SiaCoin Hard Fork!? Antminer A3

It seems that every other day I see something in the crypto news about SiaCoin, and today was no different. Those of you familiar with Bitmain Antminers may know that recently they developed a new ASIC miner for running the Blake(2b) algorithm, which is the algorithm used for mining SiaCoin.

For those that don’t know, ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Which is just a fancy way of saying a computer chip that is only good at one thing, but it is very good at that one thing. So good in fact that, ASIC’s have made mining with GPU’s and CPU’s completely unprofitable for any coin that uses an algorithm supported by an ASIC machine.

The new Bitmain Antminer A3 is capable of producing 815GH/s of computing power. For some perspective, I have two reliable sources both personally mining SiaCoin, one on an A3 and one on a single GTX 1080. To make this a fair comparison we will adjust the math so that the dollar value invested into each piece of hardware is equal. The A3 costs $2375, and a single GTX 1080 with the current lack of availability will cost you approx. $750. In this example, we will do the math based on the 3 GTX 1080’s. The A3 is currently mining approx. 500 SiaCoin per hour, or 12,000 per day. With the current SiaCoin price at approx. $0.04 that is approx. $480 per day and an ROI in 5 days. Now for the GTX 1080, each GPU mines approx. 20 SiaCoin per day, or in this example with three GTX 1080’s, 60 SiaCoin per day. With the same SiaCoin price from the previous example, that is approx. $2.40 per day, or a return on investment in approx. 3.5 years. It’s not difficult to see with this example how ASIC’s render GPU miners completely useless.

It’s important to note that this example is based on an A3 that started mining approx. 1 week after the first batch was made available. These numbers will change dramatically as the difficulty increases. The difficulty adjustment will be significant with such a staggering amount of new hashing power allocated to the network.

With all of that said, SiaCoin has reported new and upcoming changes to the SiaCoin protocol. SiaCoin has been working on a prototype of their own mining equipment, and as you can imagine, competing in the mining space with a mining hardware powerhouse such as Bitmain, is not easy. SiaCoin is planning a hard fork that would have the same effect on the ASIC as the ASIC had on GPU miners.

So before running out and buying an A3, there are certainly some risks to consider, and my suggestion would be to wait and see how things unfold. I have reported this data as accurate as possible to the best of my knowledge. Unfortunately, I was unable to do the testing myself, so I was left to trust the results of others. As always, do your own research before making investment decisions, and this is not financial advice. I am not a financial advisor.

@OriginalWorks