2020-2-25 21:28 |
According to a report by altcoin mining firm 2Miners, miners started to report an unexpected drop in Antminer E3 hashrate on Ethereum Classic (ETC) cryptocurrency mining pool while Ethereum (ETH) mining was working fine. As per the report, the hashrate dropped by almost seven folds from 80-200 MH/s to 30 MH/s. This prompted the firm to start an investigation to establish the cause of the problem.
The mining firm realized that the problem was being experienced by all pools dealing with Ethereum Classic all over the world. However, the Ethereum pools’ ASICs were performing as expected with no problems reported.
U.Today reports that from the onset of the investigations, the miners saw this as a normal problem which is mostly caused by enhanced DAG file volume. DAG, a short form for Directed Acyclic Graph File, in most cases generated in each mining epoch as it is utilized in starting ethash or the Dagger Hashimoto algorithm to produce block solutions during the process of altcoin mining.
This file’s volume is enhanced on each mining epoch that takes about 30,000 blocks, approximately 5 days for Ethereum as well as Ethereum Classic. In 2017-2018, the increase of DAG files led to slowing of GPUs used in ethash mining.
With this assumption, 2Miners investigators contacted Bitmain support to enquire what was going on and the firm issued a response today. Bitmain stated:
“E3 miner is a 4G 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.”
According to the response, Bitmain also stated that E3 will cease mining ETC after January 2020. 2Miners conducted some calculations and established that Ethereum (ETH) mining is set to be stopped in 5 week, April 8, since it is only 10 epochs behind Ethereum Classic.
Some crypto community commentators discussed the issue on social media and through a tweet, Kristy-Leigh Minehan, Ethereum mining algorithm writer, suggested that this was an opportunity for production of other capable miners by Bitmain’s competitors.
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? https://t.co/mwNUbycCZR
— Kristy-Leigh Minehan (@OhGodAGirl) February 24, 2020
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