Babbitt Original | FPGA Mining Machine is back in the arena, is it really profitable to mine small coins with it?

FPGA mining machine, you may think this is an old thing that was eliminated by Asic in 2013, but today, it not only returns to the world, it can be said to be very profitable in specific fields.

Nervos, it is listed in one of the top ten domestic public chains in some rankings, and Bloomberg has named it with Cosmos and Polkadot as the most anticipated public chain in 2019. On November 16, 2019, its main net was launched, and CKB surfaced.

CKB can be obtained through mining. At present, Nervos does not have an Asic mining machine. The data from the Xinghuo mining pool shows that the top two currently the best mining revenue are FPGA mining machines. Among them, the daily net profit of Blackminer F1 + is 36.79 yuan, which is second only Shenma Mining Machine M20S (62T). The third place is GPU mining machine.

Blackminer F1 +, this FPGA miner produces 1063 CKB coins per day, with a daily net profit of 36.79 yuan at 0.4 yuan per kilowatt-hour, and the acquisition cost of a single CKB is about 0.00126 USD. And if you buy it directly in the secondary market, today's price is 0.0062 US dollars, which is 4 times the difference. Use the FPGA miner to mine CKB and earn blood.

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CKB private offer price is $ 0.006, and crowdfunding price is $ 0.01. There were early investors who, if you know that mining is so cheap, buy mining machines directly, why invest?

FPGA miner, where is sacred?

Chinese first FPGA miner, Asic era eliminated

The world's first FPGA mining machine was born in 2013. Its creator was Chinese pumpkin Zhang (Zhang Nanzhang, the founder of Jia Nan Yunzhi). At that time, this 3200 yuan machine was a heavy blow to GPU mining. Six months later, Pumpkin Zhang used the Asic mining machine to kill the FPGA mining machine. As a result, Bitcoin mining entered the era of high computing power.

FPGA mining machine uses FPGA chip, which is field programmable gate array. You can simply understand it as a chip that is stronger than GPU but weaker than Asic. In the field of mining machines, the investment in tape-out is tens of millions of yuan at one time, so manufacturers will use FPGA for verification, and after the success, they will invest a lot of money to buy wafers to make Asic chips.

Those who know the miners know that GPU miners can mine POW coins with different algorithms, and Asic miners can only mine POW coins with the same algorithm. For example, once a Bitcoin miner is eliminated, it can only be sold as scrap iron. But FPGA mining machine has a feature, it can be mined to upgrade different algorithms of POW currency! A bit like an upgraded version of the GPU .

Summarize several features of FPGA mining machine.

First, it has more computing power than GPU. Second, the manufacturing cost is lower than Asic, the manufacturing process and production cycle are faster than Asic, and it may go online in one month. Third, miners can use software upgrades to allow miners to mine POW coins with different algorithms. Such as SHA256, and the Scrypt algorithm that GPU miners are particularly good at. Fourth, the power consumption is relatively low. Fifth, especially for some algorithms that require less memory and can be processed in a pipeline, the advantages of FPGA miners are more obvious.

Why was he so eliminated? After entering the Asic era, the energy consumption of Asic miners is better, and Assic miners can bring economies of scale.

FPGA re-emerges, small coins "new" weapon

Why can CKB use FPGA miners? What kind of currency does FPGA have natural advantages in the end?

Trinity is a well-known big V than the original chain community, and also the founder of the bull coin circle. This is a main community website that discusses mining coins. He told Babbitt that his team has been around mining coins, mining machines, Expand the layout.

"It will definitely be an FPGA miner, and we are currently conducting early-stage relevant demonstrations of FPGA miners." According to Sany, there are very few FPGA manufacturers at present. The BlackBlock that produced Blackminer F1 + mentioned earlier is a relatively well-known team. The brand mine Machines are currently mostly futures. There are also some teams that produce FPGA mining machines for self-digging, but without scale. "The development is not very full," he said.

According to him, the suitable scenarios for FPGA mining machines are as follows.

First, it is suitable for small mining coins with a high market value after a period of time, for example, the market value reaches tens of millions of yuan. The cost of deploying FPGA mining machines in such currencies is reasonable in all aspects. In the early days of the birth, small coins with a market value of only hundreds of thousands or millions are not suitable for FPGA mining machines. On the one hand, a large number of small coins may die midway and the risk is too high. Like CKB, it has a unique market value when it is born. Coinmarketcap.com shows that its current market value is about 77 million U.S. dollars, ranking 60 globally.

Second, the period when small coins did not have ASIC miners. Also taking CKB as an example, CKB is an Asic-friendly algorithm, but the time to go online is short, and no Asic miner has come out, which gives FPGA mining machines a certain living space and time.

If you are optimistic about a small coin, but it is difficult to make a large amount of purchases in the secondary market, you can only mine . FPGA mining machines are precisely the tool for mining small coins before the birth of the Asci mining machine, that is, Small coins play a new weapon.

However, FPGA mining machines are not only small coins that can be mined by the GPU. For example, Grin, Grin is a memory-intensive algorithm. FPGA mining machines have low mining efficiency and high production difficulty.

"Even if there is a small amount of self-produced and sold, it is not suitable for large-scale sales, so Grin was mainly GPU mining for one year after its birth. Like CKB, it is a computation-intensive algorithm, so it is mainly based on FPGA miners." Gin Chinese community leader Tian Qi said.

FPGAs have a certain market space, but they are relatively small, and this may be one of the reasons that Bitmain, Jianan Yunzhi and other mining giants have not entered the game.

FPGA mining machine, a small star or a star on the road to growth?

We know that many currencies such as Polkadot and Cosmos have begun to use the POS algorithm, but in 2019, although small coins are niche, they are still attracting much market attention because many currencies with very high market value growth have been born.

In the POW field, if a currency chooses Asic-friendly, it will largely experience the development process from GPU to Asic mining. The GPU era provides extensive participation, and the Asic stage uses computing power to ensure network security. This gives FPGA mining machines a certain living space.

In the “ 2019 Annual Blockchain Mining Research Report '' released by TokenInsight, it made 7 predictions for 2020, one of which is: altcoin mining may gradually move from GPU / CPU to FPGA, which may be slow in the long run Slowly occupied by ASIC mining.

At present, not only CKB, but also mining coins such as KDA, RVN (Crow Coin), DGB (Extreme Coin), and Tellor incubated by Binance and Consensys are also applicable to FPGA mining.

On the other hand, although the FPGA miner provided a buffer for the arrival of Asic, for small coins, the birth of FPGA miners will still have a certain impact on the price of coins. For example, miners do not have loyalty, they can dig out and sell. Once the market value management and the mass basis are not in place, the purchase order cannot be accepted, the price may continue to fall. Such a vicious circle. Once there is no profit from mining, the miner retreats, and the currency outcome may be Very miserable. This kind of collapse is difficult to appear on Bitcoin, but for some small currencies, it can be fatal.

Can FPGA miners become a small hot spot in 2020? We will wait and see.

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