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Posts Tagged ‘Bitmain’
There were rumors, leaks and information about an upcoming Ethash ASIC miner from Bitmain for months, but now it is official as the company has announced their Antminer E3 device. The first ASIC miner capable of mining Ethereum (ETH) and other crypto currencies using the Ethash / Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm is capable of delivering 180 MHS hashrate at 800W of power usage and will cost you $800 USD. The first batch of Antminer E3 Ethash ASIC miners is scheduled to start shipping 16-31 July according to Bitmain’s website, so the devices should start appearing in the first user’s hands sometime in August, although the devices will probably be up and running on the network before that.
Looking at the specifications, you are essentially getting the equivalent of a regular GPU mining rig for Ethereum in terms of hashrate and power usage, but in a more compact and cost efficient format with the Antminer E3. Unfortunately the word is that besides Bitmain a couple more companies have also been working on Ethash ASIC miners, so soon we may start seeing more announcements with different specs similar to what happened with the recent wave of Cryptonight ASICs. So you should be careful when you are doing the math and considering if you should invest in the first generation of Ethash ASIC miners now, you if you should wait a bit more and see… especially considering they are not shipping immediately at this point. We also need to see what will be the response of Ethereum to the ASIC miners now that they are available as they may decide to follow the same road that Monero (XMR) choose – to fork the mining algorithm with the idea to continue to be ASIC-proof or switch to POS sooner than expected.
– For more details about the new Bitmain Antminer E3 Ethash ASIC miner on the official website…
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.
If you thought that recently announced Baikal Giant-N Cryptonight ASIC miner is powerful and is going to kill the Cryptonight GPU mining you might want to reconsider. Bitmain has just announced their response in the form of the Antminer X3 Cryptonight ASIC miner and it is much more powerful than what Baikal Miner is offering. The Bitmain Antminer X3 promises 220 KH/s hashrate for Cryptonight at 550 Watts of power usage, so 11 times more powerful than the Giant-N at roughly 2 times higher price and shipping the second part of May. By the time these devices start shipping Monero (XMR) will most likely not be mineable anymore with Cryptonight ASIC miners along with some other coins that have announced plans to fork in order to remain ASIC resistant, so all the extra hashpower will need to go somewhere else.
At a price of $11999 USD per device and limited to just 1 unit per order Bitmain is accepting only BCH and USD payments for the miners. The second batch of Antminer X3 is planned to start shipping a month later, so in the second part of June with a significantly lower price of $7599 USD, though who knows how many Cryptonight coins might fork to ASIC resistant implementation by then. Just to be on the safe side be careful with the Cryptonight ASICs from Baikal and form Bitmain in order not to end up with a piece of useless hardware that can hardly mine anything profitable, even with its very high performance.
– For more information about the upcoming Bitmain Antminer X3 Cryptonight ASIC miner….