Hi Everyone.
I have a question, and the ETC mining community seems to be an optimal forum to ask this. Everyone here believes in a long term commitment to decentralized mining, and is made up of smaller players. XTend Online is producing a new generation of PCI card to completely replace GPUs for mining by late 2019. GPUs can never compete with ASICs primarily because they are optimized for graphics, not mining. There is a huge misconception in the community that ASICs can only get a factor of 2 speedup over GPUs. This rumor is very untrue. There are tremendous speedups possible given properly designed hardware for the ethash algorithm.
We are 2 Silicon Valley veterans making fully programmable equipment for the community. 10x faster than today’s GPUs for mining, and at similar price points to today’s high end graphics cards. They will be able to compete head on with ASICs. Importantly, we come from the West and have a strong belief in equal access and fair treatment for everyone, not just for our friends. We firmly believe in the philosophy of blockchain. Large organizations, be they governments or private companies, have created an economy run by sociopaths, and we are committed to supporting the ideals of decentralization.
That said, we currently have a decision to make on our product, and I would like to know the ETC community’s thoughts on which direction we should go. Assume we have a hypothetical PCI card delivering 1 GHash/sec for ETC (or any of the variants). One choice is to use a cheaper silicon technology process, but that will require about 33% more power. Another option, is to use a more expensive process that will cost about 25% more but operate at lower power.
For your analysis, assume the ROI on equipment at today’s prices is around 3 months for the cheap option or 4 months for the expensive choice.
Which variant is more attractive to the community here?
- Faster ROI (3 months vs. 4)
- Lower power (33% less electricity for the same hashrate)
If you have a spare moment, please let us know your opinion so we can make the right choice that will provide maximal benefit to the community.
Have a great 2019.
Chris