The Mining Arms Race
If you are like me, you too must be paying close attention to the difficulty charts around cryptos. The surge in prices over the last few months has brought in 1,000's of new miners - not to mention existing miners doubling down on their hashing power.
Much of the attention has been directed to Ethereum, which exploded from $8 at the start of this year to $400. As a miner, it is a bit worrying to see that its difficulty has gone up nearly 2x in the last 1 month.
Yesterday, saw that Asus had launched 2 mining specific GPU's:
- MINING-RX470-4G
- MINING-P106-6G
Main Features
- Dual-Ball Bearing 0dB Fans that do not have the problem of oil drying
- Though I have never had the misfortune of a fan dying out, this will definitely be a welcome feature
- IP5X dust resistant
- Having to keep mining rigs open definitely exposes them to dust - this is a big problem for miners in developing countries
- Super Alloy Power II components
- Should increase the life of the cards - lets see how they perform
- GPU Tweak II
- look like more of a marketing gimmick. Any serious miner will customize settings within their .bat file anyway
If Asus can deliver on its claims of a 36% increase in hash rates - perhaps these cards will be worth a look
source: Asus
Is it worth the investment?
While this is good news - how many of the average miners like me will be able to even afford them. I would also be interested to see how soon these cards hit the markets - and more importantly if they will fall into the hands of large companies like Genesis or miners in China first
Considering the rising difficulty and difficulty bomb, mining Ethereum does not make sense for me - I would rather stick to my 50 odd mh/s on altcoins and convert them to btc or eth