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Whereas the Ethereum community is getting ready 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 staff requested Bitmain to touch upon the current points with Antminer E3 efficiency involving Ethereum Traditional (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 stories on important deterioration on Antminer E3 mining rigs efficiency on ETC pool. In response to 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 development
Following an inside investigation, 2Miners managed to seek out out that every one world ETC swimming pools had been reported the identical drop in hashrate. On the similar time, Antminer E3 was nonetheless performing superb on Ethereum swimming pools, 2Miners stated. The staff instantly recommended that the difficulty was more likely 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 referred to as DAG in the beginning 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 capable of verify that the expansion of DAG recordsdata restricted the utilization of Antminer E3 for mining ETC. In response to 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 which 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 response to 2Miners’ calculations, Antminer E3 ought to terminate Ethereum mining roughly on April 8, 2020. In response to the mining pool, the present Ethereum Traditional mining epoch is 328 whereas it’s nonetheless 318 for Ethereum. In response to the DAG measurement calculator information, the DAG measurement for Ethereum accounts for 3.48 GB, whereas the one for Ethereum Traditional quantities to three.56 GB at press time.
Launched 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 a wide range of different altcoins corresponding to ETC. The discharge of Antminer E3 got here amid the Ethereum group suggesting the opportunity of a tough fork within the ETH protocol to invalidate ETH ASICs.
Because the Ethereum blockchain is predicted to shift from its present PoW consensus algorithm to PoS quickly, the block validation operate is poised to be given from miners to particular community validators. In an interview with Cointelegraph on Feb. 19, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the primary section of Ethereum 2.zero will probably be launched later in 2020.
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