Some days are full of surprise. A couple of days ago Bitmain has suddenly announced that they’ve got Siacoin miners for sale, becoming the first company to manufacture ASICS for that specific coin. The next day, another Chinese company ‘Halongmining’ has announced that they are working on an ASIC for siacoin too.

The DragonMint B52 is allegedly under development and should be available for preorder soon. The 135-chip ASIC is expected to mine Blake2b coins with a hashrate of 3.5 THS and a power draw of 1000W -/+8%.

This makes it the weakest among other Blake2b miners. This might or might not be an issue; it all depends on the price, which is still unknown.

Halongmining’s official website gives some basic info on the miner as well as the option to join their waiting list. There is no picture of the miner yet, though. On their official reddit thread, they state that “We’ll first post video of the first machine, then we can better estimate (we don’t know the wafer yield yet).”

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Now, is this legit?

Some people speculate that the miner is not real because Halongmining have announced a Bitcoin ASIC two months ago yet haven’t delivered it yet. The prototype is ready but the miner itself still got to see mass production. One might wonder why Halongmining wouldn’t deliver the DragonMint 16T Bitcoin miner first and then start working on a new ASIC.

On the other hand, CEO and Co-Founder of blockstream.com, Adam Back openly supports Halongmining by stating that he has seen the 16T miner operating in person.

Sia developers also confirm that the specs of the DragonMint B52 sound pretty real and doable: “The specs are in line with our most optimistic simulations for the SC1. If we can get the chips to run at 0.5V, we’d be seeing around 3.3 TH/s per 1000w.”

Halongmining is a new company and some people naturally do not trust it until it proves itself.

In Conclusion

It is up to you to conclude whether this upcoming miner is legit or not. Do your research and please consider sharing your findings here.

Now, what I like about this is the way Sia developers are actively reading reddit posts and replying in real time. This talks highly of them and it means that they are serious about their project and are really close to the community.

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The post A New Siacoin Miner is On the Way – Here’s What We Know About the DragonMint B52 Blake2b Miner so far appeared first on 1st Mining Rig.

UPDATE: Yesterday I’ve received an email from SIA where they’ve shared some more details on the Obelisk SC1, as well as their thoughts on the Antminer A3.
In brief, they expect the SC1 to be at least twice more power-efficient than the Antminer A3.According to them, both miners output around 800 GH/s, though the SC1 pulls 500W from the wall while the A3 consumes 1183 W

UPDATE February 3 2018

Siacoin Hashrate and Dificulty

siacoin mining hashrate increase

siacoin mining dificulty

Antminer A3 current profitability vs when launched

Antminer A3 Mining Profitability

Antminer A3 Mining Profitability Update February 3

The Obelisk team also believes the SC1 will be even more power efficient than that, though this will be known in March when they will get test chips.

The first batch of SC1 miners should be shipped somewhere in May.

What is good is that SIA team seems quite transparent. For instance, they’ve shared how many Obelisk miners they’ve sold so far:

Batch 1: 2,963 DCR1 and 3,598 SC1 units sold
Batch 2: 1,350 DCR1 and 1,996 SC1 units sold

Some months ago, the devs of the Sia network have announced that their cryptocurrency is getting its own ASIC miner – the Obelisk SC1.

Hundreds of people have preordered their SC1 units and Sia promises that they will be sending the miners in some months. The SC1 is still under development and it still got to see mass production.

Things were going as expected until Bitmain announced that they’ve released their own Blake(2a) ASIC miner past Wednesday. They’ve said that the miner is fully functional and that it already saw mass production, meaning that people will get their miners shipped as soon as they buy it.

As if that was not enough surprise, Bitmain also promised to ship the units in only 10 days. If you ever purchased from Bitmain, you know that orders usually take about 3 months.

The first batch of the Antminer A3 has been sold in a matter of hours. The units retail for $2375 USD each. Here are the basic specs:

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We are talking about gigahashes per second here. Considering current network hashrate of 626.74 TH/s, 815 GH/s per ASIC unit is insane, imagine that one 6x GPU mining rig can get somewhere between 6000 Mh/s and 9000 Mh/s. If difficulty adjustment weren’t a thing, the ROI of an Antminer A3 would be 1 week.

Crazy fantasies aside, the miner still looks really profitable after taking the adjustments into account, provided Bitmain won’t sell too many units in a short period of time. According to the bitcointalk thread, between 10k and 15K devices have been sold. In theory, this should raise the network hashrate from ~640 Th/s to about ~8,500 Th/s, resulting in 20x difficulty increase.

Those are mere speculations though and we probably won’t be able to know how many miners have been sold until we see the difficulty rising.

Scam Alert

In their tweet, Bitmain have warned users that there is a scam website that replicates bitmain’s one. Here is what they write:

https://twitter.com/BITMAINtech/status/952238245760319493

If you look at the original tweet with the Facebook ad picture, you can see that the ‘n’ on ‘shop.bitmain.com’ has a tiny dash underneath it. It is not your screen being dirty – I’ve tried to wipe mine too until I’ve realized the ‘n’ is actually a different symbol. This is what Bitmain meant by “If you look closely the “n” in https://shop.bitmain.com/ is not actually the “n” it should be.”

A Word of Advice

When purchasing a product, I always try to look at reviews and opinions both from end users and big companies alike. In this case, SIA developers have expressed their opinion on Bitmain’s A3 miner. Make sure you read it here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/7r4spy/dev_team_thoughts_on_the_bitmain_a3/

Personally, I am not taking sides in this; I thought you would like to have as much info as possible before doing anything.

Here is yet another piece of information you’d want to be aware of. Eventually, some part of the mining community is not happy with the new Antminer so they’ve requested to Sia to soft fork the coin. According to one of their last tweets, Sia core team is considering this option: https://twitter.com/SiaTechHQ/status/955880534059741185

Make sure you follow their twitter to keep up to date with the latest decisions they make.

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About Sia

Siacoin is an altcoin that is employed in the Sia network as a local currency.

The network allows its users to store their data on the cloud.

What makes it different from Google Drive or Dropbox is the way files are handled. Instead of being stored in private servers, files are encrypted, duplicated, split into fragments and distributed all across a decentralized network. This allows you to store your files without the need to trust a third-party storage company.

Other users just like you store the encrypted fragments of your files and only you have the keys to decrypt and access your stuff.

Here is a detailed review of the company.

In Conclusion

I suppose it is too early to jump into conclusions. Some people are excited about the new A3 miner while others are not.

The only thing I am sure of is that Sia is a solid company that enjoys a steady growth in popularity. They offer a real product and I believe that their coin has good prospects. It might not be skyrocketing in price like, say, Ethereum but it is definitely a coin that is backed up by a real service which means that it might be a great idea to mine it by using the ASIC miner you can get.

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The post Antminer A3 Review – Bitmain Surprises Everyone with This New Siacoin Miner appeared first on 1st Mining Rig.