We are not surprised by the announcement from Halong Mining about their new DragonMint X1 and DragonMint X2 Cryptonight ASIC miners as the company had already mentioned on twitter a few days ago that they will be releasing such miners. The Halong Mining DragonMint X1 miner should be capable of 124 KH/s hashrate with 245W power usage, costs $1714 USD with a power supply and should start shipping in April 25-30. The more Halong Mining DragonMint X2 miner, as the name suggests, should be offering double the performance or with other words 248 KH/s at 490W of power usage at a slightly better price than ordering two X1 miners – $3115 USD with a power supply and shipping should also start by the edn of next month (April).

This offer is more like a real competition to Bitmain’s X3 Cryptonight ASIC miners performance wise and at a much better price and shipping earlier. What is there not to like in some real competition on the Cryptonight ASIC miners, but then again these devices might also end up as expensive door holders as well by the time they start shipping. With Monero (XMR) and other Cryptonight-based crypto currencies announcing plans to fork to a new version of the algorithm that should make them ASIC proof again things are not looking very favorable for ASIC miners. So again a word of warning if you are interested in the recent wave of Cryptonight ASIC miners, be extra careful when making your plans should you decide to order any of the miners already available or coming soon to the market.

Last year when Giga Watt (the former MegaBigPower) announced their WTT token sale we were pretty excited about it and not only participated, but spread the word about it. With the good track record we were expecting big things to happen, but now, 9 months later we are really disappointed from our experience with Giga Watt in general and would want to warn everyone to stay away from their services. It is all but a delay after delay after another delay and things not happening for months after they take your money and in the world of crypto delays with months are not something that anyone wants as things change quite rapidly.

Let us see why we are not happy. First we were promised tokens that represent actual power capacity in the Giga Watt facility, of course they needed some time to build that capacity, so as a result there were more than a few month delays until the release of all of the tokens. Unfortunately letting users know how is development progressing during all this time has been less than well done with just a few scarce updates instead of constant updates on progress. We were promised market for these tokens that would allows us to profit from holding and leasing them to users needing power to host their miners and if there is a demand we could get higher price. Well, guess what, even at the lowest price of 4.2 cents you are not able to rent more than 60% to 75% of your tokens, regardless of how many they are and this has been like that from the start months ago.

In the end you have some 30 or more percent of your tokens free all of the time, so why not purchase some of the miners sold by Giga Watt and have them hosted at their facility to actually utilize the free tokens for something. Great idea, right, or so we thought and wanted to try it out a couple of months ago, so around the end of November last year we have purchased the following ASIC miners: Antminer S9 13.5 TH/s – PSU Included Batch 6 January and Antminer L3+ – PSU Included Batch 6 December. With these descriptions one would expect that the L3+ would go online in December or January latest and the S9 in January or early February. Guess what, it is already mid March and our miners purchased and paid for are still not online in Giga Watt’s facility.

We were pertinently waiting and waiting for something to happen, but our patience ran out completely at the beginning of February and the reply we got from Giga Watt was that our miners “should be deployed in February”. Well, they were not deployed in February and at the end of the month we were pretty pissed off already, so asking what is going on we got a reply that “Batch 6 hardware is expected to start the deployment process in March”. It is already mid March and we are still waiting for our miners to be deployed, even though earlier this month Giga Watt has released more tokens, meaning that they have additional power capacity already.

There are two more weeks by the end of the month although we do not have high hopes that we are going to see our miners getting deployed in that time frame, but even if we do see them we are clearly already very disappointed and not only will not recommend Giga Watt’s services, but will warn people not to rely on them at all. We are really disappointed from Giga Watt not delivering on time and on their promises and disappointed customers do not get compensation or refunds, so just stay away from them and save the trouble. We do plan to sell the tokens we own and move on, apart maybe from the ones needed by our miners if we ever see them getting deployed this month, or maybe the next one or who knows when.

It seems that everyone is releasing Cryptonight ASIC miners out of the blue, there is information and websites in China starting to offer PinIdea RR-200 Cryptonight ASIC miners that are promising 27 KH/s Cryptonight and 55 KH/s Cryptonight-light mining performance at 350 Watts of power usage with a price similar to that of the Baikal Giant-N. So the RR-200 promises a bit faster hashrate and comes at pretty much the same price and shipping immediately directly trying to compete with the Baikal offer. Unfortunately at this point it is hard to confirm this new miner for sure as the official PinIdea website seems to be down and there is no info on their official Facebook page about a new Cryptonight ASIC being released, so treat this information with caution!

Meanwhile another ASIC manufacturer, Halong Mining, has tweeted that they are also planning on releasing a Cryptonight ASIC, though they have been busy lately with miners for other algorithms. The Bitmain Antminer X3 was also recently announced, though it will be a while before their much more powerful devices start shipping. At the same time crypto coins using the Cryptonight algorithm are talking about forks and switching to a new ASIC proof version of the algorithm that can make all of these ASIC miners obsolete with Minero (XMR) leading the way. That is probably why more ASIC manufacturers are trying to push hardware to users that might have been mining for them for a while and are now trying to sell it as fast as possible before it becomes useless. So a word of warning – be extra careful and plan well with Cryptonight ASIC miners!

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