China's Bitmain, which manufactures and sells chips for mining virtual currency, announced that it will sell ASIC for mining for Etherarium. ASIC for Etheriam is on sale in the world for the first time. The selling price is 800 dollars.
The performance of the ASIC "Antminer E 3" released this time has a hash rate of 180 MH / s compared with 800 watts. AMD's Radeon RX Vega 64, a high-performance GPU used for mining Enterprise, is 33 MH / s at 200 watts, which is theoretically about 1.5 times better.
The shipment of Antminer E3 starts from late July, users can purchase up to 5 units per person, but not to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao. The payment method is only bitcoin cache or US dollar.
Because it used an algorithm to counter ASIC, there are community members who are not comfortable with Bitmain's ASIC.
Bitcoins could be mined originally using CPUs and GPUs for home computers. After the ASIC appeared, mining was difficult due to slow computing speed in CPU and GPU. Since the development of ASIC requires a large number of funds, coin distribution is considered to be unfair when ASIC becomes the mainstream of mining.
It has ASIC tolerance, compared with bitcoin SHA 256, it uses Ethash which is complicated in operation and adopt it as a mining algorithm. Because Ethash requires a larger memory capacity than SHA 256, GPU mining is common.
Although Monroe can be mined with GPU as well as Etheriam, it regularly competes with ASIC by changing the mining algorithm. As ASIC is developed specifically for one work, if the algorithm is changed, mining cannot be done.
In the future, since there is a plan to change the mining algorithm from PoW (proof of work) to PoS (proof of stake), it will be impossible for mining by ASIC.
Why did Bitmain sell the ASIC of Etheriam now?
Although this is not a guess band, may not it be a hard fork planned by PoW faction community members when the company changes its algorithm to PoS? Minor for PoW has an incentive against PoS because mining income disappears when the algorithm is changed to PoS.
In the bitcoin community last year, discussion on block sizes did not come together, resulting in the creation of minor led bitcoin cash. There is a good possibility that community splitting will occur over PoW or PoS even in Ehitarimu. It may include that Antique E 3 release.