Bitmain has just announced a new Equihash ASIC miner that is set to ship towards the end of June. It touts 10 thousand Sols hash rate while only needing 300 watts of power. The cost is listed at $1999 in BTC or BCH. A quick whattomine calculation shows about $40 USD in return daily at current hash rates of course. The addition of a large number of these miners will certainly drive this down to $30 or even $20 quite quickly and further as the total hash rate rises.
If these specs hold up, this could potentially disrupt the mining market for all Zcash based coins such as ZEN, HUSH, BCTP etc. This type of performance will flat out destroy that from graphics cards even despite the recent restock and price depression seen on secondary sellers and eBay. Some chains may fork but right now it seems ZEC themselves have not decided exactly what their plan is. What do you think about the rise of an Equihash ASIC miner? Will this lead to centralization and new forks or is the Equihash hash market large enough to absorb most of this new power without much change?
