IN Arecent video Jeremy Sciarappa, a You-Tuber, flips the lid off a red box in his living room to reveal a silver machine the size of a shoebox, whining noisily. The contraption is an Antminer S9, sold by Bitmain, a Chinese firm. Its job is to help validate transactions conducted in bitcoin, the world's best-known crypto-currency. Because bitcoin has no central authority, it relies on its users to keep things humming along. Those who help out are granted bitcoins, in a process called mining. The Antminer S9 is beloved of hobbyist miners worldwide. Nestled inside are 189 application-specific integrated-circuit (asic) chips, designed by Bitmain to solve bitcoin's cryptographic puzzles as quickly as possible. They were made by tsmc, a giant Taiwanese semiconductor firm.
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