Interesting read:
https://blog.sia.tech/the-state-of-cryptocurrency-mining-538004a37f9bGoes into economics, manufacturing and business side of ASIC development.
Few notable quotes:
The vast majority of ASIC-resistant algorithms were designed by software engineers making assumptions about the limitations of custom hardware. These assumptions tend to be incorrect.
The block reward for Monero is high enough that even if you think you have only a 30% chance of your ASIC surviving the PoW hardfork, it’s more than worthwhile to pursue a hardfork resistant ASIC.
At this point, I think it’s safe to assume that every Proof-of-Work coin with a block reward of more than $20 million in the past year has at least one group of secret ASICs currently mining on it, or will have secret ASICs mining on it within a few months.
If a cryptocurrency like Sia has a monthly block reward of $10 million, and a batch of miners is expected to have a shelf life of $120 million, the most you would expect a company could make off of building miners is $120 million. But, manufacturers actually have a way to make substantially more than that.
We believe it took Bitmain about 5 months to create the A3 miner, and we believe it took Halong about 9 months to create the B52 miner. We suspect both of these were completed using place-and-route methodologies, especially given the relatively poor performance of each.
In practice, Bitmain would probably require 3–4 months to adapt an existing chip to a hard fork, and if they hadn’t reserved wafers in advance they’d be looking at 4–5 months.
After any reasonable timeframe to reach out to another manufacturer, after-hours on a Friday night, our manufacturer reached out to us and said with little warning or reasonable explanation that they would be unable to manufacture for us. Just as we had been warned, our attempt to manufacture in China had fallen flat on its face. This setback is estimated to have cost us somewhere north of $2 million.
People tend to under-estimate Bitmain. Yes, they have the most money, and yes, they dominate because of their economies of scale. But they also dominate because they’ve got the fastest to-market time of any company. They dominate because they’ve got the best chip developers in cryptocurrency.
The biggest takeaway from all of this is that mining is for big players.
Edit: For got an important quote, which some people do not understood:
At the end of the day, cryptocurrency miner manufacturers are selling money printing machines. A well-funded profit maximizing entity is only going to sell a money printing machine for more money than they expect they could get it to print themselves. The buyer needs to understand why the manufacturer is selling the units instead of keeping them for themselves.
