究竟是13年，还是2013年？

本人原来是巴比特的论坛站长，2014年到杭州加入了时戳，后来18年离职了。
实话说巴比特是一个新人接触币圈特别友好的平台。因为只做资讯和内容，不涉及钱。
说出来你可能不信，公司最困难的不是17年94之后，而是2015年。
2013年第一轮获得光速创投200万，然后欢平和另外一个创始人拍脑袋，花了100万左右买了币。随后2013年底我接到电话，被邀请加入杭州的初创公司。
我在2014年8月入职。
一开始当时公司在浙大旁边租了两个小公寓，而且不是相连的，中间隔了一两间。两个房间里大概是内容组，负责资讯和论坛，另一个是技术组，负责网站维护和开发区块链浏览器。
天气热的时候，时不时就会招呼大家一起吃西瓜什么的。氛围很好，大家也很轻松。
沉重的时刻发生在2015年，天使轮剩下的钱烧了一年已经花的差不多了。
春节放假前，长铗召集我们开会，说公司账上没钱了，内容组的工资延缓一个月发放，技术组的继续发放。
会后大家相视无语，但前途浓雾笼罩，看不清楚。
我的感觉还好，因为我心里还是对币的大方向很乐观的。东方不亮，西方还是很亮的。
当时泡bitcointalk，搬砖也一直没停。
长铗后来卖币发工资的传言大概率是真的，因为我们欠放的工资大概半年之后就补上了。
后来据长铗说：我们用最初的200万融资一直撑到了2016年9月。

Useful tips, thanks for sharing.

My best guess is that lots of traditional internet companies in China have established research team for blockchain. And they usually start with bitcoin.

Since the ICO ban last September, proxies that claims to have the capability to enter pre-sale or private sale of various ICO projects have emerged in the community. The most recent case exposed is that scammers disappeared with around 140,000 ETH. The number was not verified or could be purposely exaggerated to attract attention. However, the tricks performed by scammers is neither sophisticated nor convincing. It’s hard to believe how gullible that the victims are.
On 2 March, OKEX released the note of listing Refereum (RFR), which reminded the victims of their unclaimed tokens, which, they believed, should be issued to their wallet prior to listing on exchanges. So the investors began question their proxies, only to know that their tokens have not been issued and issuance of tokens depends on “their location”.


http://news.8btc.com/ico-proxy-allegedly-scammed-140000-eth-in-china-rfr-involved

12 March, Beijing- Xiaomi is allegedly testing its crypto game, jiamitu or crypto rabbit.  But the link to the project was soon withdrawn and inaccessible at the moment for reasons unknown. The crypto rabbit is nothing more than a marketing campaign so far. But the positive aspect is that it will certainly bring more blockchain awareness to the public.

Not long ago, Xiaomi was recruiting senior blockchain developers based in Beijing, offering 30k to 60k yuan a month. It is an average offer and driven by large domestic demand for such talents. The main attraction is the post is based in Xiaomi’s headquarter in Beijing.
The leaked screenshot below reveals that the crypto rabbit is not much different from other crypto pet games.



Referral among wechat friends



User agreement of Crypto Rabbit

The link of jiamitu.mi.com was withdrawn and inaccessible at the moment. It seems that the project isn’t ready for public test.
Xunlei(NASDAQ: XNET) is the first well-known IT company in China that embrace blockchain in 2017. The company release WankeCoin, which was later rebranded as Lianke. Nevertheless, the project was still singled out as a “disguised ICO”. In order to meet with regulatory requirements, wallet transfer of the token (once a week before) was totally frozen. Basically, the tokens were crippled. Then many similar attempts have been made but none allows token transfer between users, strictly following the “one-way” rule, which means user could only trade tokens with the project owner for non-fiats.

It’s not surprised that Xiaomi eyes on deploying blockchain within its ecosystem. Zhou Maohua, Director of Data Business of Xiaomi, delivered a speech titled: Blockchain-based coordination of marketing data” in 2017 ECI Festival on 27 December, 2017. He demonstrated the feature and application scenario with Xiaomi’s marketing blockchain. He said:

“The vision of Xiaomi’s marketing blockchain is to maximize the efficiency and value of marketing data through coordination while protecting user’s privacy and data security.”

“As a company with great abundance of data source, Xiaomi always attach great importance to user’s privacy and data security. We want to promote cross-industrial data coordination with blockchain and crypto technologies, pushing the flow of data, providing values to the marketing business while realizing the maximum security of data assets.”

Online marketing has been facing challenges like user privacy, data synchronization, brand security, advertisement anti-fraud, all of which could be connected with the absence of “trust”. Blockchain offers a solution of trust and will play an important role in marketing business.

Zhou said that Xiaomi had applied for 9 blockchain patents and become a member of Hyperledger.

Xiaomi was founded in 2012 as telecommunication provider. In 2017, Xiaomi sold 98mil mobile phones in China, ranking #4 among domestic suppliers. There is speculation that Xiaomi might add mining feature on its cell phone.


http://news.8btc.com/xiaomi-may-roll-out-jiamitu-crypto-rabbit

The story below is written by Liu Jing from AI Caijing. Full text translation may help you find some pieces of the puzzle. His last and only public presentation happened in 2014, when the Bitfountain company was baffled by exploding ASIC chips. He went missing in February 2015, which was first disclosed by a bitfountain shareholder on 8btc forum.  There are many speculations from then on.

Searching

Three years after Friedcat(FC) missing, we visited his mining farm in Huai’an City (Anhui Province), attempting to solve the biggest mystery in the bitcoin circle. It is an empty factory, located in Huaian Economic Development Zone. Aside from car tracks and footprints, only three two-storey plants are standing silently, like three monsters.
Stories about Friedcat never ends. Judging from his resume, he looks like a genius in soap play. He was admitted to the teenage class of University of Technology and Science of China when he was 15 years old, ranking 11th in the whole country. After that his career seems to be taking off, he went to Yale for Ph.D. in Computer Systems.
Friedcat’s real name is Jiang Xinyu. His random and scarce public presentation was in line with his anarchist fashion. But in the cryptocurrency community, he is more than famous. He was honored as the early prophet, evangelist of bitcoin. In China, he was the first person who brought mining ASICs to the world.
During the high season, there was a waiting list for people who wants to meet him. If he were to continue his career in the crypto world, he would be the owner of unbelievable wealth, the master of legends. But the story ended abruptly on January 25 of that year.
In the year that FC went missing, Huai’an police cracked down a mafia gang. Huaian’s population density is slightly below the medium level in Jiangsu Province. Non-local businessmen joined together by regions and form a dozens of business alliance.
The food company that worked with FC was a family business from Fujian. The stage 1 mining farm of FC was located in the one of the company’s workshop, which was surrounded by dense clothing factory, machinery factory, packing plant. After FC disappeared, colleagues went to site for inquiry but eventually stopped at gate and failed to get in.

http://news.8btc.com/tracking-friedcat-after-his-missing-in-2015

360 Security release a report about mining trojans on Android platform. Among the 5 cryptocurrencies being targeted, Monero is the most popular one.

Summary
Mobile mining Trojan is the application that uses mobile phone computing power to obtain cryptocurrency for the attacker without the user's consent.
Cryptocurrency is an anonymous virtual currency. Due to its censorship-proof, semi-anonymous and intractable features, cryptocurrencies are often used for illegal transactions, or tools to conceal criminal conducts.
In March 2014 the first Android mining trojan was detected. From 2013 to January 2018, 360 Labs captured a total of more than 1,200 mining Trojan based on Android, around 400 of which emerge in January 2018 alone.

In terms of disguised forms, tools (20%), downloader (17%), wallpaper (14%) are the most commonly seen applications.
In terms of distribution sources, a dozen were found in Google play and more than 300 are distributed through third-party sites with a total download count of 2.6 million.

According to Adguard, in nearly 1 month in 2017, around 220 out of the top 100,000 Alexa-ranking websites failed to remind users that their computers were exploited for mining when users open their homepages. The number of affected users the number is up to 500 million. Most of them are video portals, file sharing sites, pornographic websites, news media and other websites that users tend to stay longer.

Five cryptocurrencies are mined on Android Trojan applications: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, Casinocoin and Monero.
Pool-mining are mostly adopted on Android Trojan rather than solo mining. Most android Trojan adopt open source pool-mining code or browser-based JavaScript.

Techniques include detecting device power, wake-up status, charge status, setting invisible pages and fake app downloader.
Profit model shifts from advertising to mining. Monroe become the preferred cryptocurrency and the target of the attack shift from attacking wallet to mining through android trojan.
PC platform already has counter measures while mobile platform cannot defend trojan comprehensively due to authority control.

Mobile platform mining is restricted by battery capacity and processor capacity. But cryptocurrencies are rapidly growing, new cryptos and values are increasing and mining eventually become profitable.
Such new profit model is still in its infancy, which requires more regulation to prevent it from being exploited.

http://news.8btc.com/android-mining-trojans-report-monero-mostly-favored

According to Technews, Bitmain is about to release the Ethereum ASIC miner F3 in Q2 or Q3 2018.

“Bitmain is about to release F3, the ethereum ASIC miner. It’s reported that every miner is mounted with 3 mainboards. On each mainboard there are 6 ASIC processors, each of which has 32 1GB DDR3 memory. Therefore, one unit of F3 miner contains 72 Gigabyte DRAM memory.”

I have doubts on the math of the report because the numbers doesn’t add up.But 72G DRAM seems reasonable and already outperforms most of the GPU-based mining rigs in the market now.
The bottleneck of Bitmain’s mass production is supply of Dram memory, which explains why Bitmain is frequent visiting storage supplier in Taiwan. The demand of Bitmain is around 3,000 pieces of 12 inch wafers per month. Ethereum ASIC chips will enter mass production stage in February 2018 by TSMC’s 28nm process. The F3 miner is expected to hit the market in Q2 or Q3 2018.
The ethhash power algorithm of Ethereum is designed to be ASIC proof. But just like Charlie Lee put it:

“I think ASICs are inevitable when the coin is valuable. But that’s not a bad thing.”

20180212132759

Bitmain has developed ASIC miner for Litecoin and Siacoin.


http://news.8btc.com/bitmain-to-release-ethereum-asic-miner-f3-with-72gb-ddr3-dram-in-q2

Partnering with samsung, ebang could be a heavyweight rival to Bitmain.

According to a report by Caixin, Lou Jiwei, former minister of Finance, said that systematic financial crisis is highly probably in China. The prevention and control of financial risks are listed as the top three major tasks in the overall success of building a moderately prosperous society in the next three years. Lou Jiwei, chairman of the National Social Security Fund, believes that the probability of systemic financial risk in China is high. There is very little room for error in preventing and resolving financial risks.
http://news.8btc.com/lou-jiwei-systematic-financial-crisis-is-highly-probable-in-china

Jiang Zhuoer retweeted an article titled:What kind of decentralization that we want? with his opinions. Written by Ying Yuan, the article claims that mining industry has no barrier other than funds while the coding side is under strict control by a few therefore mining is an open market, whose decentralization is what users desire. Below are some excerpts and Jiang’s comment.
http://news.8btc.com/what-kind-of-decentralization-that-we-need

It's necessary for compliance.

PoW will eventually dominates. How cheap is the electricity in Venezuela?

Been to Kenya once, power outage is quite often. Bribing officials might cost you dearly.

Japan is not a good choice. Quote from twitter: Japan is not a good location for mining. High electricity prices, high taxes and so on.

I don't think any miners could operate at 60-70 c degree.

Good point. China has its advantages but the mining operators are preparing for the worst.

I have been to Kenya last year. Unannounced power outage is a common thing. Maybe South Africa is better? or any other African countries?

Problem with African countries is the unstable political situation. Don't know much about India.