Bitmain now requiring KYC documentation to buy hardware

[not.you]

Anyone know the reasoning behind this?  Buying and selling hardware is hardly the same as what an exchange does.  I'm leery about giving them a copy of my passport.

[Baofeng]

Anyone know the reasoning behind this?  Buying and selling hardware is hardly the same as what an exchange does.  I'm leery about giving them a copy of my passport.

I don't know, I can only speculate that someone is putting "pressure" on them to require KYC before you can buy mining gear from them or just related to their IPO perhaps?

[BitMaxz]

This might be the reason why they are now asking for KYC documents and look at this twitter post https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status/1032642678444515329 just posted 5hrs ago.

[leowonderful]

I can only infer it's IPO related, really the only thing that comes to my mind. I don't want to send them my passport either (though it's a Chinese ID) as of yet, and I hate seeing KYC popping up everywhere in crypto.

Here's the email that was sent to me in code, for better formatting and reading:

Code:

Dear customer,

Thank you for choosing Bitmain!

Our official website https://www.bitmain.com/ will launch the Real-name Authentication on 24/08/2018 00:00 (UTC/GMT +8). Kindly complete the authentication as soon as possible, otherwise purchasing may be restricted/blocked.

1.   Due to regulatory compliance requirements, some personal information including name, ID type, ID number, address information will be collected for the purposes of identity authentication. Kindly log in to our official website: https://www.bitmain.com/ -User Center for real-name authentication. The information collected is confidential and will not be disclosed by us to unauthorized third parties without your consent, except when required for the purposes of meeting government, legal or other regulatory requirements.

2.   Customers are kindly reminded to provide accurate and truthful information for authentication and not to provide data which is false, or which belongs to third parties. Authentication information may not be modified after the authentication is confirmed.

3.   The authentication process will be carried out immediately upon receipt of said personal information, and we will notify you of the authentication result by mail. Our purchase limit structure for the authentication is as follows:

Visit Tweet linked above for the chart. Difficult to format here.

During the transition period（Aug 24th— Sep 24th）, customers who registered our official website before Aug 24th can purchase up to 1 million RMB from our domestic website and up to 150,000 US dollars from our English website；After Sep 24th, the purchase authority will be consistent with the above table based on the authentication results.

4.     Revocation of our authorization to collect your personal information is accepted. To do so, please email us at kyc@bitmain.com . Upon receipt of such revocation requests, we will no longer collect your information, and any personal information held by us will be deleted from our system in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. Please do note that should the revocation be done, you will not be able to purchase any more through https://www.bitmain.com/. Should you wish to purchase from us again in the future, you will need to go through the authentication process again.

Thank you for your kind attention and please do not hesitate to contact us in case of any clarifications required.

Best regards

Bitmain

[jackg]

Well, bye bitmain. I was going to try to buy from you, now I'll switch to other companies...

This might be the reason why they are now asking for KYC documents and look at this twitter post https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status/1032642678444515329 just posted 5hrs ago.

"Data protection by design and by default", means that business process that handle personal data must be designed and built with consideration of the principles and provide safeguards to protect data (for example, using pseudonymization or full anonymization where approriate), and use the highest-possible privacy settings by default, so that the data is not available publicly without explicit, informed consent, and cannot be used to identify a subject without additional information stored separately. No personal data may be processed unless it is done under a lawful basis specified by the regulation or unless the data controller or processor has received an unambiguous and individualized affirmation of consent from the data subject. The data subject has the right to revoke this consent at any time.

So show us your ID so we can protect your data and keep you able to use anonymous/psuedoanonymous services .
Huh?

[AdolfinWolf]

I'm actually surprised that they haven't done this earlier.

From a legal prosecutor's point of view, these miners could be used by individuals to launder massive amounts of money. (Just like a lot of Cloud mining contracts are.)
(Which would/could make them look pretty bad when holding an IPO.)

Note that i don't actually support this, nor do i support Bitmain after i further read up on them & their scandals.

For example, https://www.antbleed.com/

At worst, this firmware backdoor allows Bitmain to shut off a large section of the global hashrate (estimated to be at up to 70% of all mining equipment). It can also be used to directly target specific machines or customers. Standard inbound firewall rules will not protect against this because the Antminer makes outbound connections.

Even without Bitmain being malicious, the API is unauthenticated and would allow any MITM, DNS or domain hijack to shutdown Antminers globally. Additionally the domain in question DNS is hosted by Cloudflare making it trivially subjected to government orders and state control.

Well, bye bitmain. I was going to try to buy from you, now I'll switch to other companies...

Too bad that they almost have a monopoly...

~~~~
It's pretty funny that they're doing an IPO holding almost a billion $ of Bcash that they will never be able to sell due to limited liquidity.. Makes their reasoning for it pretty clear.

According to the Bitmain pre-IPO investor deck, they sold most of their #Bitcoin for #Bcash. At $900/BCH, they've bled half a billion in the last 3 months. If Bitcoin Core devs didn't disclose the Bcash vulnerability, it could've wiped a billion dollars off their balance sheets.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DkWzMSoUwAEn0W8.jpg

[shield132]

Hmm, I have no idea why do they need it. Ebay and amazon doesn't ask for any type of documents so why the hell does Bitmain need them?

Well, bye bitmain. I was going to try to buy from you, now I'll switch to other companies...

Can you tell me which companies are you going to buy from? I am looking for any company which sells bitmain products but can't trust any of them. The reason of this is Bitmain's bad support and shipping. Another option I can see is Baikal Miner. As far as I know they don't ask for KYC as for now.

[jackg]

Hmm, I have no idea why do they need it. Ebay and amazon doesn't ask for any type of documents so why the hell does Bitmain need them?

Well, bye bitmain. I was going to try to buy from you, now I'll switch to other companies...

Can you tell me which companies are you going to buy from? I am looking for any company which sells bitmain products but can't trust any of them. The reason of this is Bitmain's bad support and shipping. Another option I can see is Baikal Miner. As far as I know they don't ask for KYC as for now.

I was going to try to test the waters with ebay, otherwise, I'd turn to either bitfury or bw. Afaik BW are still producing miners and I could build something from the chips bitfury sell (or get part of a blockbox - they don't look like they've sold very well).

For example, https://www.antbleed.com/

Which has just opened up the market for custom software to be made to run on those miners...

[Kemarit]

So Bitmain shoot their own foot by enforcing KYC now. Perhaps its time for GMO of Japan to step up with their manufacturing of their own Bitcoin mining hardware. Might be related to IPO, but what if our/your data is compromised and leaked?

[leowonderful]

I like eBay, but you get charged a pretty hefty premium for buying ASICs most of the time compared to buying direct or from this forum, especially when the market's going upwards.

That brings me to another point- in Computer Hardware, it's possible to buy all kinds of computer parts and ASICs. I've done lots of deals there, and you'll be safe as long as you use a trusted escrow while purchasing miners. I often find great deals for miners and parts there, and the only potential downside is that most sellers only accept BTC or alts as payment.

[jackg]

I like eBay, but you get charged a pretty hefty premium for buying ASICs most of the time compared to buying direct or from this forum, especially when the market's going upwards.

That brings me to another point- in Computer Hardware, it's possible to buy all kinds of computer parts and ASICs. I've done lots of deals there, and you'll be safe as long as you use a trusted escrow while purchasing miners. I often find great deals for miners and parts there, and the only potential downside is that most sellers only accept BTC or alts as payment.

From what i've noticed, and I shouldn't be saying this because this is what I'm planning on doing, you can get miners pretty cheap if you buy them in multiples. 1 miner on it's own might sell for £550 in an auction, ten miners together recently sold on there for only £4100 which is a massive discount on what it could be and 10 antminter S9s for £4100 which were seven months old in my mind is a bargain.

You can afford for two miners to fail at that price.

There looks to be other miners like the dragonmint which look promising (providing they actually work as advertised)...

[leowonderful]

I like eBay, but you get charged a pretty hefty premium for buying ASICs most of the time compared to buying direct or from this forum, especially when the market's going upwards.

That brings me to another point- in Computer Hardware, it's possible to buy all kinds of computer parts and ASICs. I've done lots of deals there, and you'll be safe as long as you use a trusted escrow while purchasing miners. I often find great deals for miners and parts there, and the only potential downside is that most sellers only accept BTC or alts as payment.

From what i've noticed, and I shouldn't be saying this because this is what I'm planning on doing, you can get miners pretty cheap if you buy them in multiples. 1 miner on it's own might sell for £550 in an auction, ten miners together recently sold on there for only £4100 which is a massive discount on what it could be and 10 antminter S9s for £4100 which were seven months old in my mind is a bargain.

You can afford for two miners to fail at that price.

There looks to be other miners like the dragonmint which look promising (providing they actually work as advertised)...

I don't have the money to invest in multiple miners at once, but from the few bulk listings I've seen on eBay, your observations seem correct. Only thing is I don't see a lot of bulk sales on eBay for miners in the US, but that may just be me not filtering through single-miner and spam listings enough.

As for the Dragonmints (at least for the T1s), they seem reasonably reliable according to this thread, and MyRig's offering repair and servicing for them. I've used MyRig for repairs in the past, and they've always done their job quick, and I had around 99.7% uptime for the hosted S7 I had with them a while back that mined with Kano's pool. One downside with the T1s is that they only work on pools supporting Asicboost, such as Slushpool, Ckpool and Bitminter, so you're limited on the number of pools you can use. Other than that, they're a decent alternative to Bitmain miners.

[not.you]

Hmm, I have no idea why do they need it. Ebay and amazon doesn't ask for any type of documents so why the hell does Bitmain need them?

Well, bye bitmain. I was going to try to buy from you, now I'll switch to other companies...

Can you tell me which companies are you going to buy from? I am looking for any company which sells bitmain products but can't trust any of them. The reason of this is Bitmain's bad support and shipping. Another option I can see is Baikal Miner. As far as I know they don't ask for KYC as for now.

I haven't used them but there are resellers like blokforge.

[Patatas]

Anyone know the reasoning behind this?  Buying and selling hardware is hardly the same as what an exchange does.  I'm leery about giving them a copy of my passport.

Holy Shit! Seems like we will have an era where you need to submit your KYC to buy doughnuts using bitcoins! Are there any alternatives? I hope another Chinese company starts selling their 2nd copy miners on alibaba.com.

So Bitmain shoot their own foot by enforcing KYC now. Perhaps its time for GMO of Japan to step up with their manufacturing of their own Bitcoin mining hardware. Might be related to IPO, but what if our/your data is compromised and leaked?

You can't do anything, assuming it's the government that asked bitmain to do so and not their will to add the KYC policy.

[TryNinja]

More info about the new KYC requirement:



Source: https://twitter.com/CryptoApostle/status/1032649076112744448

[jackg]

Looks like people bad speculation about ASIC (such as https://getmonero.org/2018/02/11/PoW-change-and-key-reuse.html) might become true if other company also follow forced to use KYC requirement.
I wouldn't surprised if their new ASIC also have backdoor just like Antbleed.

Hopefully other mining manufacture will make ASIC with open-source firmware/OS without KYC requirement or Bitcoin (or any PoW based cryptocurrency which can be mined with ASIC) community will be forced to use ASIC "resistant" PoW algorithm.

Is there a list of identities from the people who work at Bitmain?
If not, they might just be using this as a way to make more money by selling peoples' identity infromation on...

I don't have the money to invest in multiple miners at once, but from the few bulk listings I've seen on eBay, your observations seem correct. Only thing is I don't see a lot of bulk sales on eBay for miners in the US, but that may just be me not filtering through single-miner and spam listings enough.

As for the Dragonmints (at least for the T1s), they seem reasonably reliable according to this thread, and MyRig's offering repair and servicing for them. I've used MyRig for repairs in the past, and they've always done their job quick, and I had around 99.7% uptime for the hosted S7 I had with them a while back that mined with Kano's pool. One downside with the T1s is that they only work on pools supporting Asicboost, such as Slushpool, Ckpool and Bitminter, so you're limited on the number of pools you can use. Other than that, they're a decent alternative to Bitmain miners.

Slush's pool should still earn you a similar amount to bitmain? (less blocks found but less hashing power also so you don't have to share as much).

I'm thinking of getting at least two and pointing one at a pool and one at my own node, other than installing the stratum server is there anything special I need to do do you think to support asicboost?

[hugeblack]

The SEC disapproved the ETF because "unidentifiable participants can influence the market". If someone manipulates the broad Bitcoin market, the SEC requires that they be identifiable.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons; there are a lot of investigations being done to make sure that prices not manipulated.

The acceptance of bitcoin as a currency means that the identity of the influential players must be disclosed.

In the future, all platforms will be subject to identity verification "KYC," and therefore the only way to get the Bitcoin anonymously is by mining.
Will be narrowing the purchase of mining tools and companies that make it so do not be surprised by such news.

[buwaytress]

OK, this is new to me. I can't see any non-commercial reason for requiring (as opposed to wanting) KYC procedures.

This might be the reason why they are now asking for KYC documents and look at this twitter post https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status/1032642678444515329 just posted 5hrs ago.

Would seem to be counter-intuitive. GDPR's actually resulted in de-risking from most companies and organisations. GDPR simply means companies requiring data to have to state a justification for it and then to prove that they have all the compliance measures in place. If cookie management is already a hard enough task for most websites to manage (I actually haven't seen a single crypto website already GDPR compliant), why would they want to go a step farther? All that data controller obligations with requesting KYC will kill them.

[jackg]

OK, this is new to me. I can't see any non-commercial reason for requiring (as opposed to wanting) KYC procedures.

This might be the reason why they are now asking for KYC documents and look at this twitter post https://twitter.com/WhalePanda/status/1032642678444515329 just posted 5hrs ago.

Would seem to be counter-intuitive. GDPR's actually resulted in de-risking from most companies and organisations. GDPR simply means companies requiring data to have to state a justification for it and then to prove that they have all the compliance measures in place. If cookie management is already a hard enough task for most websites to manage (I actually haven't seen a single crypto website already GDPR compliant), why would they want to go a step farther? All that data controller obligations with requesting KYC will kill them.

Localbitcoins recently appended a particularly MASSIVE gdpr compliant privacy policy as far as I can remember.

The funny thing is, my banks don't have a gdpr compliance, they're still happy sharing all of my information with everyone as much as they want to :-) (for credit scores and such)...

[Conasse]

Soon you will need a KYC verification to be allowed to breathe and you will have to pay a VAT