I'm thinking about the sudden hashrate increase in XMR, trying to explain it. It's 5 fold increase in a couple of months.
Is it that every GPU migrated from ETH to XMR? I think this is not likely, seeing ETH hashrate. And GPU supply is limited at the moment. There are not enough GPU in production to justify a 5-fold increase in such a small timeframe. Everybody and their parents started mining on the home rig ? Might be, but still, I don't buy it.
What is somebody is using asics. Perhaps preliminary or private development. Think about the D3 and what it is going to do to X11.
And if this is true, who could this be ? My coins would go with Bitmain.
I know, Cryptonote is supposed to be memory intensive and thus not asic friendly. But, 2MB is not that much and asics with such memory exist. The only risk for such an asic would be the hard forks of monero. They could increase the memory size, or maybe not. Many CPU had 2MB of cache and exceeding that would make CPUs unfit for mining.
So, my guess is that we're going to see an ASIC for Cryptonote really soon. What do you think?
Your prediction was spot on!
So, this answers some of the questions in a different thread:
Q: How long do the ASIC creators use them in secret before making them available to the public?
A: It seems they were using the Giant N and the Antminer X3 from July 2017. So, about 9 months!
Q: What kind of profits do they make before they make them available to the public?
A: Taking into account that Monero would be their best target coin, that means they could pull about $200-300/day or $80k until now with the X3 and about $20-30/day or $8k until now with the Giant N. These numbers are for just 1 device! Imagine what kind of money do they make with dozens of them.
They will also max out these profits by selling these ASICs to naive miners that will probably just pay them off until the hard forks happen and then have nothing to do with them. The creators win all the time.