Happy New Years! Seventh alt coin thread!

[dlezama]

People keep saying "bitmain mines with them for months before releasing them". In the case of Sia, someone said bitmain "clearly" mined for 45 days before releasing. I was there looking when Sia ASICs came out, I can for sure say that bitmain didn't mine a single day before shipping them, ASIC introduction is obvious in a small coin like Sia.

Now in the case of Monero, the entire network today is equivalent to about 4000 X3s. Clearly there is no room there for bitmain to have been "mining with the X3s for months".

I'm not saying bitmain is not evil, but I'm tired of people accusing them of them stealing babies and killing kitties.

u have to know these chips have been running in some form or another in bitmains ‘testing’ enviroment for months now lol, no one is that naive, well at least i hope not.  Same with sia and x11 idgf what the network hash rate is after they open the floodgates.

all these coins have seen a steady rise in hash and decline in profitability months before bitmain magically announces thier sale. 

The magician has finally come out from behind the curtain but you are still falling for the illusions Dorothy

Are you trolling or you just didn't read my message? It's not a matter of naive or not naive, math doesn't lie, hashrate can't be hidden. You repeat yet again that Sia had a "steady rise in hashrate" "months before bitmain...". THAT IS NOT TRUE

From: https://siastats.info/mining

A3s batch 1 sold on Jan 18th. So, tell me, how in hell bimain "mined with them for months before selling them"? The entire Sia network hashrate was equivalent to only a few A3s before end of Jan.

[rdluffy]

People keep saying "bitmain mines with them for months before releasing them". In the case of Sia, someone said bitmain "clearly" mined for 45 days before releasing. I was there looking when Sia ASICs came out, I can for sure say that bitmain didn't mine a single day before shipping them, ASIC introduction is obvious in a small coin like Sia.

Now in the case of Monero, the entire network today is equivalent to about 4000 X3s. Clearly there is no room there for bitmain to have been "mining with the X3s for months".

I'm not saying bitmain is not evil, but I'm tired of people accusing them of them stealing babies and killing kitties.

u have to know these chips have been running in some form or another in bitmains ‘testing’ enviroment for months now lol, no one is that naive, well at least i hope not.  Same with sia and x11 idgf what the network hash rate is after they open the floodgates.

all these coins have seen a steady rise in hash and decline in profitability months before bitmain magically announces thier sale. 

The magician has finally come out from behind the curtain but you are still falling for the illusions Dorothy

Are you trolling or you just didn't read my message? It's not a matter of naive or not naive, math doesn't lie, hashrate can't be hidden. You repeat yet again that Sia had a "steady rise in hashrate" "months before bitmain...". THAT IS NOT TRUE

From: https://siastats.info/mining

A3s batch 1 sold on Jan 18th. So, tell me, how in hell bimain "mined with them for months before selling them"? The entire Sia network hashrate was equivalent to only a few A3s before end of Jan.

How can you explain a huge spike in diff when people stop buying GPUs like before?

[MagicSmoker]

Are you trolling or you just didn't read my message? It's not a matter of naive or not naive, math doesn't lie, hashrate can't be hidden. You repeat yet again that Sia had a "steady rise in hashrate" "months before bitmain...". THAT IS NOT TRUE

From: https://siastats.info/mining

A3s batch 1 sold on Jan 18th. So, tell me, how in hell bimain "mined with them for months before selling them"? The entire Sia network hashrate was equivalent to only a few A3s before end of Jan.

That chart does seem to prove your point w/r/t SIA, but in the case of XMR it really looks like some front-running has been going on:

https://chainradar.com/xmr/chart

In situations like this I think it is helpful to look at this from a purely economic standpoint: what are the incentives to Bitmain/Baikal/etc. using their own miners before selling them vs. the costs. Since these are foreign companies with near-zero liability to, say, customers in the US or EU, they don't have to worry about individuals claiming they were sent a used or defective product; big farms, perhaps, but not individuals. Conversely, stealth mining the shit out of a high value coin like XMR with your hot new ASIC miner would be all but irresistible so there is a huge incentive to do so.

Frankly, the incentives grossly outweigh the costs, and so you are left with trusting companies like Bitmain and Baikal to act ethically. You can take that bet if you want, but I certainly won't.

[philipma1957]

Are you trolling or you just didn't read my message? It's not a matter of naive or not naive, math doesn't lie, hashrate can't be hidden. You repeat yet again that Sia had a "steady rise in hashrate" "months before bitmain...". THAT IS NOT TRUE

From: https://siastats.info/mining

A3s batch 1 sold on Jan 18th. So, tell me, how in hell bimain "mined with them for months before selling them"? The entire Sia network hashrate was equivalent to only a few A3s before end of Jan.

That chart does seem to prove your point w/r/t SIA, but in the case of XMR it really looks like some front-running has been going on:

https://chainradar.com/xmr/chart

In situations like this I think it is helpful to look at this from a purely economic standpoint: what are the incentives to Bitmain/Baikal/etc. using their own miners before selling them vs. the costs. Since these are foreign companies with near-zero liability to, say, customers in the US or EU, they don't have to worry about individuals claiming they were sent a used or defective product; big farms, perhaps, but not individuals. Conversely, stealth mining the shit out of a high value coin like XMR with your hot new ASIC miner would be all but irresistible so there is a huge incentive to do so.

Frankly, the incentives grossly outweigh the costs, and so you are left with trusting companies like Bitmain and Baikal to act ethically. You can take that bet if you want, but I certainly won't.

Bitmain  made so much money last year they simply don't know what to do this year.

So they figured  WTF why not attack gpu coins.

The next  few months will be very interesting to say the least.

[generalt]

Bitmain  made so much money last year they simply don't know what to do this year.

So they figured  WTF why not attack gpu coins.

The next  few months will be very interesting to say the least.

I think I read somewhere that Bitmain probably made more then Nvidia last year.  

By the time they ship in May that miner it will be pretty much a door stop.  Sure there might be one or two CN coins that don't switch but certainly not enough to be profitable.  It seems the crazy times of crypto never end.

[philipma1957]

Samsung Power Outage Kills 3.5% of Global Flash For March


http://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-power-outage-flash-pyeongtaek,36670.html

Wonder how this affects mining>

[generalt]

Samsung Power Outage Kills 3.5% of Global Flash For March


http://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-power-outage-flash-pyeongtaek,36670.html

Wonder how this affects mining>

I think it said that it was NAND flash so I assumed it was more the SSD side of things but I'm no expert.

[philipma1957]

Samsung Power Outage Kills 3.5% of Global Flash For March


http://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-power-outage-flash-pyeongtaek,36670.html

Wonder how this affects mining>

I think it said that it was NAND flash so I assumed it was more the SSD side of things but I'm no expert.

Oh may not be much of an issue.

[QuintLeo]

Are you trolling or you just didn't read my message? It's not a matter of naive or not naive, math doesn't lie, hashrate can't be hidden. You repeat yet again that Sia had a "steady rise in hashrate" "months before bitmain...". THAT IS NOT TRUE

From: https://siastats.info/mining

A3s batch 1 sold on Jan 18th. So, tell me, how in hell bimain "mined with them for months before selling them"? The entire Sia network hashrate was equivalent to only a few A3s before end of Jan.

It is likely that Bitmain had some engineering samples mining for a while - but the numbers don't support them having MASS deployed them to mine with prior to their sale announcements on the A3 OR the X3.



A shortage of FLASH to make SSDs with might affect pricing some, but it's not going to affect mining much - we're already having GPU shortage issues that are much worse after all.

[QuintLeo]

https://chainradar.com/xmr/chart

In situations like this I think it is helpful to look at this from a purely economic standpoint: what are the incentives to Bitmain/Baikal/etc. using their own miners before selling them vs. the costs. Since these are foreign companies with near-zero liability to, say, customers in the US or EU, they don't have to worry about individuals claiming they were sent a used or defective product; big farms, perhaps, but not individuals. Conversely, stealth mining the shit out of a high value coin like XMR with your hot new ASIC miner would be all but irresistible so there is a huge incentive to do so.

Frankly, the incentives grossly outweigh the costs, and so you are left with trusting companies like Bitmain and Baikal to act ethically. You can take that bet if you want, but I certainly won't.

The "Vega are huge monero miners" news got widespread in November - which is when Vega supply dried up VERY quickly and the hashrate climb started.
Then the "3'd party" cards hit in Febuary or so, likely feeding the second hashrate surge 'till the price spike collapsed and hashrate went flat.

I doubt Bitmain had a LOT of miners running in that timeframe, though I'm sure they had SOME "engineering sample" type miners running to test out.

[QuintLeo]

People keep saying "bitmain mines with them for months before releasing them". In the case of Sia, someone said bitmain "clearly" mined for 45 days before releasing. I was there looking when Sia ASICs came out, I can for sure say that bitmain didn't mine a single day before shipping them, ASIC introduction is obvious in a small coin like Sia.

Now in the case of Monero, the entire network today is equivalent to about 4000 X3s. Clearly there is no room there for bitmain to have been "mining with the X3s for months".

7000 more-or-less if you include ALL CN coins - but most of the extra is ETN which has also announced plans to change their algorithm.
Ballpark 500 if you count ALL of the CN coins combined except XMR and ETN.

No way Bitmain has been mining with thousands of X3 units for months, most of the hashrate growth happened in November-January timeframe can EASILY be explained by the timeframe of when those "Vega are crazy Monero miners" guides started popping up and when the massive Vega shortage hit.
The later jump in late Febuary MIGHT have been X3 production units going online, but some of it would be "Vegas from 3'd party manufactures become widely available for sale and are IN STOCK" even with the inflated pricing on most of those GPUs.

[MagicSmoker]

https://chainradar.com/xmr/chart

In situations like this I think it is helpful to look at this from a purely economic standpoint: what are the incentives to Bitmain/Baikal/etc. using their own miners before selling them vs. the costs. Since these are foreign companies with near-zero liability to, say, customers in the US or EU, they don't have to worry about individuals claiming they were sent a used or defective product; big farms, perhaps, but not individuals. Conversely, stealth mining the shit out of a high value coin like XMR with your hot new ASIC miner would be all but irresistible so there is a huge incentive to do so.

Frankly, the incentives grossly outweigh the costs, and so you are left with trusting companies like Bitmain and Baikal to act ethically. You can take that bet if you want, but I certainly won't.

The "Vega are huge monero miners" news got widespread in November - which is when Vega supply dried up VERY quickly and the hashrate climb started.
Then the "3'd party" cards hit in Febuary or so, likely feeding the second hashrate surge 'till the price spike collapsed and hashrate went flat.

I doubt Bitmain had a LOT of miners running in that timeframe, though I'm sure they had SOME "engineering sample" type miners running to test out.

Yeah, I definitely remember seeing all the Vega pumping, and I just as distinctly recall them disappearing from Newegg's stock in a matter of days... and ever since then they have only been sporadically available, and at ~2x MSRP (Newegg's price, not some janky reseller's).

No doubt some of the increase in hashrate is from the unprecedented success of compromising servers into XMR mining botnets, but come on, average network hashrate just 3 months ago was around 200 MH/s and now it is 1 GH/s. If half of that jump was from Vegas, and each Vega does 2 kH/s, then AMD must have sold ~400000 200000* Vegas in less than 3 months. That doesn't sound realistic to me, as that would normally be a fantastic number of sales for the entire lifecycle (~2 years) of a flagship "gaming" GPU. Then again, I can't say I would be surprised to be proven utterly and totally wrong about this. Crypto kinda defies logic (just like dotcoms did 20 years ago).

* - oops, I forgot to divide the 800 MH/s by 2... 

[philipma1957]

https://chainradar.com/xmr/chart

In situations like this I think it is helpful to look at this from a purely economic standpoint: what are the incentives to Bitmain/Baikal/etc. using their own miners before selling them vs. the costs. Since these are foreign companies with near-zero liability to, say, customers in the US or EU, they don't have to worry about individuals claiming they were sent a used or defective product; big farms, perhaps, but not individuals. Conversely, stealth mining the shit out of a high value coin like XMR with your hot new ASIC miner would be all but irresistible so there is a huge incentive to do so.

Frankly, the incentives grossly outweigh the costs, and so you are left with trusting companies like Bitmain and Baikal to act ethically. You can take that bet if you want, but I certainly won't.

The "Vega are huge monero miners" news got widespread in November - which is when Vega supply dried up VERY quickly and the hashrate climb started.
Then the "3'd party" cards hit in Febuary or so, likely feeding the second hashrate surge 'till the price spike collapsed and hashrate went flat.

I doubt Bitmain had a LOT of miners running in that timeframe, though I'm sure they had SOME "engineering sample" type miners running to test out.

Yeah, I definitely remember seeing all the Vega pumping, and I just as distinctly recall them disappearing from Newegg's stock in a matter of days... and ever since then they have only been sporadically available, and at ~2x MSRP (Newegg's price, not some janky reseller's).

No doubt some of the increase in hashrate is from the unprecedented success of compromising servers into XMR mining botnets, but come on, average network hashrate just 3 months ago was around 200 MH/s and now it is 1 GH/s. If half of that jump was from Vegas, and each Vega does 2 kH/s, then AMD must have sold ~400000 Vegas in less than 3 months. That doesn't sound realistic to me, as that would normally be a fantastic number of sales for the entire lifecycle (~2 years) of a flagship "gaming" GPU. Then again, I can't say I would be surprised to be proven utterly and totally wrong about this. Crypto kinda defies logic (just like dotcoms did 20 years ago).

400,000 vegas is 240,000,000  =  600 x 400,000   I would think  that is more then they sold.

  so  maybe 10 tester prototypes then a small 100 unit run  that is 110 which is the same as 20 x 110 = 2200 vegas

A good way to understand how many are mining as I type is list the hash rate every day til the al- gore - rhythm is altered

If it drops off by 20% odds are bitmain mined more then 110  units.

[fr4nkthetank]

Its simple economics really.  Bitmain may have made 100 000 ASICS, but if the total market is equivalent to 3000 ASICS (lets assume), then all they need to do is calculate how much they can add to the hashrate without dropping profitability too much relative to the price of the coin.  So it would be much more profitable to simply gradually add 35% of total hashrate over 2-3 months and mine, and keep adding hashrate as the coin price rises.  After a while you can sell all your machines but the point is at first its more profitable to keep the machines in the boxes.  So perhaps they have been mining for a very long time now, but maybe someone else has made one (hint) and now they feel obligated to sell their used hardware as always.

[JaredKaragen]

bitmain wants so much for the cryptonight miners;  just because they only realized too late that they will basically become bricks....

[Max Likelihood]

Its simple economics really.  Bitmain may have made 100 000 ASICS, but if the total market is equivalent to 3000 ASICS (lets assume), then all they need to do is calculate how much they can add to the hashrate without dropping profitability too much relative to the price of the coin.  So it would be much more profitable to simply gradually add 35% of total hashrate over 2-3 months and mine, and keep adding hashrate as the coin price rises.  After a while you can sell all your machines but the point is at first its more profitable to keep the machines in the boxes.  So perhaps they have been mining for a very long time now, but maybe someone else has made one (hint) and now they feel obligated to sell their used hardware as always.

I think this (and Magic Smoker's economic argument) cut to the heart of it--whatever maximizes their utility, they will have carefully calculated and executed. And possibly it is a matter of more cards, e.g. Vega shortage etc. AND something with asics--not mutually exclusive explanations, right?

[Marvell2]

Its simple economics really.  Bitmain may have made 100 000 ASICS, but if the total market is equivalent to 3000 ASICS (lets assume), then all they need to do is calculate how much they can add to the hashrate without dropping profitability too much relative to the price of the coin.  So it would be much more profitable to simply gradually add 35% of total hashrate over 2-3 months and mine, and keep adding hashrate as the coin price rises.  After a while you can sell all your machines but the point is at first its more profitable to keep the machines in the boxes.  So perhaps they have been mining for a very long time now, but maybe someone else has made one (hint) and now they feel obligated to sell their used hardware as always.

In pretty sure this is what they have done with the D3, A3 and now this X3 the difference with the x3 is they got thier hands forced to swamp the market prematurely due to this hardfork.  I bet if zcash announces a hardfork to change thier algo , a new Z3 miner will magically appear in the shitmain shop

[Max Likelihood]

Does anyone in this experienced group know if it realistically possible that equihash can be "asiced" in the near future? I am familiar with the argument that anything can be with time, but don't know the technical details well enough to judge how close the zec devs came to long term asic resistance with equihash.

[QuintLeo]

I think I read somewhere that Bitmain probably made more then Nvidia last year.  

Rumored, but no HARD numbers are available for Bitmain.
Given they probably have a lot higher margin on their sales, their profits being higher than Nvidia in 2017 would be no shock.

[QuintLeo]

Does anyone in this experienced group know if it realistically possible that equihash can be "asiced" in the near future? I am familiar with the argument that anything can be with time, but don't know the technical details well enough to judge how close the zec devs came to long term asic resistance with equihash.

Massive amounts or RAM required makes it pretty resistant.
It's also generally strongly limited by memory access.

I also note that ETH specifically has been having the "ongoing work to move to POS" happening or being discussed as "going to happen" for a couple years or so now, which probably has limited the potential market for any ASIC for the algorithm.
Probably would have ALREADY happened if it wasn't for the DAO fiasco and the fixes and testing of the fixes to cure that sort of thing.