Bitmain Antminer X3 Cryptonight ASIC, New Batches and New Prices

21 Mar
2018

It seems that some people think that Bitmain has lowered the prices of their upcoming Antminer X3 Cryptonight ASIC miners, however that is not true, the company has just released new Batches 3 and 4 for pre-order and has removed the first two super expensive ones. Batch 1 of the Antminer X3 had a price of $11999 USD and should start shipping by the end of May and Batch 2 had a price of $7599 USD by the end of June. The prices of the first two batches are very important as well as their shipping dates are tied to the two new batches, so for example the new Antminer X3 Batch 3 with a price of just $3000 USD should start shipping after Batch 1 and the new Antminer X3 Batch 4 with a price of just $1900 USD should start shipping after Batch 2.

What Bitmain already did was screw over anyone that has ordered their Batch 2 devices as the new Batch 3 of the Antminer X3 Cryptonight ASIC should ship faster and at less than half the price. Actually the same goes for pretty much anyone that has ordered or plans to order any of the batches of the Antminer X3 Cryptonight ASIC miners from Bitmain, so consider wisely if you still have not purchased any, but are considering it. As we have already mentioned Monero (XMR) and a number of other CryptoNight coins are planning to fork to a new CryptoNightV7 POW that should make any of the current CryptoNight ASIC miners unusable, so a pretty risky thing to pre-order ASIC mining hardware at the moment and wait for it for a few months.

NiceHash to Support Both CryptoNight and the New CryptoNightV7 Algorithms

20 Mar
2018

The controversy surrounding the release of a number of CryptoNight ASIC miners from various manufacturers and the upcoming fork of Monero (XMR) and some other crypto coins to a new ASIC-proof CryptoNightV7 algorithm continues. NiceHash has recently announced that they will continue to support both the old CryptoNight as well as the new CryptoNightV7 algorithms. The service should add support for the new V7 algorithm by the end of the month, probably before the Monero fork planned to happen later this month. Furthermore a new NiceHash Miner that will bring support for the CryptoNightV7 algorithm should also be available soon, so while the updated POW algorithm will be ASIC-proof you would still be able to rent a lot of GPU hashpower apparently.

Other crypto coins that are using the same cryptoNight proof of work mining algorithm are expected to follow suit and also fork to the new ASIC-proof version of CryptoNight, though it would most likely take them some extra time. There are some coins that have already announced their plans to do a hard fork and follow in the footsteps of Monero (XMR), others are still considering and of course there will be some for sure that will remain on the old algorithm that can be mined using the upcoming wave of CryptoNight ASIc miners. Still going for a CryptoNight ASIC miner at the moment is considered very risky and will most likely cost you much more that you would be able to mine back, though there are no guarantees.

– To keep track of the time left until Monero (XMR) hard forks to the new CryptoNightV7…

CPU Mining With cpuminer-opt 3.8.4 the Yescryptr32 Algo for WAVI

19 Mar
2018

It has been a while since we have last CPU mined a crypto coin that only has a CPU miner and not a GPU or ASIC and uses a new crypto algorithm, it has been a while since we have used the cpuminer-opt as well. So why not get back to it and put some stress on your processor for mining using the latest cpuminer-opt 3.8.4 (download) and mine WAVI coins (Bitcointalk announcement) that use the new yescryptr32 algorithm.

If you are interested in what kind of performance you can expect mining this algorithm with a CPU, here is a reference for you. An Intel Core i7 6850K (6-cores at 3.6 GHz + HT) does around 635 H/s in the yescryptr32 algorithm without overclock of the processor. A processor like the commonly used Intel Celeron G1840 (Dual Core at 2.8 GHz) manages to get around 110 H/s in terms of hashrate when mining yescryptr32. If you try mining WAVI coins with a different processor feel free to share your performance results in the comments below…

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