Hello,
In another post, I saw talk about Biakal miner for SIA, is it out? If its out, do you think GPU mining is still meaningful for SIA ?
This is the miner you are mentioning, the Baikal Giant-B:
https://www.baikalminer.com/product10.php . It is being released in February, I think . It is a multi-algo FGPA (not exactly as powerful as an ASIC). I am honestly not impressed with its specs, specially with that price-tag, and as soon as the Obelisk SC1 is delivered to purchasers (on June or before) both this Baikal and GPUs will be outcompeted.
About what effect will have on GPUs, well, while it is more efficient than GPU-mining, being a 5-algo switch miner not all the units will be mining Sia concurrently. I guess it will depend on how many units they manufacture, but so far if we look at the recent spikes at the network hashrate we had in the last 2 months (that I guess are Baikals testings, switching among those 5 algos), what they have right now represent about a 25% of the network hashrate. That is some impact on GPU miners yields, but not very dramatic. Of course if they manufacture more batches on the next months that might have a more severe impact.
Also remember that in 5 days the hardfork will reduce the difficulty to 1/3 of the current one, increasing the gains of miners 3x.
So bottom-line: When Obelisks are released on June, GPU mining will be dead, but until then I think you should be able to keep mining Saa profitably.
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