Bitmain’s Antminer E3 to stop Ethereum mining soon?
- Users had earlier reported a sixfold hashrate drop on the Antminer E3 mining rigs on ETC pools.
- According to 2Miners, the directed acyclic graph (DAG) file is increasing with every mining epoch, which is making GPUs inefficient.
According to a recent report by 2Miners, Bitmain’s Antminer E3 will allegedly suspend Ethereum mining in April 2020. 2Miners had reached out to Bitmain to get their comment on the recent issues being faced by Ethereum Classic (ETC) miners. The ETC miners had reported a sixfold hashrate drop on Antminer E3 from 180 MH/s to 30 MH/s. The 2Miners team conducted their own research and discovered that this issue is directly connected with DAG files. A DAG or a directed acyclic graph file is generated following every mining epoch or 30,0000 blocks. Apparently, as more and more of these files are accumulated, it drastically reduces the effectiveness of the Antminer E3.
Bitmain disclosed that the DAG file limit is approaching the threshold and will not be able to mine Ethereum soon.
[...] Antminer E3 is a 4GB video card. E3 is related to ETH algorithm, and DDR capacity is up to the upper limit, so E3 will not be able to continue mining. The meaning is E3 only can mine until January 2020, then will not mine again.
2Miners did their calculations and discovered that the Antminer E3 will probably stop mining Ethereum on April 8. Kristy-Leigh Minehan, an advisor for CoinMine, tweeted that this could trigger the launch of a new and improved miner:
Historically, this would lead to a launch of a new and updated miner - however, last I heard @BITMAINtech was focusing on $BTC. @Inno_Miner and @canaanio both have $ETH miners - will we see MicroBT step up to the plate, too?
Author
Rajarshi Mitra
Independent Analyst
Rajarshi entered the blockchain space in 2016. He is a blockchain researcher who has worked for Blockgeeks and has done research work for several ICOs. He gets regularly invited to give talks on the blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.
