Humans are born to "go against the will of heaven". We are as small as dust, but we have to fight against the universe~
He is a top student of Peking University, ranked seventh in the 2018 Hurun 80 self-made rich list, and was once the founder of Bitcoin Mainland, known as the domestic Bitcoin evangelist - Wu Jihan. In the preface to a blockchain book, Wu Jihan wrote: People are born to "go against the will of heaven". We are as small as dust, but we have to fight against the universe.
1. Peking University talent aspires to become an investor
Wu Jihan graduated from Nankai High School, one of the best high schools in Chongqing. It is understood that Wu Jihan has been very smart since he was a child. During his student days, he studied very hard and seriously. His ideal is to become an investor.
With his high IQ and diligent and persistent learning attitude, Wu Jihan achieved excellent results and was admitted to Peking University, a prestigious university that many students dream of, in 2005. Even on the university campus, he did not relax his requirements for himself and obtained a double degree in economics and psychology after graduation.
2. From venture capitalists to Bitcoin
After all, he was a top student at Peking University. After graduation, Wu Jihan became a venture capitalist at Huaxing Capital as he wished, and got closer to his childhood dream.
The year Wu Jihan joined the company, Huaxing Capital shifted its investment direction to the Internet and bet on China's mobile Internet industry, which gave him the opportunity to learn about the latest Internet technologies and business models. By chance, in 2011, Wu Jihan discovered Bitcoin, which was still a very niche new thing at the time. It was only something that a small group of crypto-tech punks in the United States were fascinated with. In China, perhaps only a few dozen people knew about it.
He was deeply attracted by the characteristics of Bitcoin such as "decentralization" and "non-government issuance". He spent time carefully studying the underlying technical logic of Bitcoin. He judged that Bitcoin would either return to zero or increase hundreds of times in the future. Betting on Bitcoin was a gamble.
Wu Jihan took advantage of his investment and raised 100,000 yuan from relatives and friends, and exchanged it for Bitcoin on Taobao and Mentougou Exchange. At that time, the price of Bitcoin was about US$10 per coin (the current price is approximately US$61,000, which is 6,100 times the original price).
At that time, the place where the most Bitcoin "players" from all over the world gathered was a forum called Bitcointalk. Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, would often communicate with everyone in this forum.
Wu Jihan took the initiative to apply and became the moderator of the Chinese version of the Bitcointalk forum. It was in this forum that he noticed a person with the ID "Chang Jian" who often published articles in the forum to promote Bitcoin. Don't mention it, the content of the articles is really good.
As a moderator, Wu Jihan often rewarded his articles, and the two of them became inseparable. Later, the two met in person, and Wu Jihan learned that Chang Jian's real name was Liu Zhipeng, a civil servant in the Nanning Land and Resources Planning Institute. He also had another identity, that is, an outstanding science fiction writer. In order to write science fiction novels, Chang Jian came into contact with Bitcoin.
After Wu Jihan and Chang Jian met offline, they came up with the idea of creating a Chinese Bitcoin forum; so the two of them pooled a few thousand dollars and rented a server, and the country's earliest Bitcoin information website, Babbitt, was born.
At the beginning, only Chang Qian and Wu Jihan wrote articles on it, and there were only dozens of early users. The energetic Wu Jihan translated Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin white paper "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" into Chinese, which is also the most widely circulated translation in the Bitcoin circle.
3. Go all in: Invest all your wealth in developing ASIC mining machines
In June 2012, Butterfly Labs announced that it would manufacture ASIC mining machines with computing power that surpassed ordinary CPU and GPU mining machines. They did not intend to open source the mining machine code, or even sell the mining machines publicly. To put it bluntly, they wanted to monopolize computing power.
If they launch a 51% computing power attack on Bitcoin, they can destroy Bitcoin. This news caused a panic in the Bitcoin community. At this time, Jiang Xinyu, a genius boy from the University of Science and Technology of China with the online name "Baked Cat", posted a message on the Bitcointalk forum that he could develop an ASIC mining machine, but lacked funds and needed to raise 1 million yuan.
Wu Jihan saw the news. Although the success rate of investing in the development of this mining machine was only 30%, he did not hesitate and joined the gamble. Fortunately, his bet was right.
In December 2012, the high-performance BakedCat mining machine was launched, and the BakedCat company achieved great success.
In 2013, the mining farm of FBAO Company monopolized more than 40% of Bitcoin’s computing power, which caused panic in the community.
Later, Baked Cat only retained 20% of the computing power and sold the rest.
At its peak, FC's mine mined more than 40,000 bitcoins a month, which caused FC's stock to surge 500 times. In a few months, Wu Jihan became a multimillionaire.
4. The Birth of the “Mining Tyrant”
Wu Jihan, who made his first fortune from the BakeCat mining machine, decisively resigned from his investment job at Huaxing Capital and put more energy into the mining business. He found his old friend Chang Qia and hoped to start a Bitcoin business with him, but Chang Qia did not want to give up his job in the system.
What Wu Jihan lacked was chip technology, so he used most of the company's equity to introduce technology. At this time, a top student named Zhan Ketuan (the previous story) appeared in front of Wu Jihan. The two hit it off, and Wu Jihan invested in the research and development of mining machines. As long as they could meet Wu Jihan's standards, Zhan Ketuan's technical team could get 60% of the equity.
Bitmain was established in October 2013.
In November 2016, when Bitmain allocated shares to Jihan Wu, Wu did not disappoint Jihan Wu due to Zhanketuan’s technical strength.
On November 11, 2013, Bitmain's first generation Antminer S1 was launched and quickly captured the market. However, the market could not keep up with the changes.
One month later, in December 2013, the central bank and five other ministries and commissions jointly issued a notice on “Preventing Bitcoin Risks.” Bitcoin prices fell immediately, entering a three-year long bear market.
In 2014, Bitmain, which was in the bear market, actually iterated 4 generations of mining machines. Frycat, which did not survive the bear market, also had another chip design genius, Yang Zuoxing, join the research and development of Bitmain mining machines. That year, the Antminer S7 designed by Yang Zuoxing went into mass production, and Bitmain became the dominant player in Chinese mining, which established Wu Jihan's status in the industry. At this time, the price of Bitcoin gradually recovered. Yang Zuoxing was interested in joining Bitmain, but Zhan Ketuan was only willing to give Yang Zuoxing 0.5% of the shares.
In 2016, the two sides parted ways unhappily. Yang Zuoxing chose to start his own business and founded MicroBit, which also developed mining machines and became a strong rival of Bitmain in the future. That year, Bitmain not only produced mining machines, but also launched a new mining pool and invested in another ViaBTC mining pool. Together with its Ant Mining Pool in 2014, the three mining pools together allowed Bitmain to monopolize 49.4% of the computing power of the entire network. Wu Jihan became a mining tyrant at the time. He could easily launch attacks on Bitcoin, which made American developers in the Bitcoin community look at him with a frown.
5. The decisive battle of computing power among the “mining tyrants”
On August 1, 2017, Bitmain, represented by Wu Jihan, launched a hard fork project for the Bitcoin blockchain, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), due to dissatisfaction with the various restrictions of the Bitcoin blockchain network. In a short period of time, Bitcoin Cash became one of the top four currencies in the digital cryptocurrency market with a market value of 10% of Bitcoin. Here is a brief introduction to the concept of forks in the blockchain world:
However, the forked BCH does not carry the isolated witness proposed by the Bitcoin core development team; Wu Jihan's willful hard fork runs counter to the core development team's plan, which makes them very annoyed.
As a result, the core development team in the United States frantically attacked Wu Jihan on the Bitcoin forum and called him Jihad (the Islamic Jihad Organization, which is only one letter different from Wu Jihan's name Jihan). Wu Jihan became a terrorist in the eyes of the American development team.
But they can do nothing about this world-class mining tycoon from China. What makes them even more frightened is that Wu Jihan is trying to make BCH surpass Bitcoin in price and computing power.
As long as the price of BCH makes it more profitable for miners, miners will turn around and mine BCH, which will lead to a significant reduction in Bitcoin's computing power, making the Bitcoin network more congested, and allowing more people to choose BCH.
However, Wu Jihan's challenge was unsuccessful, and the tenacious trend of Bitcoin in the later period still crushed BCH.
The forked Bitcoin made Wu Jihan famous all over the world. That year, Bitcoin ushered in a big bull market, and Bitcoin Mainland earned more than 5 billion in net profit in a year. The level of profit was astonishing.
2017 was the year when Wu Jihan gained both fame and fortune.
6. Protracted infighting
The beautiful surface also hides dangers.
1. Chip R&D:
The development of new chips is difficult: Since Yang Zuoxing set up his own company, Bitmain has experienced no less than 4 chip failures.
Yang Zuoxing's sudden rise: In August 2018, Yang Zuoxing launched the Shenma mining machine M10, whose performance far exceeded Bitmain's flagship Antminer S9.
2. Disagreements among founders
Zhan Ketuan bets on AI and invests a lot of money, but no income is expected in the short term: What worries Wu Jihan even more is that Zhan Ketuan has invested a lot of manpower and material resources in AI, an industry that requires a lot of money in the short term but no income is expected.
Wu Jihan's hard fork brought huge losses to Bitmain in terms of reputation and money: In Zhan Ketuan's view, Wu Jihan's hard fork of Bitcoin also brought huge losses to Bitmain. When BCH was born, Bitmain once exchanged all 50,000 Bitcoins for BCH, and also transferred part of Bitcoin's computing power to BCH mining. However, the separated BCH was not successful. A man named Satoshi Nakamoto, who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto, hard forked BCH again and gave birth to BSV.
In addition, the company has expanded rapidly: in a few years, Bitmain has grown from a medium-sized company with 500 employees to a large company with more than 3,000 employees. The bull market is nowhere in sight, and the huge expenses of 3,000 employees have made the company's account begin to be stretched.
After half a year of arguing, the two sides finally reached an agreement at the end of 2018.
3. Internal fighting caused Bitmain to drop from 80 billion to 30 billion
"Increase revenue and reduce expenditure": Starting with layoffs, the number of employees was reduced from more than 3,000 to more than 1,000.
External concerns: In 2019, Yang Zuoxing's Antminer quickly eroded the market share of Antminer, occupying 40% of the market share at one point, causing Bitmain to fall from the altar of the mining machine overlord.
Coup: In October 2019, with the support of investors and employees, Wu Jihan launched a coup while Zhan Ketuan was on a business trip to Shenzhen. Wu Jihan became the legal representative and executive director of Bitmain and removed Zhan Ketuan from all his positions. After Zhan Ketuan returned to Beijing, he immediately launched a counterattack. In short, throughout 2020, a series of bloody incidents such as legal person changes, snatching business licenses, and security guards prying open doors emerged one after another. Zhan Ketuan, who was on a business trip in Shenzhen, immediately returned to Beijing and launched a series of counterattacks.
Throughout 2020, Bitmain spent time in turmoil, experiencing multiple changes of legal persons, fights over business licenses, and the founder bringing security guards to pry open the company's door, among other bloody internal fighting incidents.
This internal fight dealt a heavy blow to Bitmain. Its original IPO plan was shelved and its valuation plummeted by 50 billion from its highest level of 80 billion yuan to only 30 billion yuan.
It was a fight with no winners, and the two eventually reached a settlement.
On January 26, 2021, Wu Jihan sadly left Bitmain, the company he founded, and took away BitDeer, BTC.COM mining pool and Bitmain's overseas mining farms.
In February 2021, Wu Jihan sold the domestic mining pool to 500.com, and subsequently focused on overseas mining farms and BitDeer.
On September 28, 2021, Wu Jihan talked about a talk show on YouTube called "The Best Business Show" and said, "I think regulation is an inevitable issue in the field of cryptocurrency." The strict domestic regulation may be the reason why he decisively gave up the domestic mining pool!
Final comments on Wu Jihan:
He was a visionary and was optimistic about Bitcoin in 2011.
With courage, we can go all out to support the development of the "Baked Cat" mining machine.
He is resourceful and initiated the Bitcoin hard fork, establishing his own strong influence in the encryption circle.