While the efficiency is not to good, the price somewhat makes it a potentially attractive investment. At the current cost of GPUs today you couldn't compare buying a 1070 at $600 that does around 31 MH to this ASIC that costs $800 but does 6 times more hashrate at 180 MH.
It makes the rich who moved mining operations to low-cost electricity areas even richer. The only downside is the 3 month delivery time. That is a long time in crypto and a lot could already happen by then. Makes it too much of a gamble for me.
First of all it is sold out (in few minutes I guess), conclusion: a few number of a cheap multi gpu rig have been pre-sold for 3 months later (fully paid already)
A 18x gpu rig can do the job with even less power consumption and its
actual price is not far more than 3 of this Bitmain shit, the multi gpu mb can reduce the overhead of the parts and a smart miner can assemble such a rig with current prices around $5000.
The Bitmain's new shit will cost around $1150 each (shipping + psu) so it is $3500 for 3 pieces.
So, the whole deal is about 30% discount in return for 3 months payment in advance, nothing more, the poor buyer will loose algorithm switching and any other reusability option at the same time.
Bitmain is playing one of its dirtiest games ever: it is dumping the gpu market by a moderately underpriced rig in the name of ASICs (or at least not officially denying it to be ASIC) and this way escalating hype about its unlimited power to crack every gpu based algo (most importantly ethash)
It is just a way to bring down the gpu market and causing a decrease in gpu order and manufacturing pace, to release more capacities for its own wafer hungry orders to manufacturers and suppliers (in Hong Kong and Taiwan) besides making an opportunity to buy used gpus (to be installed in its fake ASIC ethash miner), which will be dumped to the market because of the hype. It is Bitmain's way to enter the pre-built ethereum mining rigs market. Jihan is the cheapest human being ever, he always does what he is used to: messing up everything blindly and irresponsibly.
If Satoshi was not so naive to choose an algorithm with a small memory footprint like ShA256 or s/he was not that paranoid or irresponsible to leave the community alone in the hands of a bunch of show-off developers who couldn't just be a bit humble and tolerant to converge, this AsIC shit wouldn't happen at all or would be responded by a simple algorithm shift from the first beginning.
Instead look at us now, we have to deal with a monster who 'proudly announces' that he has managed to crack another algorithm, and even worse, he fakes it!
Damn it Satoshi, what did you think?
But don't worry, we will fix this
, takes time but, this piece of shit is nothing more than a little greedy Chinese whose identity and behavioral pattern is disclosed and disposed to the community.
