Bitcoin Forum

Bitmain has found itself in a war with words with the monero community over the release of its latest cryptocurrency miner, the Cryptonight-capable X3. The unit is being offered at a discounted rate to existing customers, but critics claim this is because the miners will soon be ineffective at mining monero, the main coin to use the X3’s Cryptonight technology. Monero lead developer Riccardo Spagni has emphasized that the units will not work on monero due to a scheduled hard fork designed specifically to outwit the Cryptonight algorithm.

https://news.bitcoin.com/battle-algorithms-bitmain-sparked-asic-mining-war/

I hardly think bitmain's upset. They made these asics months ago and been mining privately laughing all the way to the bank. The release to the public is a last ditch effort to capture additional profits (and duping anyone buying them) before they become paperweights worth nothing.

Right, Monero team discovered that currently 75% of coins are mined not on public pools but from unknown source, that's why they decided to change the algo. And almost immediately bitmain announced their ASICs. So bitmain has been mined Monero on their ASICs for some time anyway.

Perhaps soon we are waiting for revolutionary changes in the algorithms of coins. Everyone will start to defend themselves against asics. That's correct. The best for of the coin is the decentralization of mining. This can be achieved only when GPU mining. Perhaps this year we will have many forks and the depreciation of the coins on the old algorithms.

Yeah, g3 coins perhaps will auto change algo when detected huge lumps of hashrate in one device, things similar to nvlink will be banned from existence and no device will be able to mine if greater than normally reported hashrate, there are many ways to deal with it.

Jihan has enough money.  It's time for someone to rip the head off of Bitmain.  Whether it be Samsung or technology that provides defense against ASIC's.

Can someone fork monero and call it monero cash please? I bought batch 4 X3 and I don't care if it gets rejected by monero devs and I knew the risk. I respect the devs for wanting to stay asic resistance. I just need something to mine. Power specs is great for a home miner.

I'll probably mine some other smaller cap cryptonight coin and Auto exchange it for monero

Miners aren't in an uproar - the upgrades to mining software are already out there.
BOTNET operators might be in an uproar, and morons that didn't do their DUE DILIGENCE before they bought an X3 might be in an uproar, but that's THEIR OWN problem.


I won't be shocked if Bitmain decides to back a "Monero Cash" type stupidcoin just to keep their miners worth something - but I for one will have NOTHING to do with it, just like I refuse to have anything to do with the Bitmain-backed Bitcoin Cash junkcoin.

So i guess that is what will happen then, bitcoin cash, ethereum cash, zcash cash, monero cash.

MoneroV :)

If there's an ASIC behind it, you bet miners will find a way to keep the ASIC profitable so they can at least make their money back. Bitmain had enough money to keep BCH afloat (and surprisingly enough it's still somehow still alive) and more profitable than even BTC temporarily, they can afford to fork Monero and keep ASICs profitable on it if they so choose to by methods like pumping the coin.

As someone mentioned above, its highly likely that Bitmain was already mining with these ASICs for months. I think this is the case with many 'ASIC resistant' coins, where large company with lots of resources may have already built ASICs in private and are mining with them. The threat of forking the blockchain is what stops them from publicly making money selling those ASICs though.

So if this is correct, what makes anyone think that ethash difficulty will sky rocket once these asic's hit the public streets?  Aren't they just selling off used miners that they have already used to cause a spike in difficulity?  Especially interested in what Metroid thinks about that.

Well if done correctly gpus get a massive boost here we shall soon see.

Why do you say that?

Really? Because cryptonight ASIC mining will disappear. CN global hashrates will be down and the AMD RX VEGA rig i bought will become profitable again.

This scandal with CN ASICs has really affected miners especially those who bough VEGA GPUs with the intent to use them for CN mining. Now VEGA miners are stuck mining ETH at subpar profitability.

@ gotminer

Metroid

He is a master of the half truth propaganda method of blogging.

But  the truth  he did reveal is there was a lot of asic's mining secretly on 'gpu' coins.

He just left out the  algo switch.

bitmain mentions the switch on the 3000 and 1900 dollar batches

https://i.imgur.com/URP1YUr.png

https://i.imgur.com/URP1YUr.png

With ETH Difficulty rise from 1.5 to 3.0 in Dec/Jan i betting there are ETH asics as well.

I agree since gpus are not being sold yet diff goes up and up

Bro Phil, what do you think about Vegas and some 550's/1050s jumping on eth? aren't they enough to pull up such diff?

no  from 1.5 to 2.0  maybe but not double.

of course  the mining only p102-100 and p104-100  may have done a lot to the hash rate jump

1.45 to 2.65. It was almost double, and 80% were asics.

https://etherscan.io/chart/difficulty

Also to prove my point, profits crashed and network still the same cause gpus miners are leaving and many left the network and to camouflage it, bitmain and co are putting asics to cover the hashrate of those gpu miners that left/leaving the network. They don't want it to look suspicious.

This burden is not on the shoulders of Bitmain. They are already in profit if they mined with just a few miners plus their order model is based on pre-orders. Meaning that they get the money before units are put into production.

If Monero changes its algo, there will still be its forks. Eventually, some coins are going to keep their algo and actually embrace ASICs.

So what is the new fork date? I heard it was pushed to either April 9th or April 30th...

Given the continuing extreme shortage of AMD RX570/580 GPUs despite their announced ramp-up, and the even worse shortage of Nvidia 1060/1070 cards in the timeframe of that hashrate climb, and that it did take months to almost double, I doubt VERY MUCH that a significant part of it was ASIC.
There was ZERO REASON for GPU miners to be "leaving" at that point, as profitiablity was still quite high on ETH, since it's PRICE has weathered the "cryptocoin downturn" a lot better than most coins INCLUDING BITCOIN.
I'll also point out that the profitablity compared to ZEC and it's offspring was climbing quite a bit, which would have led to some ZEC miners pointing 1070 and 1060 ZEC rigs at ETH instead (I'm ONE of those on 1070 GPUs, so don't bother saying "it didn't happen").

There might be ETH ASIC out there, but not in the kind of quantity you seem to believe, or they're very low "efficiency gain" over GPU miners and no major threat to GPU mining.

I'll also point out that once the price drop on ETH got serious, ETH total network hashrate flattened out - not DROPPED, just stopped growing much - which ALSO makes it apparent there's no significant number of ASIC being built.

There's also the question of "where are the USED GPUs" that your ALLEGED "gpu miners that left" would be selling off - no signs of them anywhere I can see, and since AMD GPU new pricing is not dropping no indication of a significant number of them ANYWHERE.



1050 isn't a good ETH mining card - it does better even now on ZEC - but the 1050 ti does better on ETH.
Even now the Vega is better off on XMR than ETH.