Bitmain Announces Improved 7nm Bitcoin Mining Chips, Price and Network Centralization Analysis

Bitmain announced its next-generation of mining ASICs for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and other SHA256 coins.

Bitmain is China's second-largest fabless chipmaker and the world's largest cryptocurrency mining hardware manufacturer.

The company also boasts a huge mining operation, commanding anywhere from 3-15 percent of all Bitcoin mining.

Recently, the company announced an improved 7nm computer chip for mining which offers a purported 28.6 percent improvement in energy efficiency, as well as a higher hash rate than previous models.

"The driving force behind the development of next-gen miners beyond 7nm chips is slowing down due to physical limitations. With the nm size shrinking a quantum effect-when a device's dimensions become very small due to scaling and other requirements-is very likely to take place. It is promising that TSMC is already in the process of building 5nm chips. We will continue to follow the development of this technology but it is still early days."

As a result, only a few companies have direct access to profitable mining hardware for Bitcoin.

Bitmain is able to control who and where mining takes place and can continue to expand its share of the network hash rate if it so chooses.

If Bitmain were to 51 percent attack the network it would undermine the price of bitcoin, likely killing its business and rendering its ASICs near-worthless.

Bitmain, or another large miner, could ransack other SHA256 coin and switch back to mining Bitcoin, posing little risk to the miner.

Within the SHA256 algorithm, coins vulnerable to 51 percent attacks include Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, Litecoin Cash, and Peercoin.