It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Bitmain’s upcoming Antminer KS3 ASIC miner for Kaspa (KAS) has been announced and it boasts some crazy specs for sure, especially compared to what is already available on the market. The hashrate of the KS3 ASIC miner is supposedly 8.3 TH/s with a 3188 Watts of power usage, meaning a 0.38 J/GHs power efficiency. As a comparison a single RTX 3070 GPU optimized does something like 600 MH/s at 90 Watts of power used, so a single KS3 ASIC miner is equal to around 14000 Nvidia RTX 3070 GPUs in terms of hashrate and is going to be way more power efficient. With the current total network hashrate of Kaspa (KAS) at around 1.16 PH/s at this very moment, doubling it with the Antminer KS3 ASIC miners would only take just like 140 devices and Bitmain should be producing way more than that for sure…
There is no official price announced yet and Bitmain is running a competition for users to guess the price, but you can expect it to be in the tens of thousands for sure. Bitmain plans to start shipping the KS3 miners in August, meaning that you can expect a huge spike in difficulty around that time as the new machines start going online. There will be a couple of reductions of the block reward of KAS by that time and with the massive spike in the hashrate the crazy high profitability of over $2500 USD per day at the moment for the KS3 should be much lower by the time you can actually get your hands on a miner. Bitmain of course wants to take your money now for the KS3.
So, FPGA mining and GPU mining for KAS will start to fade out with ASIC miners hitting the network as it will become unprofitable for sure, even with the price increasing it will still be unreasonable to think that you’d be able to compete with significantly faster and much more power efficient in terms of hashrate ASIC miners. You still have a little more time left to mine though, so do not be quick to switch to another coin just yet. Or use the opportunity to stack up on some KAS coins while the price is low.
The Osprey Electronics E300 14 GH/s kHeavyHash miner might have been the first FPGA miner on the market for KASPA, but it apparently won’t be the only one with more FPGA and ASIC miners for KAS incoming. The E300 was initially priced at $4999 USD and is currently available at $5199 USD with end of May delivery with 400-500 Watts of power usage, but it seems that the device is now facing competition with the MultMiner M2 FPGA miner (apparently a rebranded Blackminer FPGA from HashAltCoin with kHeavyHash support) offering a hashrate of 8 GH/s at 1 kW or 10.5 GH/s at 1.3 kW as well as DigyByte, Tellor, Qitmeer and Kadena support with a price of $2000+ USD. The other new option is apparently called SuperScalar K10 kHeavyHash ASIC miner that promises 30 GH/s hashrate at 1700W of power usage with a price of around $8500-$10000 USD.
All of these FPGA and ASIC miners for KASPA (KAS) are quite expensive and although they do outperform the GPUs that most of us use for mining KAS at the moment, they still might not be a good investment and the reason for that is pretty simple – KASPA (KAS) is the only coin that currently uses the kHeavyHash algorithm and its block reward is decreasing steadily each month (check the emission curve for details) and constantly rising hashrate and difficulty. So, going for a very expensive kHeavyHash ASIC miner that cannot mine anything else is very risky and can easily get you to lose money, it is much wiser to invest what you would pay for the hardware to buy KAS instead, that could turn out to be a much better investment. The situation with FPGAs is a bit better as they could in theory be reprogrammed to mine other algorithms and coins, but there is no guaranteed that they will be, so still quite risky and again might be a better choice to go for directly investing in KAS than to buy FPGA or ASIC miner to mine it with it.
Now, if you happen to have an old Blackminer F1, F1mini, F1+, F1mini+, F1-Ultra or an F2 purchased back in the day from HashAltCoin, then you might want to pay attention here as these got a firmware update to support KASPA (KAS), although the bitstream to support the kHeavyHash algorithm is strangely called “Kasper Bit”. Head on to HashAltCoin’s support section to download the new firmware updates for these devices that will bring you KAS support and depending on the hardware you have you might be lucky to get a “free” MultMiner M2 capabilities. Surely it will be a good enough reason to revive these miners from the dead even if it is just a small mini that is not that much powerful it could still mine you some Kaspa coins at profit due to the great power efficiency of these FPGAs.
Do note however that you might need to use proxy or a VPN if you are based on USA (maybe some other countries as well) in order to access HashAltcoin’s official website and be able to download the firmware updates for the Blackminer!!!
– To the HashAltcoin Support Center with KAS bitstream updates for Blackminer FPGA miners…
Checking out the Hive OS Linux Mining OS statistics about what coins and algorithms are the most mined among the users of that mining operating system today gives quite interesting results. Kaspa (KAS) has tied with Ethereum Classic (ETC) with each at 19% of the coins being mined, followed by Ravencoin (RVN) in third place with 9%, NEXA at 7% and ERGO (ERG) at 5%. KAS has been slowly catching up to ETC in the statistics since the beginning of the year, but now it is about to flip it and become the most mineable coin among HiveOS users (it is still actually less than half percent behind). Of course, HiveOS is not the only Linux-based mining operating system and there are users that are mining directly, still this is one of the largest in terms of users and gives a good overview and insight thanks to the statistics that it provides.
It is interesting to note that in the chart with the algorithms Kaspa (KAS) and its kHeavyHash mining algorithm are apparently at 21% already with Etchash used by Ethereum Classic (ETC) at 20% of the total. There is a slight difference in the percentage here as there are some coins that use the same algorithm for mining and looking at the ore detailed stats with less rounding, we can see that Nicehash-kHeavyHash constitutes at around 1.5% additionally, though listed as a separate entity in the coins section and the Nicehash-EtcHash is at just 0.66%. Among the new coins that are slowly going up, apart from NEXA that is already quite high up at 7.29%, we can also see Dynex (DNX) at 1.43% and Radiant (RXD) at 0.8%.
– Take a look at the full Hive OS network statistics for more insights…