Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Monday, July 30th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, the King of the Bitcoin Miner's malls an IPO, not an I.C.

The prediction market augur gets really kind of dark.

A Netflix for gadgets and a Dallas Cowboys for e-sports both raise money.

Advice for Twitter and Facebook and why autonomous cars need to talk to us.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

How does that old Maxim go? The surest way to get rich in any gold rush is not to mine for gold yourself, but instead to sell the miners, the picks and the shovels.

Well, Jehan Wu and Mikrizan apparently took this to heart

and it certainly looks to be paying off for them.

Wu was a financial analyst and a private equity fund manager and Zahn had founded a streaming television startup when in 2013 the pair founded Bitmain

Bitmain which is headquartered in Beijing is the biggest supplier to

cryptocurrency miners in the world. Bitmain designs custom AIC chips which are favored by

crypto miners, so essentially all of those Bitcoin mining rigs, or at least a

fair number of them, are designed and sold by Bitmain.

And yes, I know that saying an Aesik chip is a custom chip is a bit redundant, Please don't at me.

By the way, Bitmain also runs Ant Pool, one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools,

but it's those Bitmain design chips that are apparently the key to Bitmain's success.

And apparently it has been a success.

Just how much of a success was revealed this morning when Fortune got its hands on an email

from a source either within Bitmain itself or at least close

to the company.

The email says that Bitmain is raising new money at a $14 billion valuation.

...