As we all know, in the case of ASICs, you want start mining in the earliest period when the network hashrate is relatively low giving you the biggest hits. For this reason, always the first ASIC miners batches have always been the most expensive because of the bigger return in this peroid. The next batches were cheaper and sent to customers at a later date so that the previous ones would have a chance to return of investment. Not this time. In the case of Antminer X3 Bitmain used a different tactic
Let's analyze it. Thus :
Batch 1 Antminer X3 price 11999 USD shipping 15-31 May
Batch 1 Offcial Bitmain Website
Then it’s appeared
Batch 3 (btw. Where is Batch 2?) Antminer X3 price 3000 USD shipping 15-25 May
Batch 3 Official Bitmain Website
The warning lamp in your head should already light up here. Yes, the sale of Batch 3 was caused by the decision of the Monero Team which wants block this type of machine. However, probably no one will believe that Bitmain did not know about it. The more so because the monero team reported this in February:
Monero PoW change and key reuse
The next step was the release of Batch 4 price 1900 USD shipping 15-30 June
Batch 4 Official Bitmain Website
In the network, good people began to warn naive buyers. It's no secret that the companies that produce ASIC machines before they put them out for sale quite heavily use them to extract coins being the only large digging player, which is not rare. This is very well seen when monero introduced hardfork and changed it’s algorithm to CryptoNight V7. You can see an 80% decrease in the monero network hashrate :
On the same day, bitmain decided to release a batch without a number, it could be called Batch 0 or BatchJacking, which is full of earlier ones.
BatchJacking price 1999 USD shipping 1-10 May
BatchJacking Official Bitmain Website
Now we will see the differences
Unwilling to know how people felt who were waiting for any return on investment from Batch 1. A huge waste of money, which bitmain will not pay back according to what he wrote in the offer :
The only option is to stop supporting this type of producers and simply do not buy any devices from them even when these in the calculators show very large profits and a very quick return. Such a calculator is applicable only when we are actually able to predict the difficulty of extraction when we receive the device and these values can be quite well estimated and are not true.