Ethereum ASIC Miners

On the wake of April 3rd, the "world's more powerful and efficient Ethash ASIC miner" was announced on Twitter by one of China's tech maker of hardware designed for cryptocurrency software. This Ethereum ASIC miner is called Antminer E3 and it would be sold for $800 per unit and ready for shipping come July this year.

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This Antminer E3 will not be shipped either to China nor Taiwan, and its first shipment batch will be bought with Bitcoin cash (BCH) or US dollars only.

Before the release of this Antminer E3, there have been rumors about it in the crypto community. This miner is built on a Proof of Work (PoW) hashing algorithm which is by a whole lot of altcoins and even Ethereum. This application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is made to claim the rewards of the Ethereum protocol and process its transactions.

Prior to the release of the Antminer E3, most cryptocurrency enthusiasts and miners alike, have been making use of graphics card makers Nvidia and AMD's products due to their products higher CPU and IC capacity. But with this new Antminer E3 and its better ASIC, it would dampen the use their products by cryptocurrency miners henceforth.

How does the new Ethereum ASIC, Antminer E3 fair with the Protocol on which Ethereum is built on?

Founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin has said from earlier blog posts, that algorithms for mining rewards management cannot be ASIC resistance forever, as innovation will always win no matter how hard developers try to keep their codes well optimized for the general purpose computers the average person uses.

Most developers are of the notion that in the future, individuals and Companies that can operate at a large scale will innovate or design hardware that will consolidate rewards into their hands like Bitmain's Antminer E3. And this is in line with the report that Bitmain surpassed Nvidia in 2017 in terms of overall profit, plus they are taking a 70-80 percent of the market on ASIC and Bitcoin mining earning up to an estimated $3-4 billion in the process.

Due to all these reports, just days following the announcement of Bitmain's Antminer E3, many developers have on to indicate further changes in the reworking of the software so as to order the new hardware useless.

What will be the impact of Bitmain's ASIC miner Antminer E3?

At the moment, the impact of Antminer E3 is still very much unclear. Although some people in the Ethereum Community think the Antminer E3 will not do much on the performance level, and that there might be a widespread adoption of the software same way Bitcoin hobby miners were replaced by ASICs.

Although, Vitalik Buterin has remained silent on the Bitmain's Antminer E3 launch, from his former remarks he maintained that impacts from such innovations as this, are usually short-lived because, in Ethereum's technical roadmap, there is an already planned shift away from Proof of Work in Ethereum in which mining is possible.

In all, Ethereum ASIC miner will be beneficial not only in the crypto world but it will also see improvements and innovations of better CPU.