cid:C084F38F-8B97-4BDD-901C-3A847E14385A@Homecid:C084F38F-8B97-4BDD-901C-3A847E14385A@Home
There has been a lot of FUD regarding the upcoming Bitmain F3 Ethereum mining "ASIC".
According to reports it can do 200-220 MH/s and will cost between US$2500-3000.
Now anyone who is actually mining ETH (like me) will understand that this presents no real threat to GPU mining.
A properly tweaked RX570 or RX580 can do 29-31 MH/s which means a 7 card mining rig of these will do around 210 MH/s - the same as the Bitmain F3. Many standard motherboards can fit 7 GPUs. The cost of this setup (at current overinflated GPU prices) is roughly 7 x $410 for the RX580 4Gb GPUs and $500 for everything else. That's US$3370 worst case.
Best case, the current fall in ETH prices will push GPU pricing back to recommended retail prices of $200 for a RX580 4Gb. This would drop the cost of the rig down to $1900.
Thus a GPU rig with the same hashing power as the Bitmain F3 costs between $1900-3370 vs $2500 - 3000 for the F3.
So the F3 has no advantage on capital cost and may be more expensive per MH/s.
Power consumption figures remain to to seen but we will not see the huge efficiency gains of typical ASICs (if the F3 is indeed an ASIC at all) because of the memory intensive nature of the Ethash algorithm.
Now lets look at the risks.
- 2nd hand product - Bitmain's notorious practices of "running-in" new ASICs in for a few months and capturing the early mining rewards themselves and then shipping now second-hand units to miners compared to a new GPU with a long warranty.
- Delivery delay - The gap between payment and shipping with Bitmain (and other ASIC suppliers) is long compared to very short delivery times with GPUs. This is important as ever increasing difficulty means long waits lose the most valuable mining time.
- Resale - GPUs have significant end of mining life value for gamers, AI, 3D rendering etc applications. A Bitmain ASIC is worth nothing at the end of its life as it can't be used for anything else.
- Warranty - Most GPU manufacturers provide a longer and better warranty than Bitmain does. Also it can be claimed locally.
When you take all these into account the F3 looks like a risky bad deal.
In any case, the F3 will not cause a difficulty bomb than will wipe out GPU mining (as FUD purveyors have warned) because its hashrate isn't any higher than a good GPU miner. Given the massive installed base of GPU miners, the introduction of the F3 will make no measurable difference to the normal ongoing increase in ETH difficulty.