Baikal Giant-N cryptonight/cryptonight-lite ASIC.......

[Klee]

I know there is other posts about this here but this is big enough that I think it deserves its own thread.

Good thing Monero is changing the algorithm with the next hard fork.

Game over for CPU and GPU's mining Cryptonight and Cryptonight-light, looks like a bunch on new coins forked from Monero is in the forcast.

 

[onsit]

Time to dump coins that forked off bytecoin (turtle, ipbc, krb, and such). Doing an upstream pull from Monero will be very difficult for these coins. Unless it's pull requested into Bytecoin tag that's used for Forknote coins.

Time to watch github like a hawk, and look for large commit heavy forks of Monero. Another round of early mining before pump and dump.

My only concern is how long for xmrig and xmrstak if/when they will implement support for the algo.

This does seem too cheap. And doesn't seem like anyone is actually using them. I think botnets are still the majority of unknown hash. Is this an actual known brand name for ASICs?

 

[garetjax]

60w for 20k hash doesn’t seem right

 

[spfoo]

60w for 20k hash doesn’t seem right

Nope, considering:
"Power supply:ATX Power(12v 6pin connector*3)"

60W would run from a laptop power supply...

 

[garetjax]

Also the minimum purchase is a quanatity if 6

 

[onsit]

Reading up on these - it looks like RX 550 chips setup in clustered setup, with custom firmware to do one and only thing, mine.

Which would mean these would just need a firmware patch to be able to follow monero hard forks. How they were able to get such massive quantities of these chips is beyond me - given the GPU shortage.

 

[alex_stief]

Yeah, some of the specs don't seem to add up. Especially the abundance of power connectors for 60W. I reserve some skepticism until I see how it performs in the field.

 

[keybored]

There is some speculation that these are either used or they have been selling them privately for a while now, which might explain those 100-200+MH spikes in hashrates in a matter of days. Some speculate they want to get rid of these before the fork.

 

[garetjax]

Yep read more here Baikal Giant N - Cryptonight, Cryptonight-lite ASIC miner

Looks like a laptop power supply - not sure how that powers a cluster of 550 chips - there would have to be a ton of them ie if one 550 gets about 500 hash - you would need about 40 of them. Powering 40 of those chips with a 60w laptop power supply? I don't know anything about asic miners but the ant miners use 1200w on 220v

Also like I mentioned minimum buy of 6 = $3600 x 6 = $21600 - not for the faint hearted.

 

[jetbird]

I bet this is not the only ASIC cyptonight miner out there. There are probably others of varying design deployed already, this happens to be the first to try to maximize their roi by selling there used miners before the fork.. It will be interesting to see the hashrate delta on monero after the fork. You will probably see a asic mining migration to other cyrptonight coins.

 

[spfoo]

I wonder if today's price collapse in cryptonote-based coins has any connection with this...

 

[MiniKnight]

The announcement a few weeks ago that Monero was going to constantly change algo means that they knew this was happening.

I hope since Aeon is a project of a Monero dev that gets the same.

All the others are clones. The next batch will clone the next version of Monero and these ASICs will be gone.

 

[Patrick]

I wonder if the initial batch was not already in the market mining Monero given the difficulty increase it has seen. At these specs, you could essentially run them for a few months, then push to the market just before you knew Monero would hard fork.

 

[Joel]

I wonder if the initial batch was not already in the market mining Monero given the difficulty increase it has seen. At these specs, you could essentially run them for a few months, then push to the market just before you knew Monero would hard fork.

Bitmain has been well known to do exactly this. Design and build a new ASIC, accept "preorders" to finance their construction, and mine with them for a few months and finally ship them after the diff has been raised to the roof.

 

[Joel]

Yeah, some of the specs don't seem to add up. Especially the abundance of power connectors for 60W. I reserve some skepticism until I see how it performs in the field.

My suspicion is that it's actually 1600w and they just "forgot" a few digits.

 

[alex_stief]

And in the end, why would you even design it to only consume 60W - which I still doubt would be possible. With the enormous hash rate it allegedly puts out, even doubling power consumption for even 20% or 30% higher hash rate would be no big deal. Efficiency would still be off the charts, and time to roi would be shorter. This all seems very sketchy to me.

 

[Patrick]

Bitmain has been well known to do exactly this. Design and build a new ASIC, accept "preorders" to finance their construction, and mine with them for a few months and finally ship them after the diff has been raised to the roof.

Exactly, and nothing would rush you out to market faster than Monero announcing they are going to do regular algorithm changes.

 

[Klee]

Been thinking about this today and what I think will happen so i'll share my thoughts.

Well we will find out if these miners have been mining Monero the last few months, as soon as Monero does the hard fork there will be a day or two until miners and pools swap over and after that settles down if the network hashrate is VERY noticeably lower than before that means these miners were mining Monero in the months up till the fork.

But if its the same or more as before then my guess is that they were not, but I really believe they have been mining Monero for months and it was not just bots responsible for the high network hash rate.

Either way all the other coins based on cryptonight will get mined more heavily but there are so many no single coin will get hammered too bad.

These asic miners will not affect Monero much at all except hopefully they were mining Monero and after the fork they can't and maybe it will be more profitable to mine Monero again.

IF they started rolling out back in Nov-Dec the network hash rate was about 1/4 the current hashrate, so If I had one today and mined at 20k at 60w my daily profit at todays Monero price would be about $20.00. Back in Dec the profit would be i'm guessing about 5 to 6 times that with the higher price of Monero and the lower difficulty so lets say $100.00- $120.00 per day per miner and the estimates I have heard about the price of the miners back then was about $7,000 each and would make r.o.i. in about three months so from end of November until now thats almost three months.

So I am guessing, yea i'm doing alot of that LOL, that those miners have been mining for a few months they have just made r.o.i. or very close to doing it and when you include the current sale price Baikal will make a nice profit.

The one thing that I thinks almost proves the miners have been mining for months is the immediate availability just a few weeks before the Monero fork.

Usually Baikal announces miners months before they are available and they always sale out immediately for the first batch, then the second and so on.

This time its VERY different, no announcement ahead of time to stir up interest, and immediately available.....humm almost like they have a warehouse or two full of them....... and I am pretty sure that they were not just sitting in boxes but being "burned-in" for the last few months.


I am not getting too worked up about this at all, it will not affect Monero badly at all nor affect the clones as much everyone thinks either because there will not be a huge jump in hashrate because the miners have already been hashing for months and there are plenty of coins to spread all the hash around.

So now i'm back to mining Monero and getting ready for the Fork.

And no i'm not selling all my other cryptonight coins either.

This will be a big deal until everyone realizes that its not. LOL

EDIT: Also I expect that the first adopters will be yelling about being sold used miners, it's not like that has never happend before. LOL

 

[Joel]

Maybe after the hard fork my servers will earn more than $1/day/node again!

Aside: The whole ASIC vs GPU thing always makes me laugh. People seem to forget that GPUs ARE ASICs! They were just designed for a different purpose.

 

[Algeroth]

Bitmain announced today.. 220kH at 550W.... wow.... in a price of CPU that can do 2k