You keep saying Bitmain ... there are many better, faster, more power efficient miners available than Bitmain miners.
Bitmain lost their main hardware guy years ago, that's why they've produced nothing new for years since the S9, until the recent releases.
He now runs Poolin after the contractual agreements finally expired.
I don't believe you here. S9 was out like 3 years ago and now they've launched S11 and S15, the delay is not due to lack of expertise or some genius engineer leaving a multi-billion dollars firm, nonsense.
Going down from 28 nm tech to 14 was hard enough and getting to 7-8 nm was a nightmare. It is not about design it is about chip making industry, Bitmain designs shits and orders chips to its manufacturer.
Plus, Jihan is smart, he knows how sensitive is bitcoin community about monopoly, and it is absolutely reasonable for Bitmain to maneuver in a sophisticated way to hide their dominance but it is real and undisputable: Bitmain is the dominant party in crypto ASIC industry.
You clearly have some weird idea about what is in RAM and a GPU ... and how no one could replace the simple hardware in a GPU with other designed hardware customised for any PoW.
Unless your PoW uses absolutely every piece of circuitry in a GPU (which nothing does) you certainly cannot argue something cannot be replicated and made more efficient (though it probably could anyway even if it did)
Your idea of modern gpu and RAM architecture, looks to me pretty much weird too
GPU/RAM design/manufacturing industry has their own markets and rules and competition sphere is overloaded already, believe me
There is no need for utilizing
absolutely every piece of circuitry in a GPU, we are engineers and would be satisfied with %80.
Let Bitmain or any other cracker try making a multi thousand core
thing that saturates a HBM memory bus and its cores simultaneously while running ProgPow and making it more efficient and/or cheaper than AMD by eliminating the unused 20% percent circuits. Little chance to succeed tho, but what would be the gains(just in case)?
A semi-gpu with 20% better price/efficiency and no application other than mining! Does it worth shit? A S15 is thousands of times more efficient than a gpu based system with comparable price, remember?
It is what I mean when I say ProgPoW is
ASIC-proof, it is provably safe against ASIC attack not because because it is impossible to make a hypothetical ASIC chip with a slightly (1.2x) better performance, (of course it is possible) it is secure against such an attack in the same way that bitcoin is secure: game theory and rational behavior of parties guarantees its security.
Crypto is not a mere engineering/programming domain, mathematics and socioeconomics are kings here, ProgPoW is secure by virtue of its brilliant game theoretic concept: making it infeasible for ASIC attacks to be started in the first place by de-incentivizing such attempts.
However, ASIC SHA256 miners use way more power and require very specific design constraints that the GPU companies clearly cannot match.
If making miners was so much easier than a GPU, AMD and nVidia would already have been doing it - Bitmain clearly made a crap ton of money (and profit) that can be compared to the GPU producers.
AMD/NVIDIA are leaders in gaming market which is a 200 billion industry that is doubling every year and is predicted to keep the pace for near future, they just don't take mining that serious.
