Bitcoin Forum

I’m so happy! this is great news. I’ll refrain from laughing at Bitmain and Canaan.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/31/samsung-confirms-asic-chips/

Haha, that's cool, but making ASIC chips doesn't mean they're making miners. For example they could be making ASICs ships for Bitmain to build with. I really wonder who they are making these chips for, though. They will be a major player, whomever they are.

Ebang announced their new miner would use Samsung 10nm chips, could be part of it. I feel like that's probably where the chips are going, it's still anybody's guess though. Could even be an algo other than SHA256 for all we know.

I would say “But the article says to mine bitcoin” but it also says Ethereum which we know isnt true.
Unless it is. Lol
From the article.

“Samsung has confirmed that it has begun manufacturing ASIC chips which are used to mine bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies.”

It's probably not the SAME chip for bitcoin and ethereum, but if a shop like Samsung is going to make one, why not both?  Innosilicon does.

Really exciting news and a big step forward for the network if it materializes - it's a little sketchy to have one scumbag supplier feeding the majority of the network hashpower

I read about Samsung entering the ASIC arena earlier this week. This could  be good for a few reasons, like the possibility of
more efficient and cheaper mining equipment. With that possibly opening the market to better availability as well. But my
main hope is, that such a Big, well known Name, will draw in more support from other businesses, to reinforce the BTC
community. After all, we can mine, but only as long as there is a need for BTC to be mined.

Article has some issues.

 It says Samsung makes GPUs that are used in mining - the only GPUs they make are the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 ti models, which are VERY little used in mining due to bad efficiency, and the GTX 1030 which isn't used in mining at all AFAIK.
 It says that ASIC are used for ETH mining- which is COMPLETELY WRONG at this point.
 Among others I noticed.

 It also talked about rumours of a "chinese distribution partner" - this is probably a reference to eBang and their announced "using Samsung to make 10nm chips for their next miner".

 Innosilicon never made any sort of a "dual algorithm" chip, the ONLY folks that ever did that was Gridseed and their offspring SFARDS - and the algos were SHA256 and Scrypt, no ETH in there at all.


 I would be inclined to say that whoever wrote that article had a MAJOR FAIL on their fact checking, or is just clueless about cryptocoin mining and doesn't normally write about it.

Low efficiency for mining doesn't change the fact that those GPU's could be used for mining also. Mainly, they make chips for GPU's for computers, but they could be also used for mining. It doesn't say that they are used for mining only.


There is possibility that they are making ASIC miners that could be used for ETH mining, it is not impossible. If something is not done before, it doesn't mean it is impossible.


As I said before, if something is not done before it doesn't mean its impossible. I don't understand why there couldn't be dual algorithm chip that could do both SHA256 and Ethash. Also maybe they will insert two separated chips that would be dedicated for one algorithm only. That way you could have one ASIC miner for two or more algorithms. They didn't specify "how" they'r going to make ASIC miner that could do what they say it do. We need to wait and see I guess.

I'm more inclined to believe that it is YET ANOTHER article about cryptocoin mining where the writer didn't know what they are writing about and DID NOT FACT CHECK before they posted it.
Occam's razor, yanno?

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Moderator's note: This post was edited by frodocooper to remove an unnecessary quote.

There is possibility that you are correct about writer's knowledge , I will not deny that. Note from the bottom of article made me question writer's knowledge of crypto. But I still believe that what I wrote is logical and possible. So I guess, maybe both of us is right in this case.

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Moderator's note: This post was edited by frodocooper to remove multiple nested quotes.

They made the t1 asic chip fact.

It is in the Halong dragonmint
It will be in the innosilicon t2.

They may not have designed the chip but their chip foundry cut the wafers.

I think they will be putting in 1 chip in their TV sets sooner or later.

This, I'm sure will NOT happen.

How can you be so sure?
Maybe they'll install it and give you, the owner, the right to chose if you wanna mine a little while watching GoT.  ;D
The new line of TVs will be Smart BTC Edition..

Interesting concept. If they were smart, they'd do it on smartphones and mobile devices. There are more and majority are already connected to Internet. Not everyone with a smart TV connects it to the Internet. I'm sure some companies would love to do it covertly.

There have been ideas to put mining chips into consumer electronics before.
They keep dying when the costs end up killing the product concept.

There is NO BLOODY WAY you're going to see a mining chip in a smartphone - they eat way too much power, and smartphones use "battery life" as a selling point.
Same issue with ANY mobile device - power consumption is going to kill the battery too fast, if you have enough hashrate to actually DO anything with.


The only "TV" I own has never been used as a TV - I needed a "quick" replacement for a dead monitor and my local Walmart was out of stock on monitors at that point (and there are NO other local options for computer stuff at all).
It also has a nasty irritating tendancy to want to shut itself off if it has no signal for more than about 3 seconds (it's shut itself down occasionally during computer BOOT UP as a result, which is a major PITA).
Stupid excessively "Green" garbage gets irritating that way.

How can I be so sure? I do believe I'm qualified to make that judgement.

Because one mining chip provides pitiful amounts of mining and a lot more consumes far too much power for a generic consumer device. Power consumption is a huge part of a consumer device. Many chips require ridiculous amounts of cooling and TVs and other consumer devices do not usually have any significant amount of cooling; a few heatsinks and maybe one small fan at most. The one chip pitiful amount is seriously not even worth a few satoshi of mining and there is no "generic way" to mine. All mining happens at pools and even at pools one chip won't provide enough to get a payout even once per year. Samsung isn't going to start running their own mining pools to allow people to earn dust amounts of mining that they can never actually redeem, nor will they waste effort and time developing their own chip for such a futile exercise. Samsung will happily press chips for other morons because that's what their chip foundry is designed to do. They don't care what crap designs they get given, they just have to press them at ever decreasing sizes for ever increasing costs to get their money.

Forget it, the equation doesn't work.

As someone pretty familiar with the economics of single-chip miners - yes, exactly. The cost of integrating one chip into something would profit the chip vendor, and the integrator (if he could sell it), but never the customer. The customer would only pay extra for that much mining if he's an idiot unaware of the economics of the situation, or just doesn't care about the economics of the situation.

Been saying that for years, and if anything, the economics keep getting worse with time.

Dudes, I was just joking around but thanks for opening my eyes.
I'm not in that chip building business but nonetheless I knew that it wouldn't be profitable for the consumer. That's simple logic.
But I didn't know this technical things that you've explained so well.
Thanx for that.

Some other people here are pushing the idea for real.

 As an example - Antminer's Scrypt router (R4?) - which has never earned even close enough to pay for it's cost premium over other devices with no mining in them that have similar performance, much less it's total cost, and at THIS point I think it might be underwater on cost of running the mining chip vs income unless you have FREE electric.

that is because they seriously overcharged for it

the t1 chip which samsung built for  halong/inno_silicon

does 16000 gh pushed in a dragonmint

it does 13500 gh at a relaxed speed.

That chip cost under 5 bucks.
Based on 192 x 5 = 960 and black fri price was 1500 for gear

A Samsung smart tv 50 inch costs 749

It has internet
It has a cpu

So a pcb with the chip and a heat sink is cheap under 10

Maybe they bump price to 800

And it mines 70gh using 7 watts.

Does it ever earn 50 bucks . It does not matter as this is a way to put blockchain in the hands of Sony Samsung LG etc.

I see this happening based on 1.4 billion tvs sold worldwide since 2011

Is it even real? That was announced over 6 months ago. If you've watched ASIC prices amongst all current manufacturers over the past couple months, I believe you can see Bitmain trying to control their monopoly through price manipulation. They have slashed their S9 prices by roughly $1500/unit. This forces all competitors to sell cheaper to stay in the game, which Canaan has followed. Prior to Bitmain's price manipulation, Whatsminer M3 units were the cheapest and quickest ROI. They have not changed their pricing much at all. They'll probably be out of business unless they produce something new because only a fool would pay the same price for something that hashes slower and uses almost double the power.

This may mean that supply is high and demand is low and that they are all trying to get rid of as many units as possible because they already have more efficient chips, or it's just Bitmain trying to put competition out of business. S9 is two year old technology on 16nm chips. Samsung's chip is 10nm and Halong had the chips in August 2017. I'd bet on Bitmain and/or Canaan having better chips that they just aren't releasing to the public yet. They need to capitalize as much as possible on old tech or until a competitor releases something better. Until then, they will continue to maximize profits. The Samsung chips are a bit of a let down. If the specs were legit without ASIC Boost, then they'd be some real competition.

Yet another person with no clue how the industry works and is ascribing malicious intent to a standard business practice.

Bitmain and the other mining manufacturers price their machines based on ROI and market conditions. The prices are low because the price of bitcoin has been suppressed for a while now. It has nothing to do with market manipulation.

P.S. The whatsminers have always been garbage. A 2200w 28nm miner? When was it ever the quickest ROI? Who would be dumb enough to buy that 4+ year old tech?

I've been mining since 2010, but it's cool. This is the speculation forum. If Bitmain's pricing was based solely on ROI and market conditions, then they would have slashed prices back in February. At that time, S9 w/PSU was going for $2500. Pangolinminer relaunch of M3 w/PSU was going for $1k. If you dropped $50k back then, you'd have more than double the total hash rate with M3 for same investment and ROI in under a year at current price/difficulty with $0.05 kWh electric. At a year, S9 would be $10k short. Canaan didn't change their pricing until Bitmain did. Follow the leader. When they are already trying to manipulate BCH price, why wouldn't they also try to manipulate ASIC market?

CK is right however there could still be sneaky ways they or others can hide a discreet low powered low level component based miner that mines while the consumer device is powered. This would hash at a super slow rate however when you do the bigger picture overview and realize maybe its about numbers and for example lets say they produce 20k TV sets with this discreet miner secretly within the design it adds profits to the manufacturers and integrators as such never the consumer. Now this would eventually lead to heavy legal issues if discovered such as class action lawsuits but thats a whole other topic... Fact is real mining requires like CK said lots of power and ventilation more so then one can pack into a modern flat TV set. But it goes to say if they really wanted to add a miner it would be a discreet low powered alternative if anything...

just my 2 cents

Even then people keep ignoring the pooled mining aspect I mentioned. Are you all assuming these will be mining solo - A consumer device couldn't support a full mining node and would need lots of bandwidth so that's not an option. Where would they point their hashrate? Would Samsung really start running a mining pool? Do you really think a company the size of Samsung would mine in secret and risk massive backlash when the profit margins DON'T WORK?

AFAIK in 2014 in the US the FTC went after a PC maker for a selling PC that was also mining in the background. Someone like eMachines or Peoples PC with the mining being done to (in theory) lower the price of the machine or rental contract for it. Point is, even though the Fine Print made mention of the mining aspect the company was still forced to stop and paid a very hefty fine of several million $. I do believe that particular case is why none of the space heater makers have done the obvious thing that could work as long as they make it crystal clear what the miner/heater is doing and provide the associated info on how to get a wallet, where to point the miner/heater at, etc.

Then again, remember VCR's and how most folk's were blinking 12:00 all the time?..... Perhaps to deal with the technology-challenged everyday person, as a default have the miner/heaters mine for a charity wallet like Shriners or whatever is regional to the miners.

Could also use warranty registration as a means to set up pay outs for end users.