[NEW] Bitmain Announces Antminer A3

[notey]

It is is good question.  WHY would they make a miner for blake2b?

I asked that a few pages back... seems kind of random. Someone else here suggested maybe its to f--k with the team behind Sia, who is also making miners? Seems petty to spend so much money on miners just to funk with a competitor... but with only ONE coin to mine on this machine, who knows? At least with D3's one could play an Altcoin game and mine a few other random things with it. This is literally a brick once profitability dies, and you don't even get to play with anything else. Just seems weird.

Oh well... they still make $10M selling them.

It seems strange unless they are interested in some sort of collaboration or development that would compliment a decentralized cloud storage goal. From SOPHON:

"Deep learning sets off the explosive development of AI applications, leading humans to enter the intelligent era from the information age. It takes both the 'engine', massive computing power, and the 'fuel', a huge amount of data, to successfully launch the deep learning rocket into the AI sky. Based on its extensive experiences in the development and production of chip and system, Bitmain is dedicated to developing the tensor computing processor and related products focusing on accelerating deep learning and serving the better cost effective and the lower power consuming solutions for AI."

This new Antminer A3 miner appears to be a basis for Bitmain's entrance into a cryptocurrency which will support the massive off-site data storage requirements inherent in its AI operations.

From Blake2.net - This algo utilizes parallelism and other tools to increase speed.  Q: Why is BLAKE2 so fast?
A: BLAKE2 is fast in software because it exploits features of modern CPUs, namely instruction-level parallelism, SIMD instruction set extensions, and multiple cores. BLAKE2 also benefits from the optimization work performed during the SHA-3 competition (see for example this paper by two of the designers of BLAKE2).

Q: Why do you want BLAKE2 to be fast? Aren't fast hashes bad?
A: You want your hash function to be fast if you are using it to compute the secure hash of a large amount of data, such as in distributed filesystems (e.g. Tahoe-LAFS), cloud storage systems (e.g. OpenStack Swift), intrusion detection systems (e.g. Samhain), integrity-checking local filesystems (e.g. ZFS), peer-to-peer file-sharing tools (e.g. BitTorrent), or version control systems (e.g. git). You only want your hash function to be slow if you're using it to "stretch" user-supplied passwords, in which case see the next question.

[1714641946]

1714641946

[1714641946]

1714641946

[1714641946]

1714641946

[gotminer]

I'm not understanding the algorithm that it uses, can anyone find much information about it?

Sai Coin is the main thing you'd be mining on this algo

I think ZEC, Zash.   I lookup a profit calculator, it was $ 83 per month.   Not good for $ 2400 machine.. 

Pass

lol zec is equihash.  Why chime in if you have no idea what you are talking about?

Lol.  Wow ... He has a lot more thinking to do.

[RfBTC]

Grats to the firsts come to serve with this AntMiner A3 ,  the fasters firts, will get early to the ROI ,  but 400$ /day will become 20$ /day at August...  its said  that BITMAIN its selling around 2000 - 2500 AntMiner A3....  2000 x 815GH = 1630 TH to  2037,5 TH will be added only with BITMAIN

[BenRickert]

Grats to the firsts come to serve with this AntMiner A3 ,  the fasters firts, will get early to the ROI ,  but 400$ /day will become 20$ /day at August...  its said  that BITMAIN its selling around 2000 - 2500 AntMiner A3....  2000 x 815GH = 1630 TH to  2037,5 TH will be added only with BITMAIN

It'll be $20.00 per day a lot sooner than August.

[kenji]

Grats to the firsts come to serve with this AntMiner A3 ,  the fasters firts, will get early to the ROI ,  but 400$ /day will become 20$ /day at August...  its said  that BITMAIN its selling around 2000 - 2500 AntMiner A3....  2000 x 815GH = 1630 TH to  2037,5 TH will be added only with BITMAIN

It'll be $20.00 per day a lot sooner than August.

Much sooner.

[lunobird]

Poor Obelisk Siacoin miners won't get their machines till later this year,  And thats a maybe.  Wow sucks.

[vegascoinpool]

Poor Obelisk Siacoin miners won't get their machines till later this year,  And thats a maybe.  Wow sucks.

They effectively killed that market before it shipped. Nobody is gonna want one of those, now. I'm not sure who wanted them before that... but now they don't want them for sure. Haha

[BenRickert]

Poor Obelisk Siacoin miners won't get their machines till later this year,  And thats a maybe.  Wow sucks.

I keep having this nagging feeling that Bitmain has a much deeper motive in this. I believe they will want to create a friendly partnership with the SC development team. Saia is into the cloud storage space which seems to lining up nicely with things like AI and or "Sophon". I suspect that if the Dev team gets dug in and fights Bitmain, there will be a takeover in the form of a fork. Wouldn't it behoove the two parties to come together and pool resources. Our little "Crypto World" is getting much broader and deeper than just mining coins and POW. I can't help but think that AI will replace ASIC mining at some point. Is this the "real" direction that Bitmain is going?

[BeerMan81]

Its legit... by chinese laws, bitmain can not sell this machine in the mainland by any cryptocurrency, they sell it only in RMB... you can check their chinese website
https://shop.bitmain.com/main.htm?lang=zh

and also by chinese law they must tell how many machines were available for sale... and in their announcement by Wechat account, they state there was 6000 machines just for mainland china

开售产品
蚂蚁矿机 A3 815G （适用于Blake2b算法币种）
功耗：1275W+7%
暂定价格：20800 RMB
开售时间：1月17日下午2点
本批数量：6000 台
发货时间：确认付款后7个工作日左右发货
备注：
1.现货产品无法修改地址
2.本批机器每个账户限购一台，不能使用优惠券
3.订单付款后需在官网上传付款信息，并把“订单号+付款人+付款金额+付款凭证”发给微信客服
4.付款需在2017年1月17日下午4点到账，逾期未到账订单将被取消

BTW, im not chinese... just been teaching english here for a few years

Here you can see they have received 8,881 BCH since the announcement. Divide that by the amount that i paid (1.41) = 6342 miners. However, I am sure they sold several power supplies as well, so 6000 units seems about right!

My question, is that 6000 just for china or 6000 for the whole planet?

[itzazkrit]

More just went on sale.  Last I checked another $500k worth in the books in past 20minues.

Edit....and theyre sold out lol.  possibly the ones that didn't finish paying from last night.

[merv77]

Check this out

this is gonna hurt

[sil2222]

A3 back in stock !!

[sil2222]

sold out again LOL .

[kenji]

sold out again LOL .

I can't believe people are eating these up like they did the D3...

It must be new people brought in by the recent hype, who weren't around for the D3.

[Rody81]

sold out again LOL .

I can't believe people are eating these up like they did the D3...

It must be new people brought in by the recent hype, who weren't around for the D3.

I kept hearing things like this about the D3 but at the same time I also kept hearing about people doing good with them.

[kenji]

sold out again LOL .

I can't believe people are eating these up like they did the D3...

It must be new people brought in by the recent hype, who weren't around for the D3.

I kept hearing things like this about the D3 but at the same time I also kept hearing about people doing good with them.

Not even that, but now I'm getting emails from Bitmain alerting me when new batches of this thing will be in stock.

I don't believe I can recall a single time where Bitmain has ever emailed me letting me know when a new batch of their product will be in stock. They're pushing this thing very hard, and I think the reason for it is a reason they don't want people to know about.

What do you guys think?

[stugots2]

they are releasing a few every hour and making max quantity 1 per order... I just bought 12 and it was a pain in the ass lol

[kenji]

they are releasing a few every hour and making max quantity 1 per order... I just bought 12 and it was a pain in the ass lol

1 per order and you got 12? Props, lol.

[VuValley]

Official response from the SIA [SC] Dev Team

"Bitmain has announced an ASIC miner for Sia. This has made a lot of people uneasy, especially those who preordered Obelisk units. So I'll first address the Obelisk units in isolation. Though we don't have the full chips back yet, the chips are in production and we have our final simulations. We can confidently state that the bitmain unit is far less energy efficient, costs more money, and is an objectively worse miner than the SC1. So people who ordered Obelisk units will still be receiving hardware of substantial value.

As a developer, Bitmain moving into the Sia space makes me uneasy. Bitmain has historically been extremely greedy, and very willing to sacrifice the well being of the community, of their customers, and of the ecosystem if it means they can make a couple of extra dollars. The biggest way this has manifested for altcoins is that they will over-sell hardware. When a ton of miners suddenly join the network, the difficulty adjusts. If too many miners join the network, nobody is able to make any money, and everyone eats a loss on their hardware purchase.

Bitmain has no qualms about overselling their units to buyers. They take massive margins on their hardware (>50%) and make more money than the total block reward at the expense of their customers. They over-saturate the mining market in a way that hurts their buyers. I think we will see this with Sia. Bitmain will sell more units than the Sia ecosystem can sustain, and many people end up with large losses. Bitmain will not end up with losses, because they were paid up-front with non-refundable money.

Bitmain also has a history of doing things like mining empty blocks, and like refusing to activate soft-forks that are beneficial to the network. They were openly hostile to the Bhttps://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2769785.120itcoin-core developers, and actively blocked the activation of a very valuable network feature (Segwit).

We, the dev team, are not happy that Bitmain has made an ASIC for Sia. We are not happy that many Sia supporters are at risk of losing money by buying these miners (from over-saturation), and we are not happy that Bitmain may choose to interfere with our network. This is not a commentary on general ASIC companies, this is a commentary on Bitmain specifically.

We did add an extra feature to the SC1 unit that would allow us to invalidate the Bitmain hardware without invalidating the SC1. The community would need to choose to adopt a soft-fork (it's not something we could just magically activate, we have to change the hashing algorithm slightly), and then we could get rid of this cycle of Bitmain hardware. Of course, they could just create another round of hardware (likely taking ~3 months). And, it would hurt Bitmain customers more than it would hurt Bitmain. Bitmain has already sold around $20 million of non-refundable hardware. They have made their profit, and a soft-fork wouldn't change that.

As much as I would like to punch Bitmain in the nose, I don't think a soft-fork achieves what we want. If the hardware is used to harm the Sia network, either by doing double spends, rejecting soft forks, mining empty blocks, we will invalidate it without hesitation. But for the time being, I think the best thing to do is to advise people not to buy the Bitmain hardware (to protect yourself from the oversaturation that Bitmain tries to create), and then to watch and wait, and respond more if it appears that the network is under attack. Overall though, I do not think Sia is in trouble.

I am looking forward to the thoughts from the community."

[VuValley]

they are releasing a few every hour and making max quantity 1 per order... I just bought 12 and it was a pain in the ass lol

Yeah how did you order 12?  Under the same Bitmain acct or did you make a bunch of separate ones?