<p>Presumably (I'm not sure, this is an educated guess) they called it an antminer because they have very many of them, all set to do a single thing and doing it well. One could compare their mining pool to an ant hive, where each mining ASIC is an individual ant, foraging for food.</p>

<p>This is a very common metaphor, because ants are fascinating creatures, whose actions are completely governed by very simple rules, which cause truly incredible emergent behavior. See: Ant Colony Optimization for a good example of this.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-18T10:33:29.227Z
2018-05-18T10:33:29.227Z
BlackBeltBob
<p>Does anyone by chance know? Can't seem to find this anywhere and this question popped into my head. </p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2018-05-17T04:31:03.747Z
Antminers were released before Antshares existed.
Ava Chow
<mining-hardware><antminer>
Where did Bitmain get the "Antminer" name from for all their ASIC miners?
Brennan
# Where did Bitmain get the "Antminer" name from for all their ASIC miners?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2018-05-17)

Does anyone by chance know? Can't seem to find this anywhere and this question popped into my head.

**Tags:** mining-hardware, antminer

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: Antminers were released before Antshares existed.  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_2 on 2018-05-18. Score: 1

Presumably (I'm not sure, this is an educated guess) they called it an antminer because they have very many of them, all set to do a single thing and doing it well. One could compare their mining pool to an ant hive, where each mining ASIC is an individual ant, foraging for food.

This is a very common metaphor, because ants are fascinating creatures, whose actions are completely governed by very simple rules, which cause truly incredible emergent behavior. See: Ant Colony Optimization for a good example of this.


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