At sometimes, Antminer X3 from Bitmain was selling at $12K. It supposed to mine top CryptoNote coins such as Monero (XMR) or Bytecoin (BCN).
However, XMR developers and community decided for hardfork to switch a variant of CryptoNote called V7. Those ASICs became instantly bankruptcy type investment.
Now Antminer X3s are sold at Ebay at around $1K. Another three companies were also selling CryptoNote ASICs at 1000s of bucks. They then fire sold those ASICs to miners.
XMR forked to four more coins. Though three of them are ASIC mineable, they are not close to profitable.
Then came Bytecoin whose devs decide not to fork. They argued that hardfork makes privacy coins vulnerable to tractability. It looks like BCN saved ASIC miners, but not so much. CryptoNote ASICs flooded the market like swarms, and in bear market they become less profitable by each day.
In the meantime, a small CryptoNote (CN) coin called Sumocoin switched to V7 and few days later switched back to original CN algorithms which made some ASIC miners happy but GPU miners of Sumocoin unhappy.
ASIC makers are making ASICs for literally every other coins from EquiHash (ZCash) to EthHash (ETH).
The most vulnerable are the miners. There is a big conspiracy theory about ASIC makers that they test their ASICs with new coins to make enough ROI for their manufacturing cost and then they sell them to unnoticed miners. They are in no-loss game like House always win.
Everyday ASIC Miners take all the risk of sudden Algorithm change by the coin's dev and community. Think of someone who bought Antminer X3 at $12K, they will never make ROI or half of ROI.
It became cat and mouse game for miners.
On the other hands, GPU miners of BCN and SUMO are whining that they can no longer mine their favorite coins due to ASIC miners and ASICs make their coin centralized.
It shows how vulnerable the miners are at the mercy of ASIC makers and coin developers.
Moreover, mining any of those PoW coins consumes lots of computations which also cost power and on the other hand, energy saving PoS do not produce any meaningful work.
On the other hand, Though STEEM started as PoW coin for initial distribution, now STEEM uses DPoS along with Proof-of-Brain (PoB). STEEM tries to reward the most valuable contents (i.e. Proof-of-brain). However, making perfect proof-of-brain is more than rocket science. It requires Cambrianic explosion of trials and errors to find optimum algorithms where SMT can help.
STEEM's hardforks are used for these kind of optimizations. Interestingly, STEEM hardfork do not create extra chains such as ETH and ETC, or Monero with four forks, or BTC with more than 30 forks.
Image sources: Most images are open sourced (e.g. Pixabay, Wikimedia etc.) with Creative common license. Some images are used with due courtesy to respected owners.
Thanks for reading.
Cryptominer since 2013, occasional trader and tech blogger
