The Chinese manufacturer of mining equipment ASIC, Bitmain, launched the first Ethash algorithm equipment, which allows mining Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Expanse, among others. This team has created a lot of expectations at the beginning of this year and it is beginning to materialize with the official launch of the team. Although its characteristics make it difficult to confirm if it is an ASIC device.
According to the Bitmain website, the Antminer E3 is intended for the Ethash / Dagger-Hashimoto algorithm. It generates more than about 180 MH / s, has an electrical consumption of 800 W and costs about $800, without power source. A rig of 6 video cards (GPU) RX 570 produces approximately the same computing power, consumes about 1,000 W. The difference is that, for one of these rigs, only the graphics cards are valued at around $2,000 , currently, without including the rest of the necessary equipment.
Among the conditions of this lot are that only one device per user will be sold. For their purchase they only accept Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and dollars; They will not be sent to the cities of Hong Kong, Macao or Taiwan, and will be sent between July 16 and 31 of this year. At the time of writing the article, the first batch is sold out.
Bitmain emphasizes that they will not cover the risk of change of the mining algorithm by the developers of the cryptoactive that their clients wish to undermine, maintaining this new policy initiated with the departure of their new miners for Blake2b (oriented towards SiaCoin) and CryptoNight (aimed at Monero). They have established this policy due to the rejection generated in the communities of the cryptoactives mentioned to these ASIC equipment. Especially on the part of Monero, because SiaCoin agreed not to change its algorithm to invalidate the equipment, but being alert to any threat coming from Bitmain.
Before all the rumors that were running prior to the departure of these teams, the Ethereum community has been debating the issue, proposing to fork its blockchain to avoid using such equipment in its network or even advance the transition to the Test consensus algorithm. of Participation (Proof-of-Stake), which have been proposed in the medium term.
Despite this risk with Ethereum, as mentioned, the first batch of E3 has been depleted. Partly because there are other cryptoactives such as Ethereum Classic, Expanse, Musicoin, among others, that could be mined with this equipment. Also, for the striking cost / benefit ratio that this equipment offers compared to the current mining rigs.
On the other hand, this equipment presents a distinctive shape compared to the rest of its ASIC equipment, since it has an elongated shape and a greater volume. With this space you could incorporate 6 personalized video cards in exchange for circuit boards with ASIC chips, which would explain why it does not have as much difference in processing power compared to the current mining rigs. Detail that can not be confirmed until July when they start distributing the first equipment and you can review any of these.
In other reports it has been mentioned that at least four manufacturers are producing ASIC equipment for Ethash, so it would be likely that this is not the latest model of mining that Bitmain, to stay competitive with the other manufacturers. For this reason they could be testing more powerful equipment that they plan to market later, which would explain the remarkable increase in the hash / rate of Ethereum at the beginning of the year, despite the fall in value.