On February 21, 2020, mining company Altcoin 2Miners began receiving unusual requests from the miners of Ethereum Classic (ETC). According to the requirements, the hashrate has decreased by a factor of 6 – 7 (from 180-200 MH/s to 30 MH/s). The company opened its investigation.
2Miners noticed a sixfold hashrate drop on Antminer E3, DAG file to blame everything
Ethereum Classic uses Antminer E3 ethash mining rigs by Bitmain. Right from the beginning of the investigation, the miners were confident that this problem was probably due to the increase in the volume of DAG files. A directed Acyclic graph file or a DAG file is generated in each mining era when it is used to start the Dagger Hashimoto (ethash) algorithm to find block solutions in Altcoin mining.
Antminer E3 Stops Mining Ethereum Classic, Just Over a Month Remaining for Ethereumhttps://t.co/IDtlZfow9n pic.twitter.com/6E0L3DkR2S
— 2Miners (@pool2miners) February 24, 2020
The volume of this file is increased each mining era lasting about 30,000 blocks or five days for Ethereum (ETH) and Ethereum Classic (ETC). The growth of DAG files limited the use of GPUs for ethash mining in 2017-2018. With this assumption, 2Miners gained support from Bitmain and received a response today.
Unfortunately, they were exactly like:
“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 to January 2020, they will not mine again.”
2Miners calculated that the mining of Ethereum (ETH) would be terminated in 5 weeks as this is some later epoch than its older brother.
Opportunities for competitors?
Among the first speakers in the cryptocurrency community to discuss this story is the author of the Ethereum (ETH) mining algorithm, Kristy-Leigh Minehan. She thinks this could lead to a more capable launch of miners.
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
Moreover, because Bitmain is more focused on Bitcoin (BTC) mining solutions, Mrs. Minehan recommends waiting for releases from its main rivals, Innoscilion and Canaan.
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