Dear Steemit Friends,
In a time when cryptocurrencies are becoming more mainstream and a more lucrative form of income for individuals all around the world, it's no surprise that technology continues to advance at a lightning-fast rate. For several of us, our journey started in the cryptocurrency space in the form of mining. Some of us started with GPUs and continued on as technology advanced and ASICs were developed. In an effort to curb this trend, newer cryptocurrencies that were supposedly ASIC-resistant were developed.
Bitmain has been consistently in the lead of ASIC development and ahead of all competition when it came to price vs hashrate and faster to market than any other manufacturer to date.
A new rumor has it that Bitmain will soon launch a new piece of hardware for electronic currency mining on a new platform that would be GPU-based to mine Ethereum. Currently, Ethereum miners are building rigs equipped with several GPUs to mine the ETH currency. This has made the cost of GPUs skyrocket and has impacted the overall availability of most gaming GPUs. This may soon be an issue of the past. Ethereum is (or was) designed to be ASIC proof, however, Charlie Lee said it best:
According to the Chinese website Technews, Bitmain is about to release an Ethereum ASIC miner tentatively identified as the Antminer F3. The rumored release date is Q2 or Q3 of 2018, which puts its release within the next few months. This comes at a time when Ethereum is speculated to switch to PoS eventually. With the price and marketcap of ETH speculated to overcome Bitcoin this year, I assume this is Bitmain's move to get in quick and make a ton of money before the switch to PoS happens and the price begins to skyrocket to the moon.
The rumored specs of the F3 Ethereum miner indicate that every miner is mounted with 3 mainboards. Each mainboard will have 6 ASIC processors, each of which has 32 1GB DDR3 memory chips. This makes for a very powerful miner and with the lower power consumption expected from Bitmain products, would essentially put all other homemade GPU Mining rigs out of business.
Whether the rumors are true or not will have to be seen. It has been reported that Bitmain has been meeting with various plants and manufacturers in Taiwan to determine whether the needed amount of chips can be produced at the capacity that Bitmain is looking for. In a time where GPUs are in high demand and production is constantly struggling to meet demand, this may be a tall order.
The Dram memory demand that these plants need to fulfill for Bitmain is around 3,000 pieces of 12-inch wafers per month and it's expected that the ETH ASIC chips will begin production sometime this month. Previous rumors speculated that the ASICs could reach 200 to 220 Mhash per second, but with the current specs, the hashrate could possibly be even more. Late last year, it was speculated that the miner could come in two flavors - one with a power supply and one without a power supply, however, I assume Bitmain will follow it's current trend of shipping the miner and a separate power supply as individual products.
When it comes to price, I expect the miner to fall in the range of $2500 - $3000 as this is the typical range Bitmain tends to follow. The demand and overall growing value of Ethereum may even increase that estimate.
Bitmain is well known for getting in at the right time and helping to boost the value of a currency by releasing miners for a currency that has a growing demand. The company is well known for doing whatever it can as early as it can to grab a piece of the market. If the hype is true, I will be one of the first in line to try and get my hands on a couple of these miners.
What are your thoughts? Do you think the rumors are true? Let me know in the comments section below and If you do have any questions, inputs, or feedback, please also share those with me. I would also appreciate support in the form of Upvoting and Re-steeming my post if you found it informative
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