We all heard about the release of Bitmains ASIC for equihash or for Monero. We think that it’s pretty reasonable to assume that more powerful equihash ASICs will be released in the coming months regarding most of the currencies.
Several reasons for this.
ASIC Resistance - Forks
The vast majority of ASIC-resistant algorithms were designed by software engineers making assumptions about the limitations of custom hardware. These assumptions tend to be incorrect. Le's take for example Monero. The Monero devs have committed to keeping the same general structure for the PoW algorithm, and because of that commitment we believe that you could make a Monero miner capable of surviving hard forks with less than a 5x hit to performance. The new generation of ASIC will be able to adapt itself to the forks.
Equihash is an algorithm that has three parameters. Zcash mining happens with one particular choice for these parameters, and any naive hardfork from Zcash to drop ASICs would likely involve changing one or more of these parameters. We were able to come up with a basic architecture for equiahsh ASICs that would be able to successfully follow a hardfork that chose any set of parameters. Meaning, a basic hardfork tweaking the algorithm parameters would not be enough to disrupt the new generation chip, a more fundamental change would be needed, resulting to see massive speedups and efficiency gains over GPUs.
All coins
With the new technology , you will be able to mine not only Ethereum,Monero, Btc, Ltc and Dash but all cryptocurrencies. Enabling you to mine faster and having massive speedups and efficiency gains over GPUs you will have a large number of coins with a low-value each, but with a high quantity. At the end of the day, you will always be able to create custom hardware that can outperform general purpose hardware.
There is a pro and cons for this new generation.
Pros and Cons.
Cons - all the cryptocurrencies will be centralized, with a possibility of 51% attack but I don't think it will happen. We can look again what happened with Monero and Ethereum. A few months ago, it was publicly exposed that ASICs had been developed in secret to mine Monero. Some sources say that they had been mining on these secret ASICs since early 2017, and got almost a full year of secret mining in before discovery.
It’s estimated that Monero’s secret ASICs made up more than 50% of the hashrate for almost a full year before discovery, and during that time, nobody noticed. During that time, a huge fraction of the Monero issuance was centralizing into the hands of a small group, and a 51% attack could have been executed at any time and was never did.
The reason why is ASIC are money printer there is no reason to stop printing money.
Pros -The blockchain trx will be faster and ASICS will be more accessible to people.
The biggest takeaway from all of this is that mining is for big players. The more money you spend, the more of an advantage you have, and there’s not an easy way to change that equation. The manufacturer are taking advantages to lead to a centralized world.
