humble opinion based on zcash network hashrate graph.
if someone else is watching this graph, don’t you think that hashrate upper border is not organic?
Today Nov.2/2018 with a difficulty around 42m the z9 mini would mine about 9 ZCash in a year at 360 watts. Back before ASICs took over, at around 10m difficulty, ONE 1080TI would mine 2.4 Zcash at 180 watts.
Soon the z9mini will be less efficient than a GPU per coin. With the big spikes of difficulty, a ASIC company is most likely getting a new model online. Sadly difficulty is going to keep shooting up, the arms race has begun.
This is why GPU mining is so much better. The hardware does not become obsolete in 3 months, its closer to 3 years for GPUs. Whats the point with ASICs if you are racing to pay off your miners, only to be stuck with something that loses you money 3-6 months later. Now you have to spend most of the money you just made back on miners or your done mining. Repeat every 3-6 months, soon the miners begin to become a huge money sink.
I would expect to see a jump when Bitmain starts shipping out the next batch of Z9’s, so you may be right.
Hard to say definitively, but I would agree. It appears as though the network has been capped at 2.1GH/s for about a month. This could be the result of large miners opportunistically switching between different Equihash coins rather than overt collusion to limit difficulty. However, I wouldn’t dismiss that possibility outright, as Bitmain may be trying to supress difficulty in order to make the asking price for the Z9’s more attractive.
I think that estimate might even be too generous. Assuming a Z9 Mini hashes at 16,000 sol/s, and taking yesterday’s avg. difficulty of 41M with an assumed difficulty growth rate of 20% per month, you could expect to mine about 5.6 ZEC (~$650 USD) over the next 12 months.
Longevity is definitely a huge plus for GPUs, my rigs have been running 24/7 for well over 2 years now and only a single fan has failed in that time. Obsolescence is a trickier question though. Current mining revenue is about 0.03 ETH per day with a dozen RX480’s, and it was over 3 ETH per day when I started. That’s a decrease of over 100x in coin yield. It should be interesting to see what effect a switch to ProgPoW will have on Ethereum’s hashrate, as we don’t really know how much of the network is comprised of ASICs.
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seems that 02.11.2018 at around 9:00 upper hashrate limit was removed.
and we can see spike from 2.15 to 2.62 GH\s as an instant result.
and there is no third batch as such, they ship within a week.
from my surroundings i can say that they experience big sales right now.
What do you mean by “from your surroundings” exactly?
I’m just curious why anyone would buy Equihash ASICs at these prices instead of buying coins directly, it makes absolutely no sense. The only logical explanation is that Bitmain and Inno are manufacturing new batches for themselves at minimal cost in order to regain control of the mining rewards.
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i mean i can judge from my surrounding. my friend was selling 8 z9minis for around three weeks, crazy demand (phone calls) this week exactly. all adverts with equihash miners gone. from this i make conclusion that people actually buy equihash asics right now.
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As long as equihash coins show up as profitable there will be a huge demand for equihash asics, simple and easy as that.
How is it profitable though? Unless you’re the company manufacturing the ASICs, the projected mining revenue for any Equihash ASIC doesn’t even come close to covering the unit cost. It’s plausible that hobby miners aren’t aware of how difficulty works, but that’s certainly not the case for large farms. Either large farms are getting massive discounts (i.e. 50% off list price) or the manufacturers are adding more machines for themselves, but I have a hard time believing that anyone is buying 10,000 units at the current list price. That’s approximately how much hashpower went online yesterday.
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Because everybody and his grandma still thinks that the current prices are the lows and will raise a lot soon or late… And the other thing, yes, i have a feeling their are indeed larger mining farms with access to cheap electricity buy these Z9’s or whatever equihash asics…
Judging from other ASICs they have made in the past that have lost 90+% of the value they started selling them at. My guess is the z9 only costs 300-500 usd to make, I doubt its even that much. I wouldnt be surprised if Bitmain is still making them to mine with for a month and then reselling them for 1k-2k.
At the price of 500 usd or less per unit, it still is very profitible for a manufactuer to make and mine with. At them prices, z9s would ROI in 30-60 days.
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Antpool is back on top and was down below yesterday in the pool Zcash ranking, so Bitmain is most probably testing new devices, rip us normalos 
Bitmain are mining for themselves! Look at the fluctuation in hashrate on Antpool. You can call it testing, but they’ve publicly claimed that they don’t test mine on the mainnet with their devices before shipping, so they’re obviously liars. What else are they lying about? You can bet that for every Z9 they sell they likely keep 2 or 3 for themselves. That way they can maintain their share of the network hashrate and mining rewards while earning additional revenue selling overpriced units that they know will rapidly depreciate.
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only solution would be hacking Bitmain HQ…
They already “hacked” your real money wallet 
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and zooko response to this literally is - we are thinking of solution, but note that if we will come out with something, we will inform community at least a year in advance.
this is just crazy asic protection from person who supposed to be in front of asic resistant project, lol.
absurd.
yes, that’s what i think, not the next 12 months and maybe never like 10 months ago … But hey, that’s just my personal opinion and feeling, it could sky rocket the next day, but i’am just don’t believe in it…
very f%&*ing true 
So you or your friend were selling Z9 Minis last week and now you’re calling for ASICs to be bricked? No offense, but that’s downright unethical. What about the people who purchased those units from your friend?
Zooko is looking out for the entire community in regards to gradual changes. He’s aware that bricking ASICs will disproportionately hurt the endusers who purchased ASICs, such as the people who bought your friend’s Z9 Minis. The manufacturers won’t be hurt as badly, since they’ve already made a profit on the units they manufactured. I’m all for PoW changes, but abruptly bricking hardware would hurt a lot of people and more than likely fracture the community.
what about people who invested in nvidia GPU’s, in march 2018. Idea was mining asic-resistant zcash.
And then without warning z9mini!
seems that noone cares about that part of community. because they took pure gamble, right?
well… then it would be logical that people who invested thousands in hardware, which is good for only one umodified algorythm, took much bigger gamble, and they don’t deserve to be saved either.