Huaqiang North Commercial Area (HNCA) is one of China’s biggest electronic markets in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province. It use to be a industrial area mainly provided electronic, communication and electrical productions. However, things changes nowadays. People start to talk about blockchain, bitcoin, hash power and mining machine…

As we all know, “mining” is the main way to get a bitcoin, and the mining machine plays an important role in the bitcoin world and the threshold of mining also raises as time goes on. actually, “Made in China” has firmly monopolized the design and production market of various types of mining machines in the past few years. However perhaps not many people knows that HNCA has become China and even the world’s largest distribution center for mining machines.

A story of the mining machine

If you say bitcoin price surges may cause heart attacks , the story of bitcoin mining machine is also extremely dramatic.

In the early days, bitcoin could easily be ‘mined’ by a computer CPU. The mathematician problem could be simply “solved” by certain softwares. However, the number of output blocks per day is fixed, as bitcoin price raises, more miners join in this business which causes mining difficulty increases. The mainstream of the mining industry turns from individual miners to mining teams and enterprises with low-cost electricity resources and professional deployment capabilities industry.

The cryptocurrency is booming these days. While most people are targeting this investment asset, smart businessman see enormous markets behind the bitcoin price – the mining machine. Large number of miners pour into the market, mining machines are in short supply which causes a new group comes into being: the mining machine wholesalers.

Bitmain, the Chinese mining giant which founded in 2013, it develops mining chips, accesses the chips to the miners and then sell miners to customers all over the world. At present, 80% to 90% of worldwide mining machines are provided by this company and it has also occupied the head of bitcoin network’s hash power for a long time.

Looking back at 2017, the sudden demand increase for bitcoin chips shocked the whole semiconductor industry in the 3rd quarter. According to a report provided by AllianceBernstein, TSMC’s ASIC chips revenue of the 3^rd quarter in 2017, was “mainly relied on Bitmain”.

International miner sale

When you walk in HNCA, you can see many advertisements of miner shops are printed in Chinese, English, Korean and even Arabic, which shows the miner business here is so ‘internationalized’. “No one sells computers nowadays, mining machines are in short supply and the price changes every day. Even a second-hand AntMiner S9 can still be sold at about 21,000 yuan ($3286 USD).” said a salesman.

AntMiner S9 is the most popular miner in the market at present. However, when you ask “how much?”, instead of tell you the price straightly, salesmen will type the current price on the calculator. The miner price changes everyday in a range of 22000 yuan to 27000 yuan ($3443~$4226 USD). However, the cost of production is only worth 3000 yuan ($470 USD) and the miner market is still so hot, the profit space of miner is visible. As the threshold of mining becomes very high, selling miner becomes a better way to make a profit.