An Ethereum developer has opened an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) to discuss whether the community should modify its Ethash mining algorithm to maintain ASIC resistance. The EIP is a direct response to reports that Bitmain — by far the largest manufacturer of mining rigs that use Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chips — has developed an Ethash ASIC miner and will begin shipping them within the next several months.- by the way the same proposal to change algorithm was for the SIA coin, after Bitmain launched it's miner. But finally SIA decided not to do so.
Turns out the Bitmain E3 (NOT the F3 as reported) is not exactly a big GPU mining killer.
180 Mhash
800 watts
About the the SAME performance as a well-tuned 6 card RX 580/480 based rig, and slightly INFERIOR to a well-tuned 6-card GTX 1070 based rig.
On the other hand, at $800 they WILL sell these things probably as fast as they can make them, for a while.
First batch isn't shipping 'till mid-July though - achieving 100% ROI is going to be a bit iffy even if POS gets pushed back a couple more times.
http://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=00020180403174908564M8dMJKtz06B7Note that Bitmain would have to sell well over ONE MILLION of these units to double the current ETH Network Hashrate (at current numbers right around 1.75 million, then add in a few hundred thousand more to cover ETC and the other forked ethash coins).
It took them almost 2 YEARS to achieve close to One Million sales on the S9, and the S9 is higher performance and efficiency than ANYTHING ELSE currently shipping.
Don't bother forking the algorithm on ETH for THESE miners, it's not worth the time and trouble.