Do you think bitmain is secretly mining ETH with ASICs?

[pickleburglar]

Was just looking at this chart: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-hashrate.html

The mining boom started around spring 2017.

Spring 2017 - Summer 2017: ~40T increase
Summer 2017 - Autumn 2017: ~40T increase
Autumn 2017 - Winter 2018: ~60T increase
Winter 2018 - Spring 2018: ~110T increase

Oook. IMO the height of the average joe mining boom was around late summer 2017, that's when the hardware was most expensive, mining most profitable and that's when I'd expect the biggest increase.

However the increase since winter 2018 has been more than double of that. That just seems unlikely based on mining profitability and also it would have required GPU manufacturers to double their production.

I'm 98% convinced ASIC manufacturers started bringing first ETH asics online at around december 2017 and have been steadily building and mining with them ever since.

[Tidsdilatation]

You're wrong about the avarage joe being in summer 2017. The prices are higher now than ever. But the height of the peak was november i think, that was when most ppl entered crypto i think. Not during the summer.
To answer your question about Bitmain: ofcourse they do. They are scammers and thieves.

[pickleburglar]

The prices are higher now than ever.

That depends on the region I guess, over here polaris cards peaked at around €400/each in late summer, they have been ~€350 since 2018 started and now with the recent loss of profits I see them move for as low as €250

[thesourc3]

Personally I think that Bitmain engineers and develops their ASICs months in advance prior to releasing them to the public and run them in a clean room. Then, once they've made a significant amount from "testing" these machines, they release them to the public for even more profit. With this being said, it could very well be that Bitmain has already created an ASIC for ETH and is running them as we speak. They may not run their ASICs for a long period of time before selling them, but I do believe that they at the least run each batch for a month or so before they're sold. It's very difficult for me to think otherwise given that they seem to constantly be growing despite the major fluctuations in cryptocurrency. To each their own, but you'd be pretty ignorant to think that they actually sell their machines without "testing" them first. I also believe this is why they always sell their ASICs in batches months in advance and they're able to give pretty accurate dates as to when they will ship.

[Branko]

The prices are higher now than ever.

That depends on the region I guess, over here polaris cards peaked at around €400/each in late summer, they have been ~€350 since 2018 started and now with the recent loss of profits I see them move for as low as €250

Wheres that, they're €400+ in Croatia

[Vann]

There are many reasons for the network hash rate to have increased, but IMO, a Bitmain ASIC conspiracy ain't one. Daily media hype towards the end of last year, $20K BTC and $1300 ETH, which on a yearly basis outperformed BTC by almost 10000% a the end of last year and beginning of this year brought in lot's of new miners at a peak, as it always does. Another factor that limited the network hash rate was the ETH ICE AGE MAY-OCT artificially increased block times and difficulty. Once the Byzantium fork happened in the middle of OCT it ended the ICE AGE and profitability increased right around the time Crypto started the end of the year bull run, which brought miners back to ETH. The most recent hash rate increase is from Vega miners switching to ETH after a collapse in Cryptonight profitability.

[Eternu]

It is not impossible that Bitmain has made ETH ASIC miners and are using them for mining as we speak. But I think that this jumps in hash power isn't because of ETH ASIC miners.
Large number of people wants to mine Bitcoin, but are not in position to mine it because of high difficulty. So where will they turn, of course toward ETH. So because of impossibility to mine Bitcoin and turning to second strongest crypto, hash rate has increase drastically. This is my thoughts only, don't have any kind of evidence.

[percy_tc]

i think nowadays VGA'a are the best price/hash ratio for ETH becuase it is very memory dependent and video cards are equipped with the best price/speed ratio memories.

Bitmain cannot make more efficient miners than these. Of course they can make their costum miners for ETH even with cheaper/older rams with enormous amount of bandwith (512bit ?), but still it will have the same (or worster) power consuption, which make it pointless for the public.

[RentGPU]

Nope, i don't think so , it's such a conspiracy theory about eth asics , man look at the amount of sold and out of stock gpus the last period and you will know why hashrate jumps that fast

[CryptoPlay]

Yes, they are mining it.

Just like Monero....since long time ago.

I bet since december 2016.

[Metroid]

Only the naive and stupid think otherwise, not only bitmain but some others too, they have had the prototype since january 2018 and have been mass bulding eth asics for sometime and adding to their farms.

[Metroid]

Winter 2018 - Spring 2018: ~110T increase

100% sure, this 2x increase were asic prototypes, that was started around december 2017 - January 2018

[Za1n]

Personally I think that Bitmain engineers and develops their ASICs months in advance prior to releasing them to the public and run them in a clean room. Then, once they've made a significant amount from "testing" these machines, they release them to the public for even more profit. With this being said, it could very well be that Bitmain has already created an ASIC for ETH and is running them as we speak. They may not run their ASICs for a long period of time before selling them, but I do believe that they at the least run each batch for a month or so before they're sold. It's very difficult for me to think otherwise given that they seem to constantly be growing despite the major fluctuations in cryptocurrency. To each their own, but you'd be pretty ignorant to think that they actually sell their machines without "testing" them first. I also believe this is why they always sell their ASICs in batches months in advance and they're able to give pretty accurate dates as to when they will ship.

This is basically my belief as well. Bitmain has been known to this this exact practice before with their other ASICs, developing and running them months in advance of actually selling them to the public.

Furthermore, the only reason they even publicly sell them is to make room for the next generation of ASICs they are making, so by the time a consumer gets the technology it is already a generation behind.

This would be like Nvidia or AMD mining with the new GPUs for 6 months before releasing them to the public, and for all we know they may be developing plans to do just that.

Sound farfetched? Take a look at this CNBC article: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/secretive-chinese-bitcoin-mining-company-may-have-made-as-much-money-as-nvidia-last-year.html

You know the executives at Nvidia are going to be looking into what their new competitor is doing and try to take a few page from their playbook. AMD will surely be watching and taking notes as well.

[Metroid]

Furthermore, the only reason they even publicly sell them is to make room for the next generation of ASICs they are making, so by the time a consumer gets the technology it is already a generation behind.

This is exactly what they are doing, no exception, bitmain or baikal or others, all of them are crooks. While idiots are using s9 and think they profit big, bitmain already running s11 hehe with double, triple hashrate.

[Spill]

You bet Your F$%king Ass bitmain has an asic like device on eth already.   Anyone who doesn't realize it is just
to dumb or naive or alot of both to understand.  15 Th/s is being added to the network every week that's a like 50k  GPUS being added every week
which is highly doubtful.   Lets guess how long they will mine with them until they try to sell them?

I'm guessing at least 6 months.

[Raimy]

I think proof of this is that while the Ethereum prices has been dropping we are seeing network hashrate continuing to be added at a feverish pace.

Looking at the Etherscan website we can see: Highest Avg Hashrate of 268730.4354 GH/s was recorded on Friday, March 16, 2018.

This would be crazy to be simply normal miners going out and buying more overpriced GPUs while profits are plunging, but might make sense if it is from new ASICs which are way more efficient.

[Metroid]

Nobody in the right mind would buy a rx 580 to just earn few cents of dollar per day, running an eth asic means that the few cents earning with a gpu will be 30 - 100x with 1x asic. So yes, asic have been for at least 3 months in the network and eth devs are doing nothing to counter the bullshit, reason why eth has been crashing and not going back up. It's sad but is the truth. Although I do believe eth is going up again only if eth devs do something about it cause if not then eth will keep crashing. If eth devs do something about it then we will see eth $8000 in 2018.

[TorbjornE]

To extract the ETH, RAM is used. And the speed depends on the amount and quality of RAM. Do special ASIC unprofitable. Its price will not be much lower than the graphics card.

[slymbal007]

No,i do not think they are mining ETH.
Bitmain gets too much credit.
Many gamers,who never mined before,who already owned gpu's,started to mine as well.Almost all gpu's are sold out.Vega gpu's added.Just a lot of people mining ETH i think.Nvidia gpu's mining ETH.

[nc50lc]

Maybe not, maybe yes, they could have been "secretly" renting those hashrates.
It's very easy for a distributor/manufacturer to use the units for "testing" while making some bucks out of it.

And here's a better conspiracy theory:
With the rise of the so called Bitcoin "Cloud Mining" last year, I think Bitmain is behind that gimmick too, next would be Ethereum.