Bitcoin Brothers Aim To Disrupt Bitcoin Mining 

There Are New, More Powerful, Supercomputers

Coming to the forefront, after being in stealth mode for two years, the Bitcoin mining supercomputer manufacturer Bitcoin Brothers has been launching the hosted Bitcoin mining services powered by the company claiming better stronger machines making the mining of Bitcoin more efficient. Whereas the Bitcoin mining is the process by which transactions are approved in the Bitcoin ledger known as the blockchain where new bitcoins are minted. Therefore for every successful verification of a block of Bitcoin transactions, the miners are rewarded with 25 Bitcoin. It means that the new services have Bitcoin miners not having to invest in their hardware but can instead mine using the latest and greatest in Bitcoin mining technology. 

This explanation even though simple, the process of validating transactions has become increasingly complex as the blockchain grows. The trend noticed here is that as the price of the Bitcoin plummets those margins are shrinking for miners who thereby have to buy costly computing devices, with the sole purpose being built for mining and thereby base them in some far-flung locales. 

The History Of The Welle Brothers

The Berlin-based company founded by an ex-German military cryptologist Mark Welle and his brother, Maik, offers to sell mining services using the supercomputers with processing capabilities of over 6 petahash . While it is financed in part by money, the Welle brothers made as Bitcoin miners in the early days of the technology, the Bitcoin Brothers are working on with TSMC to manufacture the proprietary 3D 16nm FinFET application-specific integrated circuits ASIC designed by the company itself. Whereas they come to be smaller, with more powerful chips designed for very specific functions, as they are there with several companies already active in cloud mining as asserted by Bitcoin Brothers that their machines are the fastest in the industry. 

As the supercomputers come, the number of Bitcoin equipment manufacturers are being as steadily shrinking as players like KNC Miner are getting out of the market of selling hardware and others like Butterfly Labs are being shut down by the US Federal Trade Commission. According to Thomas Ackermann, the chief technology officer at Bitcoin Brother, they have a business model in different stages where the first stage is selling people services for Bitcoin mining where people can rent portions of the machines starting at gigahshes, terahashes, up to petahashes. It is being noted that the Bitcoin network has currently the capacity whereby it can process roughly 250 petahashes using those types of equipment that Ackermann said was outmoded and ready to be upgraded once the market is hit the existing 250 petahashes will be turned off. 

In case the first phase of the company’s business plan is to sell cloud mining services, then the second one is providing priority services for transactions where certain customers can get transactions approved ahead of others in the blockchain. There is a network that can manage to control a large chunk of approvals whereby they can add additional fees to prioritize transactions as Ackermann say where in the future he envisions selling its ASICs in 10nm format for mobile devices to Apple, LG, as well as Samsung supporting NFC replacement in the devices enabling crypto authentication at registers. Finally, in case the blockchain becomes the backbone for the internet of things, the processing transactions explodes and powerful mining technologies become even more valuable. 

What Are The Supercomputers Gaining?

In this context, each of the company’s supercomputers contains 256,000 of its ASICs with lower energy, more powerful chip, and the banks of computers the company is building can scale up to a point where 1.5 exahash contained on a single console. 

According to Ackermann to put the machines in perspective, whileSHA256 integer calculations are hard to compare to floating-point operations, on the common LINPACK Rpeak and Rmax benchmarks with each of the MSMEs outperforming the world’s fastest supercomputers. In comparing hasher gates to cores each MSEM has the double number of the 3.1 million cores in Tianhe-2, the No. 1 on the PetaFLOP list: and comes at a fraction of the cost where the floor space and the 1/20th of its 18-megawatt power draw. Where the Bitcoin supercomputers come with a quasi-opportunistic massively parallel computing model for job scheduling establish a new exascale class well beyond FLOPS and MIPS.  

Concluding Thoughts

While it is to be noted that Bitcoin Brothers aren’t the first company to tout an innovation in the processing power aiming to reduce mining costs, Asicrisign GmbH has similar claims around its new chip technology. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal where it was changing its name to CoinBau, claiming it has developed an energy-efficient low voltage chip reducing the energy needed to mine Bitcoin by half called the Wolfblood Extreme Efficiency where the chip would require only 0.19 joules of energy for a gigahash that is the mathematical equation of Bitcoin mining computing power. Whereas the current standard is 0.376 joules per gigahash according to the WSJ report.