IMPORTANT UPDATE – Should You Invest In Ethereum Mining?

Recently I’ve stumbled across some disturbing news that has made me question the future of Ethereum as a coin.

According to certain news, Bitmain is about to start manufacturing their first ASIC for Ethereum. Lately Bitmain has been pioneering their way to several coins. For instance, they were one of the first ones who have made an ASIC for CryptoNight algorithm (Monero, Sumocoin, Electroneum, etc).

The news first appeared two days ago and after some days of research and monitoring I’ve come to the conclusion that we are definitely not dealing with rumors at this point. Yesterday it also became clear that at least three other companies are working on Ethereum ASICs.

What does this mean to you?

On one hand, if all of the four companies will release their ASICs someday soon, we will not have to worry too much about hashrate centralization. Say, the situation would be way worse if Bitmain would be the only company to create ETH ASICs because then they could possibly get a huge share of the global ETH hashrate.

On the other hand, I’d expect Ethereum difficulty levels to skyrocket in the next months. That if ETH ASICs will be released and working as advertised, of course.

What Should We Expect?

I am quite certain that Bitmain will release their ASIC. They rarely cancel their products, even when they know that it will not work as intended (as it happened with CryptoNight). I am also quite certain that other companies (HalongMining, Baikal, etc) will not miss their opportunity to join the party. That being said, we still do not know for sure how the Ethereum community will react to this.

Monero is a recent example of how the developers of a coin said a bold and definitive ‘No’ to ASICs. As you can read in my other article, Monero developers have decided to fork their coin every half year just so no ASIC could be compatible with the coin. This made CryptoNight ASICs way less attractive to the end user because Monero is arguably the most profitable CryptoNight coin to mine to the date.

Nobody said that Ethereum community and devs will simply accept the fact that Ethereum can now only be mined with ASICs. Maybe they will, thought there is a huge chance that they will do at least some changes to the coin.

My Personal Advice on This

The situation with Ethereum is certainly not clear now and it might take days or weeks for it to become a bit clearer. So, here is what I would recommend you to do in the meantime:

1. 1. Do Not invest in Ethereum cloud mining packages:
      1. Ethereum price might further decrease in the near future. Investors seem to dislike any changes in the way a coin works, which is why Ethereum price significantly dropped once Bitmain have announced their upcoming ASIC for the coin.
      2. If ETH ASICs will become a thing, you can imagine that difficulty levels will skyrocket and any packages you’ve purchased might suddenly lose any profitability.
   2. When purchasing GPUs for mining, do not count on Ethereum when calculating ROI. It is uncertain whether ETH mining will be still a thing in some months so I think it’s a good idea to focus on mining other coins.

1. If you haven’t yet, try your rigs with other GPU-minable coins/algos. I’ve posted guides on how to mine zCash, Ravencoin (a coin that is known to be the most ASIC-resistant of the family), Decred, LBRY, Pascal, Verge, KECCAC, among others.

In Conclusion

As always, do your own research. If you find something interesting, I’d appreciate you to post it in the comments section below. As a community, we rely on each other and a piece of important info can save any of us a lot of time and money. Thank you again for reading!