Whereas the Ethereum community is preparing to begin shifting to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, some mining units would possibly quickly cease su
Whereas the Ethereum community is preparing to begin shifting to proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus, some mining units would possibly quickly cease supporting ETH mining in any respect.
Bitmain’s Antminer E3, as soon as the “world’s strongest” {hardware} for mining Ether (ETH), will allegedly cease Ethereum mining in April 2020, based on a Feb. 24 report by altcoin mining pool 2Miners.
Customers began reporting a sixfold hashrate drop on Antminer E3 mining rigs on ETC pool final week
2Miners revealed the information after its workforce requested Bitmain to touch upon the current points with Antminer E3 efficiency involving Ethereum Basic (ETC) — an open-sourced blockchain platform that derived from Ethereum laborious fork in 2016 after the DAO collapse.
On Feb. 21, 2Miners began receiving first experiences on vital deterioration on Antminer E3 mining rigs efficiency on ETC pool. In keeping with 2Miners, some customers reported a sixfold hashrate drop on Antminer E3 — from the factory-declared hashrate of 180 MH/s to as little as 30 MH/s.
Bitmain reportedly confirmed that the difficulty was attributable to DAG progress
Following an inner investigation, 2Miners managed to seek out out that every one world ETC swimming pools have been reported the identical drop in hashrate. On the similar time, Antminer E3 was nonetheless performing high quality on Ethereum swimming pools, 2Miners stated. The workforce instantly urged that the difficulty was prone to be linked with directed acyclic graph (DAG) — a file that’s generated each new group of 30,000 blocks often called a mining epoch.
When mining Ethereum, every GPU requires a giant file known as DAG firstly of the mining course of, 2Miners elaborated. As DAG recordsdata develop every 30,000 blocks, or mining epoch, the reminiscence capability has apparently reached its restrict.
Following a request to Bitmain helpdesk, 2Miners was reportedly in a position to affirm that the expansion of DAG recordsdata restricted the utilization of Antminer E3 for mining ETC. In keeping with Bitmain, Antminer E3, which is an ASIC miner, nonetheless accommodates a 4GB video card for mining, whereas the DAG file is approaching the edge.
Bitmain reportedly stated:
“[…] Antminer E3 is a 4GB video card. E3 is expounded to ETH algorithm, and DDR capability is as much as the higher restrict, so E3 will be unable to proceed mining. The that means is E3 solely can mine till January 2020, then is not going to mine once more.”
Present DAG measurement for ETH, ETC and Expanse. Supply: Investoon.com
In keeping with 2Miners’ calculations, Antminer E3 ought to terminate Ethereum mining roughly on April 8, 2020. In keeping with the mining pool, the present Ethereum Basic mining epoch is 328 whereas it’s nonetheless 318 for Ethereum. In keeping with the DAG measurement calculator data, the DAG measurement for Ethereum accounts for 3.48 GB, whereas the one for Ethereum Basic quantities to three.56 GB at press time.
Released by Chinese language mining large Bitmain in April 2018, Antminer E3 was touted because the “world’s strongest and environment friendly EtHash ASIC miner.” As reported beforehand, Ethash is the Proof-of-Work (PoW) hashing algorithm utilized by Ethereum and quite a lot of different altcoins similar to ETC. The discharge of Antminer E3 got here amid the Ethereum neighborhood suggesting the opportunity of a tough fork within the ETH protocol to invalidate ETH ASICs.
Because the Ethereum blockchain is anticipated to shift from its present PoW consensus algorithm to PoS quickly, the block validation perform is poised to be given from miners to particular community validators. In an interview with Cointelegraph on Feb. 19, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the primary section of Ethereum 2.zero might be launched later in 2020.