Wednesday, April 4th 2018
Bitmain Intros Antminer E3 for Ethereum, GPU Prices Could Finally Cool Down
It was only a matter of time before ASICs turned the tide on GPU-accelerated crypto-currency mining. Bitmain announced the Antminer E3, an ASIC miner purpose-built for Ethereum mining. Priced at $800 (or less than the price of an AMD Radeon RX 580 in January), this ASIC draws about 800W of power, and offers a hash-rate of 180 MH/s. To put that into perspective, an RX 580 only has about 30 MH/s, and draws around 200W at typical mining load. Bitmain has begun accepting orders for the Antminer E3, with shipping to commence in July. At its price, no GPU in the market can match the economics of this ASIC, and hence, VGA prices could begin to cool down, and GPU miners could find it hard to hodl on to their overpriced VGAs.
77 Comments on Bitmain Intros Antminer E3 for Ethereum, GPU Prices Could Finally Cool Down
But who's making the asic itself Bitmain i assume.
that leaves a question for me,how good are this parts competitors going to be and what Has Samsung cooked up for algos, they have touted their manufacturing of a new asic , was it this For bitmain??, themselves or someone else?
whats next?
currently one 1070 card priced in the UK at over £500 quid will produce one US dollar per day minus electricity.. eth mining is already dead unless prices go up by large amount..
where this leaves bitmain i havnt a clue.. but it aint in a nice place..
trog
if i was to strip my rig and sell the 1070 cards i would not expect to get more than £200 each for them.. rightly or wrongly i will hodle on and hope for a crypto rebirth.. he he
trog
Their entire business model is the following:
1) Design ASIC around the most profitable mining coin at the moment.
2) Mine with them for months until production fully ramps up to make a quick buck with unfairly powerful machines.
3) Once they are dirt cheap to make, put them on sale for a price that makes it barely possible for the buyer to profit.
4) Start looking into its replacement while the suckers mine with your old used product.
Now take a closer look at this "ASIC" they have for sale:
1) 160MH/s @ 800w isn't any more efficient than what you can do with a 14/16nm mining rig right now. Heck I could probably do better with 6 x 28nm Fury Nano's!
2) That $800 price tag does not include shipping or a PSU. That brings the total price likely to ~$1000! [For reference I paid $1200 for a 150 MH/s rig that has been mining for a year!]
3) Any profitability calcs you do now are meaningless. This thing ships in July, delays are expected with ASIC's, and it will probably take a couple weeks to arrive after shipping. So this won't get to you until around the end of August. By then who knows how high the network difficulty will be, and more importantly:
4) 12nm GPU's will be on sale before this arrives! Consider the fact that a rig made up of 3 x V100's does 240MH/s at 750w! This "ASIC" is grossly less efficient than what I can build right now, and "Turing" will likely make this ASIC stupid before it even comes out.
In summary, I would buy this ASIC in a heartbeat if it was on sale on Amazon for $800 RIGHT NOW. But it isn't, and most informed people will know that their existing rigs have another 4 months of mining before this even gets into customer's hands, and you may even be able to get superior "Turing Rigs" before this comes out.
github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/958
At any rate, I'd buy a used mining GPU BEFORE I bought a used gaming one, (and then likely mine with it for many years). I have a feeling you're not going to do either and are just wasting our time.
But question for all existing miners who wait for crypto comeback (+200?+300%?):
why dont you just buy crypto then? I mean if you know that "future is here to stay" - sell your mining rig (while it still has close to MSRP some value) and for that $$$ buy and hold that crypto and cash in those +300% later. in case if cryptos will stay as low as now (or probably go even lower - because you see the trend, right?) you will aslo lose lot of value of your existing gpus (you see that all gpus are like -30% of what prices were just 4 weeks ago, right?) and your mined pennies in your crytpos will be even less worth - I mean either you mine or not - you should consider your self and act as a casual crypto trader - your income will be detemined only from crypto daytraders speculation volume not "the future technology".
Honestly, I view that as a good thing. I agree, you'll always make more money investing than mining.
That's not why I mine though. I do it for fun, for jounalism at TPU, and for learning.
Others may have different reasons.
as for buying coin directly i have already done that.. money invested in coin £6900.. price up (quite quickly) to £14000 a couple of months or so back.. all looking very good.. now its down to £5000... its the same problem as selling a mining rig.. to sell now while its worth what it is or hold on and hope it all starts to go up again..
this is not one coin thing.. its all of them..
trog
If i were a miner now, i'll sell soon
if coins go up mining profits will go up again.. i built my rig back in august last year.. mining only really got profitable when the price of eth shot up to near $1200 a couple of months back.. with eth back down to $400-ish what was $50 dollars per day is now less than $10 for me..
its been an exciting ride.. thats for sure.. :)
trog
That's if you're paying normal electricity price in Europe @home.
So, ETH can go down to 155$ until this can't be run by anyone.
2 options :
- Market fall before and only a few will invest in those machines
- Many people will invest because it's better than GPU and the mining power is going to raise in peak, and then crash when hitting the 155$ cap.
Anyway, GPU mining is over very very soon.trog
I took thoses prices from my bill as a simple customer.
In France we produce a lot of energy, so I think it's cheaper than in other countries (we have around 60 nuclear plant if I remember well).
They don't want to be bad countries who uses nuclear power, but they it, so they make it in some way.