Bitmain is the most famous and important cryptocurrency mining company on earth. It has operations in several countries and it sells different ASIC miners to the public. But there are some cryptocurrencies that are working against application-specific integrated circuit miners. Monero and Siacoin are among them.
Stop ASIC Miners
Bitmain has launched a new powerful mining hardware known as Antminer X3 ASIC miner. This new released product has been created to mine the CryptoNight hashing algorithm that Monero uses. Other cryptocurrencies like ByteCoin and AeonCoin use the same mining algorithm.
With these new products, the most benefited are large manufacturers of video cards and specialized ASI chips. That situation creates concerns about the centralization that these enterprises are acquiring. That could be harmful for the system and the participants.
According to different statistics, Bitmain earned $4 billion dollars during the last year. Something that can be compared to the 24 years that Nvidia needed in order to reach such profits.
Monero reacted about this situation and published defamatory posts about how insolvent the new Antminer X3 are. Riccardo Spagni, Monero’s developer, explained on Twitter that the new Antminer X3 will not work for Monero.
Just a reminder that this WILL NOT work on Monero https://t.co/rhy6k2I4Yh
— Riccardo Spagni (@fluffypony) March 15, 2018
Mr Spagni explained that Monero’s core development group will be performing regular updates to the hashing algorithm.
Other cryptocurrencies have also given their opinions about the new Antminer.
David Vorick, founder of Siacoin, wrote:
“Bitmain has historically been very greedy, and very willing to sacrifice the well-being of the community, of their customers, and of the ecosystem, if that means they can make a couple of extra dollars.”
In the past, Siacoin community debated about whether to invalidate or not the new A3 miners that Bitmain was going to release and a debate started to take place in the community. At the moment, Siacoin and its core team decided not to invalidate the new A3 miners.
“After much consideration and discussion, we’ve decided to not invalidate A3 miners via soft-fork unless Bitmain takes direct action to harm the Sia project. We’re incredibly excited about 2018 and will move forward stronger,” reads a tweet by Sia Tech.
