Topic: Do you think bitmain is secretly mining ETH with ASICs? (Read 1857 times)

lol yup six feet under

I don't love Bitmain method's, their are like pirates of the crypto-currency world.

Secret asics are only known to people who work inside bitmain's warehouse, not even bitmain's partners know about them, they are very secret. That f3 was a leak and probably the person who leaked is dead hehe

The e3 is an old eth asic, need to watch for the f3 which is 10 times more powerful, around 1500mhs.

Fork is coming ...

I think they have tested theirs in the last 6 months. It is quite long.

Yep, that's could be. Like the guys it retail shop selling ASICs from the basement.

I do believe Bitmain is mining ETH with asics. Why wouldn't they? They probably have tons of miners that they won't sell due to minor cosmetic imperfections, but they'll still run perfectly. No sense throwing them out.

Then you are wrong.  It's just simple.

Just enough to know that mining is profitable

Of cource, or how he test their product in real conditions
Its like the engineering samples of cpu's by intel, this type of machines bitmain will leave for himself

I see ya got to much math

learn some math before making comment like that

Do ya really think they are a secret morons?
Mining is not profitable  now. Still profitable is selling equipment for mining.

if I were in their shoes I would first mining secret for myself, but when profits fell, began to sell, any would probably have done so.

Very simply, yes, they would if there was profit to be made. BM definitely 'run in' units before selling them, so anybody's guess how many units they have already live, but they'll add to that number as the weeks go by.

Do you think bitmain is secretly mining ETH with ASICs?

I dont see any reason why wouldn`t they..

I meant that if miners existed then they would have created it long ago so they can mine it themselves before releasing it to public. So by now they should have released it (after mining the hell out of em) due to possibility of eth going pos and this is what has happened they are on sale right now within 24 hrs after my comment. I meant if an asic existed then it should be on sale right now not later.
Some were speculating that Bitmain is researching into it and might release it in december 18' my comment was for them.

I believe that they have tested it for long time.

I guess he's new and doesn't know that Bitmain is "testing" miners for months before they sell them

Thanks for the lols

No Bitmain is definitely not mining Ethereum. if they had developed an ASIC then it would be already on sale right now.

ETH PRICE jumped more in the 3Q/4Q timeframe in absolute terms than in the 2Q (2Q was a much higher PERCENTAGE increase).
Also, availability of GPUs to mine it WITH became a major issue for a while in 2Q - don't you remember AMD high-end Polaris cards selling for more than Nvidia 1070 and even some Nvidia 1080 cards for a month or so?
It takes TIME to aquire parts and build rigs, as well as a chunk of cash - pretty much across the board ALL altcoins ran into that issue.
Then the second bit spike hit in early January, fueling ANOTHER explosion of hashrate for a while, 'till coin prices started dropping seriously.

110 THash is less than 4 million GPUs (presuming RX 470/480/570/580 or GTX 1070) - given AMD and Nvidia extreme shortages that started right after Christmas and did NOT get better 'till a couple weeks ago, there is no need to blame a large number of ASIC for the jump - GPUs can EASILY account for it.



THE KILLER to your theory - Bitmain announced their E3 ASIC unit TODAY but it doesn't ship 'till mid-July indicating THEY DON'T HAVE MANY OF THEM ON HAND.
It turns out to be a little LESS EFFICIENT AND LOWER HASHRATE than a well-tuned Nvidia 1070 6-card rig and about the SAME hashrate and efficiency as a VERY well tuned AMD RX 480/580 6-card rig.
The E3 is NOT a GPU mining killer - Bitmain would have to sell over ONE MILLION of them to achieve 50% of current ETH total network hashrate, but there's no way they can get enough CHIPS to manage that in a significantly short timeframe.

For perspective, it has taken them almost 2 *YEARS* to sell ballpark ONE MILLION of the S9 units (there is some question as to the actual number due to competition from the Avalon 721/741, the unknown number of miners BW.COM uses in it's internal farm, the number of eBang miners sold or used internally, but *probably* a majority of the Bitcoin total network hashrate is from S9 units) - this is despite the S9 being the unquestionable "most efficient miner for SHA256 made" (a title it STILL holds at this time given reported Halong ACTUAL performance).

I seriously doubt the E3 will manage to achieve 50% of all ETH mining hashrate before ETH goes POS.

There's a REASON Bitmain is pricing it so cheap - it won't SELL if it wasn't cheap.


ETH over the last 2 weeks or so has been flat (give or take luck varience) on total network hashrate - if folks are still building new rigs, they're being matched by folks shutting down rigs or moving them to other stuff.


I can believe Bitmain had "engineering test" units online as early as December 2017 - but I do NOT believe they had "production" units online anywhere near that early, or in significant numbers before VERY recently.

There is no asic on ETH.  You  a bluffing. But there are lots of buttheaders which continue to bild rigs

Bitmain accurately capable of such, but on the other hand in winter, only the lazy did not begin to mine the ether, the network had to grow significantly.

 

Thats nice in theory but that is a lot of hashpower that the combined market cant handle right now.  I.e. it would crush a lot of coins network and make them unprofitable.

If there is not a hard fork to resist an ASIC resistance then I believe the majority of the community will just mine an alternate currency or a external team will fork the blockchain with the respective code to prevent asics. e.g Ethereum Cash etc.

Called it!

https://en.insider.pro/topnews/2018-03-30/poll-ethereum-users-support-hard-fork-resist-asic-miners/

the fork on ETH is comming???

Nvidia has no interest in rushing out their next generation cards, as the CURRENT ones already dominate the market and are selling faster than they can make the GPUs.

They also aren't widely used in Mining compared to AMD, so they have a lot less incentive to bother wasting time on "mining specific GPU models" - so far ALL of the "mining specific GPU cards" have originated in 3'd party CARD manufacturers using standard GPUs.


Lead time on a new ASIC miner design is months, not years - but it's still quite a few months.
I suspect Bitmain started work on an ETH ASIC miner probably around mid-year 2017 timeframe, possibly a bit later, when the altcoin "price jump" proved to have some staying power.

What I DON'T understand is their SIA and CN miners - the SIA one swamped the VERY TINY market in no time flat, and the CN miners are going to be pretty much "dead on arrival" given Monero's long-stated OPPOSITION TO ASIC.
I'd have figured they'd target equihash LONG before SIA and that they'd have been smart enough to avoid CN entirely.


Given that AMD was sold out for MONTHS despite very high pricing during the ETH hashrate growth this fall/winter/early spring timeframe, it's VERY EASY to account for that growth without needing some hypothetical and PROBABLY DID NOT EXIST IN QUANTITY ASIC miner.
Also don't forget the Nvidia 1060 and possibly some 1070 cards mining ETH, *AND* some folks switching from other algorithms due to ETH getting more profitable on their EXISTING cards.

That's a good point. While the whole Alt market was mooning at the beginning of the year, it made sense for some to mine smaller coins that have a better unit yield than ETH. Especially for Nvidia rigs. Now that the market is consolidating and profits are down, miners are flocking to ETH looking for a stable return. Even for Nvidia rigs which did much better on other algos, ETH is now a comparable option. WTM shows ETH is a good option for 1070's and 1070 Ti's. For P104 at 40 MH/s and P102 mining cards at 47 MH/s, it's no comparison. ETH is by far the best option. Which is also why the ZEC difficulty has gone up 42% since the beginning of the year compared to 68% for ETH.

http://whattomine.com/coins?utf8=%E2%9C%93&adapt_q_280x=0&adapt_q_380=0&adapt_q_fury=0&adapt_q_470=0&adapt_q_480=0&adapt_q_570=0&adapt_q_580=0&adapt_q_vega56=0&adapt_q_vega64=0&adapt_q_750Ti=0&adapt_q_1050Ti=0&adapt_q_10606=0&adapt_q_1070=1&adapt_1070=true&adapt_q_1070Ti=0&adapt_q_1080=1&adapt_q_1080Ti=1ð=true&factor%5Beth_hr%5D=30.0&factor%5Beth_p%5D=120.0&grof=true&factor%5Bgro_hr%5D=33.5&factor%5Bgro_p%5D=130.0&x11gf=true&factor%5Bx11g_hr%5D=11.5&factor%5Bx11g_p%5D=120.0&cn=true&factor%5Bcn_hr%5D=630.0&factor%5Bcn_p%5D=100.0&eq=true&factor%5Beq_hr%5D=430.0&factor%5Beq_p%5D=120.0&lre=true&factor%5Blrev2_hr%5D=35500.0&factor%5Blrev2_p%5D=130.0&ns=true&factor%5Bns_hr%5D=1000.0&factor%5Bns_p%5D=130.0&lbry=true&factor%5Blbry_hr%5D=270.0&factor%5Blbry_p%5D=120.0&bk14=true&factor%5Bbk14_hr%5D=2400.0&factor%5Bbk14_p%5D=125.0&pas=true&factor%5Bpas_hr%5D=950.0&factor%5Bpas_p%5D=120.0&skh=true&factor%5Bskh_hr%5D=27.5&factor%5Bskh_p%5D=120.0&n5=true&factor%5Bn5_hr%5D=44.0&factor%5Bn5_p%5D=130.0&factor%5Bl2z_hr%5D=420.0&factor%5Bl2z_p%5D=300.0&factor%5Bxn_hr%5D=3.0&factor%5Bxn_p%5D=120.0&factor%5Bcost%5D=0.12&sort=Profit&volume=0&revenue=current&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=bittrex&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=cryptopia&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=poloniex&dataset=Main&commit=Calculate

http://whattomine.com/coins?utf8=%E2%9C%93&adapt_q_280x=0&adapt_q_380=0&adapt_q_fury=0&adapt_q_470=0&adapt_q_480=0&adapt_q_570=0&adapt_q_580=0&adapt_q_vega56=0&adapt_q_vega64=0&adapt_q_750Ti=0&adapt_q_1050Ti=0&adapt_q_10606=0&adapt_q_1070=1&adapt_1070=true&adapt_q_1070Ti=0&adapt_q_1080=1&adapt_q_1080Ti=1ð=true&factor%5Beth_hr%5D=30.0&factor%5Beth_p%5D=120.0&grof=true&factor%5Bgro_hr%5D=33.5&factor%5Bgro_p%5D=130.0&x11gf=true&factor%5Bx11g_hr%5D=11.5&factor%5Bx11g_p%5D=120.0&cn=true&factor%5Bcn_hr%5D=630.0&factor%5Bcn_p%5D=100.0&eq=true&factor%5Beq_hr%5D=430.0&factor%5Beq_p%5D=120.0&lre=true&factor%5Blrev2_hr%5D=35500.0&factor%5Blrev2_p%5D=130.0&ns=true&factor%5Bns_hr%5D=1000.0&factor%5Bns_p%5D=130.0&lbry=true&factor%5Blbry_hr%5D=270.0&factor%5Blbry_p%5D=120.0&bk14=true&factor%5Bbk14_hr%5D=2400.0&factor%5Bbk14_p%5D=125.0&pas=true&factor%5Bpas_hr%5D=950.0&factor%5Bpas_p%5D=120.0&skh=true&factor%5Bskh_hr%5D=27.5&factor%5Bskh_p%5D=120.0&n5=true&factor%5Bn5_hr%5D=44.0&factor%5Bn5_p%5D=130.0&factor%5Bl2z_hr%5D=420.0&factor%5Bl2z_p%5D=300.0&factor%5Bxn_hr%5D=3.0&factor%5Bxn_p%5D=120.0&factor%5Bcost%5D=0.12&sort=Profit&volume=0&revenue=current&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=bittrex&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=cryptopia&factor%5Bexchanges%5D%5B%5D=poloniex&dataset=Main&commit=Calculate

Exactly, for a fact Russian traders bought an entire monthly production of few vendors, literally offering 20$ per cards just to dump other traders...

Yes but that is due to scams. Scammers at moment are analyzing the market, their plan to scam people was better than they thought it would be, scamcoins like ripple, stellar, cardano, iota and tron made them with a huge balance sheet to account the money they made for. They will have some time off before they start scamming more people out again.

The real reason scammers turned their crypto to usd or other scam currencies is the fact they knew popular coins would tank due to asics. They sold before everybody else and now they are waiting for the bottom and will start the pump scam as soon as the decision is made by the top mafia men.

The rise of the difficult on equihash is also questionable. Asics on eth network means asics on zec network.

That definitely possible.
BTW  I strongly believe that this huge difficulty increase in the last months is due to alt crash.
For quite a while during 2017 ETH was not the best coin to mine, there were plenty of scam coins with much higher profitability.

Right now the market seems to get closer to fair value, so all those dummy projects are slowly going down, making ETH the best coin to mine again.
Basically everyone is mining ETH right now.

You trolls want to create an excuse for everything instead of facing reality. It's amazing how persistent you all trolls are saying that hashrate increase were gpus instead of asics. Get over it and accept it because asic manufactures already unofficially announced eth asics now you trolls need to face reality and I know how hard is to face that gpu mining might die in 2018 cause you trolls know that if ethash is compromised and so equihash and the denial in this thread shows how much you trolls are trying to hide the fact that asics have been for while mining eth and equihash.

Just because the GPUs weren't available at retail stores doesn't mean that they weren't being produced.

Someone offered these manufactures a better deal and they sold it directly to them.

Neoscript and many other coins are more profitable with vega than eth. My point is on those 2 months, 80% were asics and 20% gpus.


Hey you are the one that dont understand before and after dif bomb and the sort and blame me for your lack of understanding hehe

Clearly you have no clue how things work regarding algos and since you elegantly ignored a part of my previous post about the technical limitations for ETH ASIC, this ends my discussion with you.

The concern is ETH still the most profitable despite of dips, and most GPU's jumped into it adding diffs and not by buying anew.



I doubt about this   for the links posted by Vann with increased 34% sale by nvidia,then add up AMD sales,  its not a few GPU's

He mining not secretly. Openly mining eth - reason is testing their asics.

First of all, was not only cryptonight profit that plummet, eth did too, matter of fact all coins had a dip in profit. Second, most places gpu's were almost sold out everywhere December to January, only few people and few places had gpus, so 80% of that hashrate was not from gpus, it was from asics.


Come on, January 2017 was a lot different than January 2018. January 2017 had abundant stock of rx and nvidias, January 2018 almost nothing, that hashrate could never have come from gpus.

Last year during the big boom I think there was around ~900k GPUs added on ETH per month.

In January that figure went up to around 2.2m GPUs.

So it's hard to tell whether these are ASICs, most likely more gamers started to mine, people with old GPUs started to mine, or production increased at AMD/NVidia.

Nvidia had a record 4th quarter last year and as stated in their press release, in good part because of mining sales, as I'm sure it was for AMD with the price runnup in ETH.

https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidias-graphics-card-sales-surge-but-are-cryptocurrency-miners-the-major-buyers


This article estimates a combined almost $1B in AMD/Nvidia sales can be attributed to the most recent network hash rate increase of ETH. In addition most of the P104 sales were in the 1st quarter of this year as are the P102 sales.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4147054-nvidia-amd-overestimate-time-bomb?page=3

As this post from RIGED shows, the collapse of Cryptonight profit compared to ETH for Vega's began at the end of January and it was nowhere near twice as profitable as ETH for weeks before then.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.29249935

All of which without a doubt contibuted in large part to the network hash rate increase since the beginning of the year for ETH. In addition to the TONS of new rigs that came online and existing rigs that switched to ETH from record price at the beginning of the year.

You know they never manufactured 2.6m p104, i would say not even 10% of that number. Also Vega cryptonight miners just moved recently to eth, so that rules out any vega added hashrate in january cause cryptonifght'd electroneum was twice more profitable than eth with vegas. 80% of that hashrate were asics. I just cant understand why you trolls cant accept the truth. Why you trolls defend bitmain and co so much, come on, give a break.

The ETH network hash rate chart shows the current run up began on Novemebr 20th, EXACTLY when the ETH price run at the end of last year began and also the mining profitability increased bringing in TONS of new mining rigs to mine ETH.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-hashrate.html#6m

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-price.html#6m

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-mining_profitability.html#6m

Since the beginning of the year the ETH network hash rate has grown by ~100 TH or 65%. 100 TH is equivalent to roughly 2.6 Million P104 cards at 40 MH/s each that came out at the end of December. Combined with the Vega's switching from Cryptonight, AMD mining rigs coming online and more recently the P102 mining cards, it could easily explain the 100 TH increase from the beginning of the year.

Are you a mindless troll which don't know how to see things properly? I will explain one more time, the removal of the dif bomb made eth dif to go from 3.2 to 1.3 after the fork. After that there was no dif bomb anymore, and it rose from December 2017 1.4 to 2.6 January 2018, don't you get it? So no, the hashpower was not there cause what made eth to double the dif was the dif bomb which doubled the network before the fork, july/august to be precise, but as soon as eth dif bomb was removed after the fork then things went back to normal which means 1.3 dif to 2.6 with new added hashrate of asics.

It didn't double in 2 months the hashing power was there all the time Byzantium fork just lower'd diff at one point and cut the block reward in from 5 to 3

https://i.gyazo.com/ff74625fba230d859b2f1c0a5fc8929c.png

It took almost the same time to get back to current difficulty from July 2017 to October 2017 and after the fork from October 2017 to January 2018

I'm not saying that there is no ETH ASIC out there I just think that they are not contributing to overall difficulty that much.

As discussed in other threads the ETH algo is heavy on memory and there are simply technical limitations in building ASICS with endless Ghs (unlike CN algo where you can easily surpass any rig by 20x)

I already expressed the same things already. Asics = unfair competition cause not everybody can buy it.


All are related to how many chips memory makers can provide to them, how many chips amd can provide them, from december 2017 to now is impossible to have such hashrate with gpus. My point is to have that kind hashrate in 2 months took eth network 3 years. So is impossible eth network to double in 2 months with imaginary gpus, it took 3 years for that hashrate to happen and after they started putting asics on december 2017, it doubled in 2 months. So my point is imagine april 2015 to december 2017 let's say 10 million gpus and that is 3 years putting gpus in the network, now think about from december 2017 to january 2018, people add 10 more million gpus, is impossible cause manufactures cant manufacture or produce 10 million gpu that took them 3 years in 2 months.

So whoever says that network increase is gpu and not asics must go to a doctor and have the insanity test.

I think you are underestimating the number of manufacturers and there volume of productions, Sapphire can produce around 100k pcs a week (first hand info, they don't even negotiate with traders for less then 20k pcs) not to mention that in that total hashrate there are tone of rx550/560 cards from 2014/15 so the number of gpus could be higher, stretch that on 3 year of manufacturing you get like approximately   400k GPU's a month this is easily achieved with all the vendors combined 

If there were ASIC miners for every coin I guess people would stop buying GPU's for mining. But sadly there isn't and people are left with only GPU as a choice. Also to say that someone is an idiot because s/he bought GPU for mining is wrong on so many ways, but I support your logic about price and income. Keep in mind that not everyone can buy ASIC miners, so for some GPU is easier choice. Also there are some features that GPU have which ASIC miners don't.

Unfortunately ASICs or similar devices are future of mining at last for the large scale operations, small guys like us will continue to make some pocket change profit with our gpus.
But big chunk of this crypto cake is not reserved for us.

Given the profitability x return of investment, I'd say only idiots are buying and mining with gpus and yes there are too many idiots out there, I do not see anything wrong if somebody has a gpu and start mining cause maybe he did not mainly buy for mining so that is okay, now for somebody to actually pay $450 to earn $0.60 per day is unreasonable.

Also I said 80% of the hashrate from december 2017 - to right now are asics.

Doing some research I've found that is estiamted that 3 million gpu's were sold to miners just in 2017, according to this information:

https://wccftech.com/amd-nvidia-intel-q4-2017-gpu-market-share/

and this just in 2017, in addition nvidia miners in the past has other algos that it was more efficient than eth, but in 2018 most of the time eth were the more profitable algo (I'm speakin about most known algos).

So maybe all the hashpower entering the eth network is not just asics.

This just estimate by using RX 570 as sample.
if you say low end GPU, this is very insane.

After do the math, i'll say, ASIC HERE!

I doubt nvidia or amd would do such a thing, they can charge more for gpus but mine with their gpus for profit? no, dont think so, they do mining tests but that is it.

And why not nvidia or amd, nvidia new generation seems to be delayed for ever, what is doing nvidia?, as you can imangine nvidia like apple or other major hardware manufacturers usually plan the development and the deadline to launch a product some years before the product is launched.

Nvidia and AMD could be doing the same as bitmain is doing if they find that mining is so profitable, can you imagine the R&D department of Nvidia working to develop the fastest and more efficient gpu miner based on their techonology?, I don`t know if what they would develop would be as efficient as an asic, but sure it would be close to, with everything optimized to mine,optimized drivers and optimized cooling.  I know, I have not any proof,is just a theory, but why not?

I also see ASIC manufacturers starting to bring the first ETH asics online around 2017 and continue to build and mine with them since then

hopefully development development is better and can mine together

And not all GPUs are working 30 mhs

Count GTX 1060s, 1070(TI), 1080(TI), R2XX/R3XX and so on...

Maybe Yes.
I think hashrate BOOMING too fast
same as Monero, they are mining cryptonight coin and we do not know it, lets do the math

Ethereum Network Hashrate : 226 TH/s

= 236978176 MH/s

Average RX 570 hashrate is : 30 MH/s, so with this network hashrate, we have

= 236978176 MH/s / 30 MH/s
= 7899272 GPU RX 570

is possible? i think no

I doubt that is true, he get a lot of merit, if that would be truth, he would not get merit

I am not sure with out any proof how you people are sharing and discussing about bitmain's move on mining ethereum. If they run the big farm also why we have to invest on mining field bro. Everyone knows that difficulty for mining ethereum has been increased from simple mining pool to Nicehash algos. Nothing seems like giving any profits for ethereum.
I personally does not believe the any rumour. This is the conclusion from my about this query.

You shouldnt bother going back and forth with Metroid, he is one of the biggest trolls on this site. Go look at his posts, there is nothing meaningful about them, just conspiracy theories and mockery of people. He adds zero value to the community.

Where there's no (or bad) information there will always be speculation..

I normally don't come to the altcoin mining section. But this got my attention. It seems the altcoiners are getting smarter This was one of the main reasons why Bitmain decided to dump alot of their S9s at the end of the year. But in Honesty, I kinda side with Bitmain on this one. It was sensible since mid 2017 to develop ASICs for Ethash, but unlike BTC, Ethereum devs got wind of it and started to threaten POS even though they knew that would have tanked their coin.

I think you did not finish reading my post.

Cause you are in denial too, the evidence to support eth asics have been known for 3 months already.


And nvidia took 20 years to get there, bitmain 3 years. Most of the world is capitalist which means, think what bitmain can do with 3 billion dollars. I myself have to say that I had no idea about any cryptonight asic and for me and i do have inside info, i guess they knew i would leak and their profitability would die right at that spot, so they mined and sold the coins and then all cryptonight coins crashed the price cause they sold most of their coins when it was 2.5x more money.

If you guys think cost is going to make Bitmain stop you're all wrong. They have more than enough money to do anything they want. They made more profit than NVIDIA in 2017... They just made ASICS for Cryptonight which was deemed asic resistant. If the only factor is money then for sure they are mining secretly with their Asics. The only moment it was revealed that they had ASICS was when Monero announced their hardfork to change their POW.

Why do you call me troll? I was just giving my reasoned opinion.

Statements like "eth will always be the king" are more typical of a troll or fanboy.

The hashrate is not only recent, started 3 months ago, so nothing supports what van said, cryptonight miners are switching to eth now and a week ago, before that they were mining only cryptonight so nothing van says has any base and if you think it has it means you area greater troll than him cause stay in denial like that is bad.

You are doing or did it wrong then cause ethash never gave more money than cryptonight with vega.



Another one in denial here. Keep on it trolls.


You trolls need to understand that profit wise, eth will always be the king of altcoins and the reason is still profitable even having asics on mining eth and those troll asic companies have boundaries, they don't want people to suspect there are eth asics.

Also take note that anybody saying there are no eth asics means, they must be paid trolls from asic companies and alike, do not trust anything they say.

I myself leaked many info about it on beginning january and they got angry at me and want me to be quiet about it, do not listen to these trolls that say there are no eth asics.

That's exactly what Nvidia was doing with the P series mining cards which are targeted for ETH mining and only distributed in bulk orders. Especially the P104 that came out at the end of last year and gets 40 MH/s+ on ETH. More recently there is also the P102. That has also contributed to the increase in ETH hash rate from the end of the year in a big part and that is a fact. Not some crazy ASIC conspiracy based on a single rumor on a Chinese web site with ZERO proof.

I don't think any ASIC vendor is mining ETH currently, because of several reasons.

Firstly, Ethash is designed to be memory-intensive, and that means that the ASIC would be very costly to produce because of the amount of memory that needs to be addressed by every single chip.

On top of that, chip manufacturing technology is stable at 14nm, with some players trying to jump to a lower and much more expensive 7nm production process. Popular GPUs use 14nm technology, so any ASIC that pretends to be more efficient must be lower than that (Bitmain Antminer L3+ is 16nm, for instance), thus becoming very expensive.

I don't discard completely the possibility of Ethash ASIC mining, but I think that nowadays the more efficient option are GPUs. The difficulty ramp up is caused in my opinion by more and more GPUs mining.

Regards.

You forget one important thing, there was not enough GPUs on the market to support such increase in hashrate...unless AMD or its partners were selling
through other channels to big miners

I gave you merit on this, its basically a turn of events, I do also mined XMR at ICE AGE however it started at the end of the year when ETH is way more profitable than mining Cryptonight, when Vegas were out and GPU shortage happened medium type GPU's like Rx550, were forcibly sold out and guess what, they also added to mine ETH.

Once xmr forks hopefully amd gpu s will switch over to xmr from eth ( if its profitable). Eth difficulty should drop, but if these eth asics are being "tested" then it could be just an excuse to ramp up the testing with running more machines leaving little difference in eth hashrate. These eth asics might cost a lot to make but its their power efficiency which should make them a money maker.

Greed is capitalist trait, and China is communist country, or I missed something?

BITMAIN money hungry company ,,, they never get enough ... it seems Chinese government started to investigate them... invoices, tax, bitcoincash, probably they got reported by Chinese farms ....

Money laundering ....Currency manipulation (LTC, Bitcoincash ....)


After these yes I believe that they have ASICs capable to mine etherium ... they should also make a fork and you will see how the used ASICs they will hit the market as new new ....

Now you know why DRAM price has gone crazy.

100% yes bitmain and other asic manufacturers are secretly mining ETH with ASICs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yes, they are mining it.

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

I bet since december 2016.

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

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.

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.

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.

Wheres that, they're €400+ in Croatia

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.

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

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.

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.