Shen Yu Community AMA: After more than a decade of ups and downs in the industry, do not challenge human nature

整理：BlockBeats

The social platform AAAny continues to gain popularity. Today, Shen Yu registered on the new social platform AAAny and interacted with netizens, answering their questions. BlockBeats has organized the Q&A as follows.

BlockBeats Note: The AAAny platform was developed by Wang Hanyang, the author of "Who is Behind Binance: 4000 Resumes of Stateless Companies." The platform provides social interaction in a Q&A format, allowing anyone to ask questions on any user's homepage, hence Ask Anyone Anything.

I am Shen Yu. I accidentally entered the Crypto field in 2011, traded coins, faced liquidation, mined, worked on chips, and went bankrupt with a few companies. I am still struggling to stay active on the front line, operating two companies: F2Pool and Cobo. Let's AAA.

Question: What is this product for?

Shen Yu: F2Pool, as a classic PoW mining pool, provides refined software services for miners. Through network connections, mining machines can connect to the pool, which synchronizes block data and unconfirmed transaction information from the full-node blockchain network. This information is used to construct tasks, which are then quickly distributed to various mining machines for computation. Once a mining machine finds a value that meets the difficulty requirements, the pool broadcasts the corresponding generated block to the entire network. The distribution of mining rewards is carried out according to a specific allocation algorithm to ensure the earnings of all mining machines. After 10 years of accumulation, F2Pool has successfully mined over 1.5 million bitcoins.

Cobo provides professional and diverse private key security storage services for institutional users, including centralized HSM, co-signing MPC, and on-chain multi-signature, and has designed detailed and comprehensive risk control strategies that align with corporate internal workflows.

Question: How do you regain your spirits after each entrepreneurial failure?

Shen Yu: I take a few months off, play some games, read books, and when I get really bored, I look for something to do again.

Question: What were your main responsibilities in the companies you started?

Shen Yu: More on strategy, operations, and product; I also did a lot of Ops for a long time. For over 4 years, F2Pool had only 2.5 people, and aside from not writing code, I did everything else, so I was more like a jack-of-all-trades.

Question: Where does this half person (the "2.5 people" mentioned above) come from?

Shen Yu: I maintained the mining farm while also serving as online customer service, so I count as half a person.

Question: How do you understand "worked on chips"? It seems like a huge investment with a particularly long return cycle in the domestic chip industry?

Shen Yu: I worked on mining machine chips, following the principle of first principles, saving wherever possible, and the iteration cycle is fast. The chips produced at the right time yield decent returns. In 2013, I developed a 55nm chip for LTC but missed the market uptrend.

Question: Speaking of which, from 2011 until now, is there anything you once firmly believed in that you no longer believe? Or is there something you didn't believe in before that you now believe?

Shen Yu: This is a very good question. From a naive young man fresh out of school to someone who has experienced the ups and downs of the industry for over a decade, I have undergone many tests of human nature and witnessed the dramatic rises and falls of many people, so I currently believe even more that one should not challenge human nature.

Question: Why did you stop new user registrations when the BTC ratio of F2Pool exceeded 33%?

Shen Yu: As a crypto-native entrepreneur, I understand that a single mining pool exceeding 33% could impact the security of the entire blockchain network. My personal assets and dreams are closely tied to blockchain security, so I choose to commit to protecting the network's safety.

Question: Besides stopping new user registrations, what other measures will you take? What will other mining pools do in this situation? (Continuing from the previous question)

Shen Yu: Actually, there is limited action that mining pools can take. Generally, they first stop new user registrations. If the hash rate share continues to rise significantly, they can increase fees to force profit-sensitive users to migrate to other pools. There have been similar situations in history.

Question: So what is the relationship between mining companies, SMIC, and Huawei's latest mobile phone chip?

Shen Yu: I really don't know.

Question: Are you happier now or were you happier before? Or have you always been happy?

Shen Yu: The benefit of blockchain is the endless stream of fun things, with dopamine secretion being quite vigorous. If I had to compare, I was a bit happier before.

Question: What is Shen Yu's view on money? This industry sometimes brings money quickly, making people feel like it comes from the wind. And sometimes it may be because they hit the right trend but mistakenly believe it is their own ability. How do you think one should view crypto assets with a calm mindset?

Shen Yu: Test more, think clearly about how to make money, but only earn money within your ability. I guess around 2012-2013, the market was flat, and I played a lot of on-chain gambling games like "Satoshi's Dice," with big wins and losses, which had a significant emotional impact. Later, I became more peaceful and resolute in cutting losses.

Question: I'm curious if you still invest in meme coins?

Shen Yu: I won't invest in meme coins; the capital capacity is too small, and the rules are not transparent. Occasionally, I might invest in head mining projects that have been audited by internal security teams.

Question: Happiness for you is no longer related to money, right? What is it related to then?

Shen Yu: It might be the feeling of growth, understanding a complex protocol, reading a good book, learning a mental model, achieving a stage goal, etc., all of which can bring happiness.