Mining company Bitmain has introduced a new ASIC miner Antminer X3 working with hash algorithm CryptoNight, which is used for mining Monero (XMR). Equipment will be available in may, however, according to the online edition of The Next Web, this time it may become ineffective.
Chinese mining giant plans to sell a new cryptocurrency miner by several parties: in may, the price of the equipment will be $11 999, the second batch will be available in June at a price of $7 599, the price of third and fourth party — $3 000 $1 900 respectively. Currently users can pre-order. In addition, Bitmain is planning to release another two batches of equipment but only for users in Hong Kong.
It is noteworthy that a leading developer of Monero’s Spanyi Riccardo (Riccardo Spagni) wrote in his Twitter account that the new miner “won’T work” for mining Monero, given the planned hard forks, which will make changes in the Protocol proof-of-work (PoW).
A response to a tweet of Spanyi served as update the information pages for prospective buyers “Hong Kong parties.”
“One major cryptocurrency that uses a hash function CryptoNight, plans to change its PoW algorithm, and according to their public statement is a deliberate step against ASIC miners, including X3”, — stated in the updated product description.
Bitmain also requests that future buyers carefully weigh “the risks associated with the mining of cryptocurrencies”, and warns that a refund to customers, changed the purchase decision, will not be performed.
We will note, in February, a blog Monero there is a record of the intentions of the developers “continue to resist” company ASIC “reacting quickly to any potential threat from ASIC and spending a little modification PoW in every hard forks”.
“To maintain the principles of decentralization, deterrence of the development of the ASIC and to defend themselves against its unknown aspects, the Monero team are expected to modify the Cryptonight PoW hash in each fork is scheduled two times a year”, — said the representatives of Monero.
As noted by The Next Web, Adminer X3 is designed not only for mining Monero — it is suitable for mining Bytecoin, Aeon, Dash and a few tokens, but there are no guarantees that this will not change by may or June.
In General, the release of a new ASIC-miner has caused a lot of responses. So, a Reddit user called the release of the Antminer X3 “large Scam”.
“Do not buy from Bitmain X3. They mainily Monero with ASIC and now, when it becomes impossible, they want to get out of their car at you,” the user wrote hodlingtv.
We will remind, recently it became known that manufacture their own ASIC chips for mining bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies started Samsung.
