So I had a videochat with Jihan Wu

[local_miner]

@zooko

Last Thursday (5/24) I finally managed to sync up with Jihan Wu for a videochat. We had spoken to each other briefly at LABitConf in Buenos Aires about a year and a half ago, right after Zcash launched, but we hadn’t communicated since then as far as I remember.

@zooko

I said that a large fraction — maybe 60% or so — of the XMR hashrate had disappeared from XMR and switched to XMO, and asked if that was Bitmain’s mining operation. He immediately replied “No, it was not us. We released the Monero miner right after the samples.”

Thank you for clear that up. I’m sure some of people wouldn’t believe that though.

@zooko

He said “We have never been doing a stealth mining strategy.” He said that the reason they decided not to use stealth mining is that they wouldn’t be able to keep it secret. He said they have 2000 employees, and a large-scale mining operation would require hundreds of employees to be involved in the whole process.

Probably it’s easy to find out Who’s mining What and How much they are mining.

@zooko

I asked “Are you mining Zcash right now?”. He replied “Uh, are we mining Zcash right now? Yes, I think so because there is already some sample miner produced and we have also opened the service for mining Zcash in Antpool right now, and we have a few miners right now in testing. And right now in I think one week or two our first batch of ASIC miners will be shipped.”

Nice of him to give us ETA.

@zooko

This seems like a big step in the right direction! Transparency about orders and shipments of the Z9 aren’t one of the things that I asked for, but I definitely would have if I had thought about it — it is very central to the burning questions about whether Bitmain — or anyone — is running stealth ASIC mining, whether they mine at scale with their own equipment prior to offering it to customers, how much of the total Zcash hashpower is ASIC vs. GPU, how concentrated the ownership of the ASIC miners is, etc.

Another nice gesture.