The CoinDesk Mining Roundup: Mineral Oil, Bitmain and Scrypt-N
Published on May 31, 2014 at 21:31 BST | Butterfly Labs, Mining, News
At bitcoin’s current price and network difficulty, the network is generating millions of dollars per week. But that’s with miner operating costs notwithstanding.
For example, Dave Carlson’s MegaBigPower pool earned 18 blocks last week, representing 1.57% a share of total rewards. That’s about $200,000, and some of those spoils will need to go to running the datacenter that supports his pool.
With that in mind, here is what has been going on in the mining sector since our last roundup.
Mineral oil cooling
Using Radeon R9 280x GPUs to mine scrypt is becoming fairly inefficient due to the rise of the Gridseed miners. One enterprising DIY miner has decided to remove heat by dipping his GPUs in mineral oil, then extracting the heat using a car radiator.
There are a number of cooling options available for mining: Air, water and the use of treated fluids to cool miners.
Mineral oil is an interesting option, not only because it looks unique – you can see heat dissipating off of the oil – but also due to the fact that it can be quite messy. Nevertheless, it does work and miners building their own custom rigs are clearly using it to reduce heat generation.
HashFast founders broke
“The only thing that is holding us back is that we are as poor as church mice,” CEO Eduardo de Castro said.
HashFast had reportedly taped out a 28nm chip that could hash at 400GH/s last September. However, the company has had a number of problems. For example, in March the company had its bitcoin wallet frozen by a Fort Worth, Texas court.
In a guest post by Dario Di Pardo for CoinDesk about purchasing mining equipment, Di Pardo wrote he had lost confidence in the company, and has requested a refund.
Innosilicon A2 Terminator
ASIC scrypt mining is heating up, and perhaps the best example of this is Innosilicon’s A2 Terminator.
The
28nm chip is capable of operating at a minimum of 1.6MH/s per 10 watts.
That means a 150MH/s unit would use 1KW. Innosilicon, a Wuhan,
China-based manufacturer, will sell these chips to makers of complete
mining rigs.
One of those companies is Gridseed, one of the first producers of scrypt-based mining units. Gridseed has told CoinDesk that it already has built a blade form factor unit using the A2 Terminator called the G-BOX.The Gridseed G-BOX is expected to produce 70MH/s of scrypt power per unit. That would be a major step up from Gridseed’s current G Blade, which hashes at 5.2MH/s while using 140W.
Bitmain Antminer S2 upgrades
However, a recent Bitcoin Talk forum post indicates that the company will sell upgrade packages to these units that could double the S2′s power to 2TH/s, available this fall.
Bitmain’s only other product right now is the Antminer U2+, a USB stick that generates 2GH/s at 2.95W. It is selling a minimum order of 500 U2+ units for 10.8. Bitmain also seems to have an agreement with 112 Bit, a US-based distributor of Bitmain products, to provide hosting for the company’s hardware.
BFL Monarch update
Kansas-based ButterflyLabs has released an update on its Monarch blade
form factor miner. The 28nm unit, which is expected to perform at
600GH/s for $2,196, is said to have better power performance over its
industry rivals.
According to the
update, the Monarch will be three-to-five times more efficient than the
competition. The base Monarch is expected to draw 235W of power, and
another version, called the Imperial Monarch, will have 1TH/s of power
at 550W.
Although the Monarch’s initial test chips were produced back in January,
shipment of units has been delayed. Recently, it was reported that
consumers have appealed to the Federal Trade Commission to investigate
over $1m in alleged unfulfilled orders from BFL.
Flower Tech scrypt-N
The company does have two other products for scrypt mining – a 10MH/s standalone unit called the Daisy and a 60MH/s blade called the Orchid. However, these units also have a Q3 2014 target ship date.
There are now a number of coins promoting themselves as protected from ASIC mining because of scrypt-N including vertcoin. But if Flower Technology is able to produce a miner that can hash both scrypt and scrypt-N, that could have some serious implications for the altcoin mining market.
Got a cryptocurrency mining tip for future roundups? Contact us.
Disclaimer: This article should not be viewed as an endorsement of any of the companies mentioned. Please do your own extensive research before considering investing any funds in these products.
