Crypto is decentralizing, AI is centralizing, according to Peter Thiel. Although the venture capitalist has followed this remark with a somewhat strange ideological classification for these technologies, the premise rings true. Artificial intelligence advancement is now in the hands of huge companies such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and their Chinese counterparts. Machine learning relies on data – the more the better – and platforms such as these have proven skilled in collecting it. They have used their competitive edge to make AI products better which draws in more users and more data – a great example of leveraging network effects.

Even by the standards of Bitcoin, things are crazy in China. As the boom in cryptocurrencies has become the biggest speculative bubble in recorded history, a single company in Beijing's Haidian District has been selling the chips that generate as much as 80 percent of the world's cryptocoins. "We feel lucky," says Jihan Wu, the co-chief executive of Bitmain Technologies Ltd., which was more or less unknown two years ago and, according to Wu, booked revenue of $3.5 billion in 2017. Cryptocurrency networks run on number-crunching, electricity-hogging "mining" technology, and to play in that game with any seriousness, you pretty much need Bitmain's chips. And because it's China, the whole thing could fall apart at any minute.

By its own reckoning, Bitmain built 70 percent of all the computers on the Bitcoin network. It makes specialized chips to perform the critical hash functions involved in mining and trading bitcoin and packages those chips into the top mining rig; the Antminer S9. Now the tech giant is looking to Artificial Intelligence. Apart from Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining, Jihan Wu, the Co-founder of Bitmain envisions a use-case for Bitmain beyond blockchain and cryptocurrency. In an interview with the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers (IEEE), Wu expressed that while Bitcoin's success is personal to him, Bitmain can't solely rely on Bitcoin and has to search other avenues for continual success.

By its own reckoning, Bitmain built 70 percent of all the computers on the Bitcoin network. It makes specialized chips to perform the critical hash functions involved in mining and trading bitcoins, and packages those chips into the top mining rig--the Antminer S9. As he told IEEE Spectrum contributing editor Morgen E. Peck in July: "It's quite personal that I wanted Bitcoin to be successful. But as a company we are not allowed to solely rely on the success of Bitcoin. That's a thing we cannot afford."

The biggest recent news in the crypto world is that China issued a ban on ICOs, swiftly followed by South Korea. Japan is also rumored to be considering a similar ban. The U.S. SEC has also issued a warning against "pump-and-dump" ICO schemes, and is evaluating whether some offerings were not disguised securities following the DAO case. The above raises questions about the meaning of money, securities, and might help "correct the market". Some of it is reminiscent of China's ban of digital currencies for use in the "real world" way back in 2009 -- especially Tencent's.

Two years ago, a Chinese chip-design expert named Micree Zhan was reading China's seminal science-fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, while wrestling with how to create a new processor. He had already designed custom chips for the company he co-founded, Bitmain, that had made it into the world's leading bitcoin miner, allowing it to dominate the new, hyper-competitive industry of unearthing bitcoins. Now he needed a chip that could launch Bitmain onto a new trajectory, one that would help it master a world-altering technology called deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. While performing his nightly meditation, a practice he has kept up for nearly a decade, it suddenly came to Zhan. "It was late at night, and something inspired me--Sophon!" he recalls. A sophon is a fictional proton-sized supercomputer from The Three-Body Problem that is sent by an alien civilization to halt scientific progress on Earth. The aliens use it to take over Earth when their own planet is destroyed by the chaotic gravitational forces of its three suns.