This is the end result of every coin that has ASIC mining: All of the hashrate going to a few Chinese pools because it’s unprofitable for the fools who bought the publicly released ASICs at a 500% profit margin for the manufacturer.
We’ve seen this happen with Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, Decred, and Siacoin.
It will very soon happen to Zcash. People who bought the Z9 and Z9 minis will have to shut them off by the end of the year.
Why? what proof do you have that by 01/01/2019 I will have to shut down my solo Z9 mini?
Here is some salt for you, after only 37 days of running my solo Z9min I will have recovered the cost of investment in the Z9 mini by your time line where I will have to shut it off it will have paid for itself + 2.8 more times.
That seems a little optimistic. Right now with 2 mini’s OC’d to 16k, I get $2G per month when the difficulty is at its’ lowest and closer to $1.5G at it’s average. The difficulty will be 50% higher in September. They were $2300 each with shipping and power supplies. Break even point will be end of September most likely, depending upon the price.
ohh sorry I was given a max coupon to purchase the mini I have, I forget that sometimes, so my OPP was not that which changes my recope
This is kind of neat Photonic or Optical FPGAs on the horizon – Silverton Consulting
There is a good chance they break even sooner. While i agree that difficulty will raise soon or late, it seems price of Zcash is raising as well, compensating a lot the difficulty increase. We see it right now. Last week it was about $25 per Z9 mini, today we get over $30 per day…
My Bet goes end of August - Middle of September latest.
Looks still more promising than the the plan for someone buying today a 1080ti, needs about 780 days (2+years) to break even (only GPU, without necessary hardware).
My opinion if planning build GPU rig you for Equihash waste you money. If you have 10x GPU and mining ZEC waste you profit. I remember my first GPU Ring on 2017 5x GTX 1080TI making 3 Zec per month 1100W
Getting into GPU mining now is not a good idea. If you already have GPUs, it’s still profitable, but a new investment is not a wise idea.
That said, the 1080 Ti will be worth a lot more than a Z9 mini in a few years. I suspect it will be worth more than the Z9 mini in a few months, if we see the typical difficulty increases associated with ASIC mining. There are very few investments that depreciate more quickly than cryptocurrency ASICs.
Just out of curiousity, you are aware there are companies that buy asics that are no more used for deep learning on such stuff? Just asking because a lot of people say/think that it’s worth nothing at some time, totally missing such buy up companies and or the possibility to sell them as parts which seem to be bring some good bucks as well.
How much do you think the Z9 mini will be worth in a year?
A fascinating thread since EOS is proof-of-stake…
More info…
the energy regulator of the Canadian province, Régie de l’énergie, gave the region’s utility firm, Hydro-Quebec, the go-ahead to impose a deterrent tariff that will see cryptocurrency miners paying double the rate that is levied on households and other utility customers.
https://www.ccn.com/quebec-approves-energy-rate-hikes-for-bitcoin-mining-firms/
My personal opinion is USD 150-200, in that range…
Sia community analysis of blockchain data and mining pools:
The oldest block we can track of Antpool is #132204, dated on November 17th, what means that Bitmain mined Siacoins in secret for exactly 2 months… In total, 550 blocks were mined in secret during the 2 months previous to the Antminer A3 announcement, representing around 85 million Siacoins in block rewards… they could have recovered the whole cost of the ASIC development just by secret mining during those 2 months. This, of course, on top of the $74 million in sales profit just from the first 2 batches
Here is an except from the link above… sound familiar ?
"I remember those days as the most stressing experience I have lived on the blockchain space. Being a moderator of the official Discord, I had to deal with the confrontation of the community while I had to deal with my own feelings but keeping them aside. The once peaceful and collaborative community stopped talking about Terabytes of data stored, file contracts and new features, abandoning itself for weeks to a situation akin to a civil war, including letters, confusing polls, sues and death threats. To fork or not to fork? Either choice would tear apart the community. Either choice the community would lose members and contributors. Some left it already even after the final decision. My anxiety, ATH. In the end it was decided not to fork. “”
Interesting read but some points that i miss or make me not believe the whole story:
Both, Bitmain and Baikal, released their Asics at the same time, Innosilicon a bit later. There is no comparison btw these how each of them affected the hashrate, minining pools, private/secret mining, blocks. While the author tries to describe one piece of the puzzle, how does it fit if we do not know what when how the other 2 pieces of the puzzles did.
We shouldn’t forget that Bitmain has released it’s A3 about 6 months earlier than Sia their own Obelisk miner. causing Obelisk mostly millions of wasted invetments. I don’t take the independent third-party and unbiased statment of the author, a SIA dev, moderator and Sia stats page owner. Independent means something else in my book.
Other than that i think he is absolutly right with the problem of unknown mining pools which is indeed a real big concern.
Beat me too it again. Read this while I was on break at work, was going to post this, was an interesting read and some great forensic analysis of what the reality is, at least in regards to SIA. What I would love to see is @zooko ask Jihan about it in a follow up discussion and give him the opportunity to explain/refute/prove otherwise.
what is going on with the diff
Current Zcash Difficulty: 8,340,327.39482897
1013a (edt)
seeing 30% swings is bananas
I guess auto switching asics & gpus that switch btw. ZEC, ZEN, ZCL, BCI and BTCP, up to what’s more profitable at the moment. Just only a guess of course.