Crypto Mining Blog
It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Search
Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category
It seems that the life of the Antminer E3 ASIC miners from Bitmain is nearing its end with the Ethash miner apparently becoming useless for Ethereum Classic (ETC) mining and soon for Ethereum (ETH) as well, or at least we are getting such reports form users being unable to mine properly ETC these devices anymore. The reason for that is the fact that they do work like video cards with 4GB video memory and as these become obsolete due to large DAG size (even though not yet 4GB in size), so will do the E3 ASIC miners. ETC is the first to drop from the E3 coins to mine as it is ahead with about 10 epochs from ETH (328 for ETC, 318 for ETH), so Ethereum has less than two months left before reaching the same place as ETC did. Of course there are a number of other smaller Ethash-based projects that are far behind with their DAG epochs, so the E3 miners will still be able to be mined with the ASIC miners. The problem is what will happen with profitability with a big influx of hashrate coming from large E3 mining operations, so most likely very soon it will be time to retire the miners.
It is interesting to note that Ethereum (ETH) does have a plan to do another fork and switch to the ProgPow proof of work mining algorithm (GPU-only mining) at some point this year, and the time could coincide with the “E3 miner death” for ETH mining or not. Nevertheless now is definitely not the best time to be buying Antminer E3 even if somebody is offering the hardware at a really low prices as in less than two months it might become pretty useless. If you do have E3 ASIC miners make sure you maximize their use for the remaining time that you should be able to mine ETH with them and start planning what to do with them afterwards.
- Published in: Mining Hardware
- Related tags: Antminer E3, Antminer E3 4GB, Antminer E3 end of life, Antminer E3 ETC, Antminer E3 ETH, Antminer E3 mining ETC, Antminer E3 mining ETH, Bitmain, Bitmain Antminer E3, ETC ASIC, ETH ASIC, Ethash ASIC miner
There are a lot of FPGA mining solutions out there, but arguably the most user-friendly one seems to be the Blackminer F1 series by Hash Altcoin. The company has just announced it is going to retire their retirement of the Blackminer F1 and F1+ devices as they have been sold out and there are no plans to manufacture them in the near future, but there will be a new device to take their place. The new Blackminer F1-Ultra FPGA miner is up for pre-order at a regular price of $2100 USD ($2100 USD if you use your invite code + $200 USD coupons), or $2000 USD if you want to support us and use our invitation code ZLOZLA. The shipping of the new HashAltcoin Blackminer F1-Ultra FPGA miners should start on 25th December and the same goes for the availability of hosted miners.
The new Blackminer F1-Ultra should contain 2 hashboards with improved hardware design and product structure over Blackminer’s previous product series. The upgraded core chips should improve the performance by more than 20% according to the manufacturer and the supported algorithms should also be optimized, and the optimization rate of different algorithms can reach 5% to 15%.
HashAltcoin Blackminer F1-Ultra Expected Hashrate:
– Veriblock (VBK) – 15.5 GH/s – 700 W
– VerusHash (VRSC ) – 372 MH/s – 494 W
– Nervos (CKB) – 26.5 GH/s – 1137 W
– DigiByte (Odocrypt) – 5.75 GH/s – 1157 W
It is interesting to note that the numbers above listed by the manufacturer are a bit weird and kind of contradict to what Hash Altcoin claims in terms of performance improvements compared to the specs listed on their website for the F1+ miners. The F1-Ultra hashrates for VBK are lower with similar power usage and for VRSC the hashrate is also lower with higher power usage compared to F1+ for CKB and DGB the hashrates are higher, but with higher power usage as well… maybe these are not the final specs and further improvements could be achieved as we are currently not impressed. Also the fact that the number of supported algorithm at this point is very limited, though the ones quoted by the manufacturer are among the most profitable to mine at the moment, lacking support for some others may lead to missed opportunities at times… compared to the much wider number of supported algos by the F1+.
– Visit the HashAltcoin Blackminer F1-Ultra FPGA miner official product page…
- Published in: Mining Hardware
- Related tags: Blackminer, Blackminer F1-Ultra, Blackminer FPGA, CKB FPGA, DGB FPGA, DigiByte FPGA, FPGA miner, Hash Altcoin, Hashaltcoin, HashAltcoin Blackminer F1-Ultra, HashAltcoin FPGA, Nervos FPGA, Odocrypt FPGA, VBK FPGA, VeriBlock FPGA, VerusHash FPGA, VRSC FPGA
Back in October Ravencoin (RVN) forked to X16Rv2 as a means to drive away the ASIC miners for the X16R algorithm it previously used. The new algorithm X16Rv2 has helped lower the hashrate and make RVN mining prfotable for mining with GPUs for a bit, but now it seems we are getting back on the road to ASIC miners in the near future for the new algo. The X16Rv2 is apparently getting bitstreams for FPGA miners like the BittWare CVP-13 FPGA with 240 MH/s cited hashrate for the initial release… this is faster than 6x GTX 1080 Ti GPU mining rig with a third of the power usage. The only catch is that the CVP-13 FPGA Cryptocurrency Mining Board is pretty expensive, but unlike ASICs it can be used for a number of algorithms and with future bitstream updates can be much more futureproof. Of course the next step is new ASIC miners coming in the near future for the new X16Rv2 algorithm with Ravencoin getting quite a lot of attention from users.
– For more information about the BittWare CVP-13 FPGA Cryptocurrency Mining Board…
- Published in: Mining Hardware
- Related tags: BittWare, BittWare CVP-13, CVP-13, CVP-13 FPGA, Ravencoin, Ravencoin ASIC, Ravencoin ASIC mining, Ravencoin fork, Ravencoin hashrate, Ravencoin X16Rv2, Rvencoin FPGA, RVN, RVN ASIC, RVN ASIC mining, RVN fork, RVN FPGA, RVN hashrate, RVN X16Rv2, X16Rv2 FPGA, X16Rv2 FPGA miner, X16Rv2 FPGA mining, Zetheron