Bitcoin Forum

Mining equipment wars have, at least temporarily, ended, and a winner emerged.
BFL, KnC, Spoondolies have all bitten the dust, Bitfury and Avalon are no longer competitive and will probably close the shop too.
Antminer R4 is the only profitable miner on the market right now (R9 are not sold to the public at the moment).

That's not a healthy situation IMO. Do we have any hope for it to change in the future?

While at this exact instant in time, there aren't any S9's available, I am 100% certain that Bitmain will make more and put them up for sale. I expect the "No S9 for sale" to be a transient condition that reflects their batch sale strategy. The s9 has most assuredly been for sale to the public and will be again.

You could easily see another time when the R4 isn't available, and the S9 is.

Avalon is supposedly going to deliver the A7 (follow on to the A6). Specs and price are unknown. You are correct about KNC, BFL, and Spondoolies. Bitfury might yet come back to life, but that's fairly speculative at the moment.

I've always thought companies like Bitfury were just keeping the miners for themselves instead of releasing it to the public.

Why keep it for themselves though? When they can make a killing producing one  from a low cost then put an exorbitant pricetag on it for people to buy. People will still buy them anyway, as long as the miner pushes for more THS than the last one, the buying public will see it and be blind to the price.

You don't go to a gun fight with a knife.

No one really fights bitmaintech with ASIC sales.  So no one has been able to release a better cheaper miner.

So Avalon builds a close miner and sells it at a higher price so as not to offer real competition.

Bitfury builds in house gear and avoids it all together .   The best most competitive way to mine btc is with a gpu rig.

Huh ? Wtf ?
  No way .

Well mine eth or xmr with a gpu rig and convert to btc.

This is what bitmaintech is up against.

Frankly I think it is good for all.

So when Avalon releases the 7
I want it to be a 0.08 to .11 watt miner.  And I want it to be a little more costly then the s-9.

This will help gpu mining .  The last thing we need is a war with bitmaintech. And any ASIC company .

Bitmaintech will simply crush that company and in the process it will hurt the btc price.

Same as when. Bitmaintech did battle with spondoolies.

I think this is what's driving people out of bitcoin mining- there's pretty much no more competition left and no more smaller stick or usb based miners made by any official company anymore; GPU mining is a lot cheaper and has a much higher resale value, and Bitcoin's losing quite a few people to altcoins like Ethereum. I'm not jumping ship yet, but the next few months will definitely be interesting. I see bitmain as the only asic provider in the future.

Yeah I have 5 s-9 cost me over 8k

I have 21 gpu's Mining ETH and XMR. I Spent less then 8k . I use 1/2 the power  and right now I am earning more by the gpus then by the asics.

I have a foot in both camps. And can shift either way.

you have the right information about the r4 and r9 but i think r9 will not be easliy available for the public it is because to maintain the the rate of the bitcoin price . stilk the increase price of butcoin is a result of less mining of btc .

If the purpose of mining is to support the network then yes the Bitcoin network is losing support by losing viable mining options.

Most of the alt-coin mined by GPUs is converted to BTC or fiat I would imagine since people need to pay their credit card bills.

I've actually sold off some of my miners for GPUs, they are usually more profitable with coins like Ether and resell for a pretty good price, even if they get outdated, unlike ASICs that are nearly useless when they become unprofitable.

16-14nm is going to be current technology for quite a while until we shift to 12nm or whatever the next step will be, power and performance gains will be very minor in the future, and ASICs should have a marginally longer life than they currently have. That said, it's your choice, and I actually don't recommend mining right now.

I think Antminer won out and at this point, people should be thankful they are still committed to making sure miners are available on a retail basis for the public.    If another company won out, likely that would not be the case at this point in mining.

Mining is not worth now so all companies would be out of business soon. This is how it works :)

Although not entirely thrilled with them I would say they have been one of the best in the miner hardware business (when compared to the behavior of of companies like BFL/Avalon/KNC).

Agree with both of you.   Think about a BFL-lead mining market (yuck).    I am pretty happy about where we are now and its really promising that GPU mining has taken off again with a few legitimate coins that have pros and cons to sit alongside Bitcoin.

I hear what you are saying, this is kind of like Taco Bell surviving the franchise wars in Demolition Man.

Currently yes there is only 2 miners for sale from 1 company (Bitmaintech), however, things will change shortly...

Rumor has it the Avalon7 will be released soon that should compete with the S9 and R4. Hope it does soon so we can get some competition choice and price wise....

It would be better to see more mining equipment. What is actually letting people down to bring them on the market? Since in most places the cost for electricity is high, so why are there no other solutions?

Before we had these usb sticks, there is an bitmain router, though it is old equipment and not profitable nowadays, why is it all gone?

It's not profitable because multi-million dollar corporations have set up shop in countries to get rates that are unimaginable for the little guy.  Little guys should still mine to support the network and possibly turn a profit or break even but the days of easy money are gone.

I thinking that mining is not worth now so all companies would be out of business soon.

Because manufacturers see no need to create more equipment; mining is already more centered on datacenters and people with cheap electricity, so alternatives are now less useful(at least what they think imo). Bitcoin mining has moved off of the home mining scene steadily in the last few months, and we should have seen this coming. I don't forsee any major alternatives to the S9 and A-series miners anytime soon.

Altcoin mining has become pretty viable for most people (GPU coins like ETH and Monero) and it's where home mining is moving very rapidly. Looking at it can't hurt.

I will take a look at it ;)

Another good thing about mining altcoins is that you can quickly exchange them for bitcoins when the price of bitcoin dips.

The A7 is coming , i just noticed more about it on tweeter and some one broke down the A7 code and it looks like it might be a 7 or 8 th that runs better then the S9 or whatever they called there so called home miner  . well see . i posted  more here :

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1502116.msg16531702#msg16531702  I know it's little out dated but it's for those who don't know .


I had given up all hope was about to get ride of my few older antminer i have left and went to GPU Mining, started building a GPU farm .



here is about the A7 code

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1502116.msg16303099#msg16303099

what would be interesting to see is what would happen if Avalon was to sell there A7 say at 800/900 bucks per with no intention of starting a price war or taking on BM they just want to price things the right way .the worse that can happen is BM would lower there price lower and Avalon would start setting the market price from there and would all ways be higher then BM, I can see that working as long they don't get greedily etc . and not try to put BM out of business and actually start price war's but try to make things more fair for every one if Avalon could do that and stay humble thu it all like they are now, i could see it working and BM would be under control price wise. the money would still be there.

IF they really want to keep selling to the public and turned down that deal with the other company because it would have cost more then it was worth (not just money but values) and they didn't want to add more to there administration.  which btw was why they turned it down , i guess they still wanted full control and not add more form the blog that was posted .

I think the problems spondoolies had was they had to be top dog why I say that after all the smoke cleared they went down fighting started making sense less posts there pride was hurt for sure and they actually thought they could take out bitmain and wouldn't back off, and work with them, they had a nice miner to.

i know it won't happen it's just a dream but it's a thought .

800/900 might not be a shock for an Avalon 7 - if they do the same thing as they did on the Avalon 6 and make it a somewhat smaller capability miner vs. the same gen Antminer.

 6TH/600 watt ballpark and at least as quiet as the A6 for $800-$900 would sell a LOT of Avalon 7 units even though it would be somewhat higher on a $/TH basis vs the S9.

Mercy! Even IF I had cheap power and close to 2k to drop on a miner/psu right now I wouldn't.
The draw these units have on your home's tiny little electrical panel seems a bit much.

It was easier to spread a few S3s around the house but these? I don't think so.
 I just made a cross country move and was thinking to set up some more miners.
It looks rough for miners right now?

You also have to take into account the build quality of the Avalon gear over the Bitmain gear.
People should expect to pay more for something that is built better.

I'm hoping for something more like 6TH/450w.  75 w/TH would be very nice.

But you know what they say, wish in one hand....

 I did - as well as the "I hate BitMain" crowd.

 9-)

good for you buddy for minning bitcoin as well as ETH and XMR, i wonder how much space you are allocating for both the equipments,i am not a miner so i have my doubts are you allocating ETH and XMR in the 21 gpu's simultaneously or you have seperate rigs for ETH and XMR. is it possible to mine multiple alt coins simultaneously
since there is only one bitcoin miner in the market the prices are really high and without a worthy competitor consumers wont get a reasonable price for the miners

the only problem with mining ETH with GPU is the size of the DAG file
you already require a card with at least 2 gig memory on board and the file keeps growing with time
http://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/5426/a-bunch-of-2gb-cards-stopped-working-tonight-because-of-dag-file-size/p5
if it exceeds 2 gig,which it will eventually,you would have to switch to less profitable x11 coins or anything similar or buy 3 gig memory videocards

 10nm pure silicon or 7nm silicon/germanium alloy/matrix, depending on if the Intel vision or the IBM vision makes it into mass production first.

 BOTH have said "10nm is end of the road for pure silicon" - which implies a rather long gap to get the infrastructure built up to handle making wafers that are NOT pure silicon in sufficient quantity past 10nm.

 The other issue with ETH mining the last month is that the profitability has gone back into "major drop" mode due to the huge number of folks moving into ETH mining + dag file size growth dropping hashrates a little across the board for existing rigs + price seems to be stagnating at best.
 I suspect there will be a short "bump" in a few months, when the DAG file gets so large that 2GB cards can't mine ETH any more, then back to dropping profitability 'till the big POS switch finally happens.

 X11 is NOT a GPU option any more, can't even break even at 2c/KWH with ANY gpu due to the widespread deployment of multiple ASIC that handle X11. Baikal also handles X13/X15 and a couple other algorythms that don't have any "large scale" coins at all, write those off too.

 XMR might be an option - but watch it tank on profitability hard if a bunch of ex-ETH mining cards suddenly shift when they can't do the DAG any more.



 It does look like the ASIC wars are about to reopen, after too many months of BitMain having the only small-miner available new option. 8-)

 There's a reason I've been building my recent rigs for what I've been doing with them - max flexibility and close to optimal for my PLANNED long-term usage of them (which the 1070 rigs have been doing for a month or so now, and the next 2 planned rigs will go straight into).

 Up side - other than the 1070 rigs, I think pretty much all the hardware I've used on ETH is now paid for or VERY close.
 Down side - I'm having to scramble more than I'd prefer to keep enough income going with changes overall to cryptocoin mining the last few months *AND* my own move complicating things.