his profile: http://8btc.com/space-uid-10012.html.

The original post was written in Chinese. I translated it to English with the help of Letkor Nigusta (@mrletkor).

----


I'm a Bitcoiner from China. I have come here to bitcointalk.org to inform you the reason of the abnormal LTC hashrate fluctuation.

As we all know, LTC is trying to activate SegWit. However, the progress has now been blocked by LTC1BTC.com and LRC.top as they increased their hashrate by a huge amount on Apr.17. So we guessed that Bitmain had a batch of new assembled LTC miners that will be sold to customers soon, and these miners were causing the hashrate abnormality. Actually, the hashrate of Antpool jumped from 100GH/s to 400GH/s and it suddenly jumped back to normal. To make it less obvious, more than 700GH/s hashrate was moved from Antpool to LTC1BTC.com and then to LTC.top later. This is no accident, we all know that the owner of Antpool, Jihan Wu, and the owner of LTC1BTC & LTC.top, Zhuoer Jiang, are both well known BU supporters. They are closely related with each other and are backed by Bitmain. It's an open secret that these two guys conspired together to make this happen.

Screenshot: the abnormal hashrate jump in Antpool.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9p41UoUQAA0k1c.jpg:large

Screenshot: the hashrate increase in LTC1BTC.com and LTC.top.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9r8dOEXkAAQ534.jpg:large

On Apr. 18, lots of Bitcoiners in 8btc.com, a famous Bitcoin forum in China, were angry about this scandal and denounced Wu and Jiang. Later on the same day, Charlie Lee was infuriated by Wu & Jiang's plan to block SegWit on LTC and left their internal WeChat group.

While we were guessing on where the huge hashrate came from, we found that the things are going to be really worse than what we expected. Today, Bitmain's sales sent a notification to customers who pre-ordered their LTC miner Antminer L3+. They claimed that there will be a shipping delay of the miners due to firmware bugs. The delivery date is still TBD. Customers can choose to cancel the order, or get daily compensation before the shipment.

In other words, Bitmain is stealing over 700GH/s hashrate from those who bought the miners.

Screenshot: Bitmain's notification of delaying miner shipment.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9r-TBMXsAE3bbA.jpg:large

This scandal has an extremely bad influence in China Bitcoin community. What I want to say is that most Chinese Bitcoiners support rational Bitcoin upgrades like SegWit and are against BU. But indeed, there are some interest groups supporting BU for their own benefits. There's no way to speak rationally to the evil guys like Wu and Jiang. The only way to make Bitcoin greater, is to completely defeat them.

[-ck]

Meh, not remotely surprised. I also happen to know that some pool owners are being coerced into mining BU under fear of not getting hardware from bitmain, along with financial incentives being offered to otherwise neutral poools.

The only way to make Bitcoin greater, is to completely defeat them.

How does one actually do that? We don't happen to be sitting on a truckload of money and asic manufacturing plants to overwhelm them; they are the producers of the bulk of the bitcoin and litecoin hashrate. This is why people are talking about a proof of work change, which I think would be terrible for bitcoin at this stage myself. The destabilisation of the network to move from being dependent on hundreds of millions of dollars of ASIC hardware investment to amateur hardware in the home would be a huge hit to the security and stability of the blockchain. There is no real thing as an "asic proof" algorithm; with enough financial incentive anything can be made into an asic - and bitcoin has the incentive there. A proof of work change will just make us go through the process of switching from cpu to gpu to fpga to asic all over again.

[Sadlife]

Surely these greedy bastards will surely do anything underhanded just to gain the miners their support so they can implement their centralized Blockchain whch is BU.
Can't we do anything to stop it? Are we just merely spectators ?

[kiklo]

I'm posting this on behalf of the original author vexz in 8btc.com. Link to his profile: http://8btc.com/space-uid-10012.html.

The original post is written in Chinese. I translated it to English with the help of Letkor Nigusta (@mrletkor).

----


I'm a Bitcoiner from China. I have come here to bitcointalk.org to inform you the reason of the abnormal LTC hashrate fluctuation.

As we all know, LTC is trying to activate SegWit. However, the progress has now been blocked by LTC1BTC.com and LRC.top as they increased their hashrate by a huge amount on Apr.17. So we guessed that Bitmain had a batch of new assembled LTC miners that will be sold to customers soon, and these miners were causing the hashrate abnormality. Actually, the hashrate of Antpool jumped from 100GH/s to 400GH/s and it suddenly jumped back to normal. To make it less obvious, more than 700GH/s hashrate was moved from Antpool to LTC1BTC.com and then to LTC.top later. This is no accident, we all know that the owner of Antpool, Jihan Wu, and the owner of LTC1BTC & LTC.top, Zhuoer Jiang, are both well known BU supporters. They are closely related with each other and are backed by Bitmain. It's an open secret that these two guys conspired together to make this happen.

On Apr. 18, lots of Bitcoiners in 8btc.com, a famous Bitcoin forum in China, were angry about this scandal and denounced Wu and Jiang. Later on the same day, Charlie Lee was infuriated by Wu & Jiang's plan to block SegWit on LTC and left their internal WeChat group.

While we were guessing on where the huge hashrate came from, we found that the things are going to be really worse than what we expected. Today, Bitmain's sales sent a notification to customers who pre-ordered their LTC miner Antminer L3+. They claimed that there will be a shipping delay of the miners due to firmware bugs. The delivery date is still TBD. Customers can choose to cancel the order, or get daily compensation before the shipment.

In other words, Bitmain is stealing over 700GH/s hashrate from those who bought the miners.


This scandal has an extremely bad influence in China Bitcoin community. What I want to say is that most Chinese Bitcoiners support rational Bitcoin upgrades like SegWit and are against BU. But indeed, there are some interest groups supporting BU for their own benefits. There's no way to speak rationally to the evil guys like Wu and Jiang. The only way to make Bitcoin greater, is to completely defeat them.

No offense but you are full of shit,  If chinese Miners were dumb enough to adopt segwit,  segwit would have already been activated.
Chinese do control ~68% of mining capacity, and btc core would have changed the soft fork to only need 60% in a heartbeat.

It is not segwit , it is deadwit, and rightfully so.    


 

[franky1]

or

sit down with them and ask them how about re-code segwit to still do the same thing. but in a way that makes the community as a whole happy.
(1 merkle full node+pool consensus with segwit and dynamic blocks and limited txsigops and compact blocks and schnorr and anything else)

..

get passed the 30 second utopian sales pitch of the dreamland of 2 merkle segwit requiring tier networks, feature opt-ins(their word twisting way of hiding the non 100% guarantee of network benefit). and instead look at the flaws and ask yourself is there another way to code it and do the other things the community want to make everyone happy. rather than a half baked gesture.

why bomb/get rid of a huge industry based on a few months old code, which functionally is not a 100% promise of feature and only temporarily kicking the can down the road. when a proper full community happy version could have been done.

afterall.. UASF is suggesting to continue the 2merkle segwit kick the can down the road until late 2018(3 years of delays/waiting)...
so isnt it time to say just get on with a proper job version as plan B instead of sitting on hands and shouting bomb them until 2019

[d.kevin29]

What a coincidence, considering the week this "firmware issue" happened! I am seriously hoping his business will fail soon.

Although the Segwit adoption percentage went below the treshold, it has been holding very well until now and will probably continue to. What I'm wondering is how can we do something to take action against him. From what I read, there is pronably no hope China will do something about him, and he might even have connections to the government itself.

This is pure manipulation - he's using our power (speaking in general - I didn't buy anything from BitMain) and, correct me if I'm wrong, his customers will have to pay ELECTRICAL FEES. It's like you didn't receive a dish in time at a restaurant and you have to pay some extra cash for that happening.

What he is trying to do will not work for too long. I cannot wait for everyone to wake up against him and successfully finish all this Segwit stuff. He's literally profiting off people's money. And I won't be surprised if these miners will be available a few days after the Segwit's activation period.

[kiklo]

Surely these greedy bastards will surely do anything underhanded just to gain the miners their support so they can implement their centralized Blockchain whch is BU.
Can't we do anything to stop it? Are we just merely spectators ?

Nope , you sir  are a spectator , unless you are hiding a few warehouses full of ASICS.

Your options are:

1. Call China Daddy
2. Call BTC Core Daddy, and hope they switch to a different PoW
3. Move to an Alt coin, pick one with proof of stake if you want to be your own man.
4. Or move back to the old crappy financial system, Gold Silver & Stocks


 

[judgelight]

Surely these greedy bastards will surely do anything underhanded just to gain the miners their support so they can implement their centralized Blockchain whch is BU.
Can't we do anything to stop it? Are we just merely spectators ?

We need to completely defeat them.
We need let everybody know how ugly they are!
And take this matter to wikipedia, to BBC, to TIMES.

[gentlemand]

This type of behaviour can't be maintained forever. If you're an overt and flagrant prick then eventually every single person in the space will turn on you. It's only a matter of time.

[franky1]

all of you blockstreamists are forgetting one small thing.

blockstream can code things differently to a way the whole community would be happy.
but no.. its a blockstream short cut or kill every opposer in the community and blame the opposers

[judgelight]

all of you blockstreamists are forgetting one small thing.

blockstream can code things differently to a way the whole community would be happy.
but no.. its a blockstream short cut or kill every opposer in the community and blame the opposers

if blockstream can kill antpool,ltc1btc,btc.top .
We all support for it.

[pedrog]

This kind of stuff should be illegal, aren't authorities in China cracking down on crypto currency manipulation?

This guy is not only manipulating market for his own selfish reasons, but also being dishonest with his costumers.

Aren't Chinese costumers and users making formal complaints with proper authorities about this guy actions?

[franky1]

all of you blockstreamists are forgetting one small thing.

blockstream can code things differently to a way the whole community would be happy.
but no.. its a blockstream short cut or kill every opposer in the community and blame the opposers

if blockstream can kill antpool,ltc1btc,btc.top .
We all support for it.

lol keep fingers in your ear and lips on blockstreams cheeks..

or

think about bitcoin as a diverse decentralised network and ask yourself, 'hmm maybe blockstream could do something better'

if your first reaction is.. no just bomb them until the end of 2018. then please bite your lip
if your first reaction is.. find out what would work for the whole community to unite around that wont have wasted 3 years for a soft half gesture. then your on the right path.

segwits half gesture is only 6 months publicly released and not even ready for users to use.. the keypairs that are needed for the 'opt-in' features blockstream have previous called 'fixes' are still not finalised.

yep. the fixes are no longer network wide promises but admitted as 'opt-in features'
are not even ready

yet people still think blockstreams current half baked code is the only route and should be followed through, even if objected/abstained this year, to continue pushing it until 2019.

it just make logical sense for blockstream to do a plan B of something that the community can unite around

[franky1]

This kind of stuff should be illegal, aren't authorities in China cracking down on crypto currency manipulation?

This guy is not only manipulating market for his own selfish reasons, but also being dishonest with his costumers.

Aren't Chinese costumers and users making formal complaints with proper authorities about this guy actions?

1. proof or racial speculation starting from reddit?
2. what if the proof is a firmware update to remove asicboost facility so that bitmains own customers cant asicboost. (which was last weeks desire that bitmain should do something to not be able to asic boost)
3. what if the proof is a firmware update to ensure all asics sold had asicboost facility so everyone, even those outside of bitmain had the efficiency gain

[pedrog]

This kind of stuff should be illegal, aren't authorities in China cracking down on crypto currency manipulation?

This guy is not only manipulating market for his own selfish reasons, but also being dishonest with his costumers.

Aren't Chinese costumers and users making formal complaints with proper authorities about this guy actions?

1. proof or racial speculation starting from reddit?
2. what if the proof is a firmware update to remove asicboost facility so that bitmains own customers cant asicboost. (which was last weeks desire that bitmain should do something to not be able to asic boost)
3. what if the proof is a firmware update to ensure all asics sold had asicboost facility so everyone, even those outside of bitmain had the efficiency gain

C'mon, don't be naive, all this hashpower didn't came from thin air, they are using miners who they already sold and should be shipping to costumers to block SegWit in litecoin.

[cryptoanarchist]

Ha Ha, more sour grapes from AXA/Bilderberg funded Blockstream.

[mindrust]

Enough already, Just change PoW and let them eat shit. I wish it was that easy though because those fucking parasites will find another way to exploit the new PoW.

It is very clear that we need a competitor to Bitmain or else we are doomed and the Core devs seem like they don't care. Bitmain is a monopoly now and what they want is to take over bitcoin and make it a Chinese centralized currency.

The solution is simple: We kill the Bitmain.

https://youtu.be/tATf94uDH8Q?t=110

[judgelight]

Enough already, Just change PoW and let them eat shit. I wish it was that easy though because those fucking parasites will find another way to exploit the new PoW.

It is very clear that we need a competitor to Bitmain or else we are doomed and the Core devs seem like they don't care. Bitmain is a monopoly now and what they want is to take over bitcoin and make it a Chinese centralized currency.

The solution is simple: We kill the Bitmain.

https://youtu.be/tATf94uDH8Q?t=110

We need kill the Bitmain!

[GreenBits]

This kind of stuff should be illegal, aren't authorities in China cracking down on crypto currency manipulation?

This guy is not only manipulating market for his own selfish reasons, but also being dishonest with his costumers.

Aren't Chinese costumers and users making formal complaints with proper authorities about this guy actions?

Unfortunately, it isn't. Guys on here are always crying for light/no regulation on crypto; this is my primary argument against that. This is a legal grey area, quasi fraud but easy to argue legally that he was unaware. Also, depends on the wording of the contract, ESP in cloud mining situations. Basically, it would take the right lawyer and a dedicated class to see this the whole way out. He will get away with this, but his company will eat this reputation hit forever. This was the United Airlines of BTC, ATM.