It is a well-known fact that bitcoin mining hardware has changed by leaps and bounds in recent times due to the evolution of new central processing units in the market. On April 6, Monero tweaked its mining algorithm to curb any potential threat of ASICs and preserve ASIC resistance.” That same day, Ethereum core developers met to discuss whether they should change Ethereum's algorithm and ultimately decided not to for the time being, much to the chagrin of the Ethereum community.
With Difficulty rising and the halving of block rewards imminent, the S7 is reaching the end of its profitability for those without access asic mining to cheap power… although if Bitcoin's exchange rate rises sufficiently, the S7's profitability may well be extended beyond expectations.
For example, in April 2017, anonymous researchers found a firmware vulnerability in Bitmain antminers called Antbleed , which was billed as an ASIC kill-switch.” This vulnerability allowed Bitmain, a government, or other bad actors to remotely stop Bitmain ASICs from mining on the network, which could cripple Bitcoin.
However, the ASIC miner is a niche device, which means that A10 ETHMaster and Antminer E3 won't be able to mine Monero or other coins that are not Ethash coins when its rate goes up. ASIC miners are made exclusively for Ethereum, so their owners would have to put up with it.
Regardless of whether you are in favor of or against the implementation, ASICs do provide a variety of features for those who take part in them, and that includes the mining; it is all a matter of subjective opinion as to whether or not they will work out in the long-run on a widespread network.
If you haven't turned a profit in four months, there is little chance you are ever going to. Setting the difficulty at 21772 gives time for your asic to be shipped, arrived and set up as many asics are still only preorders with promised shipping dates.
IMO right now it's best to wait - we're just starting a "generation transition" and ALL of the older generation stuff is getting very iffy on RoI, especially with the Bitcoin Block Reward halving due probably next July (possibly late June if hashrates shoot up too much) unless you have very cheap electric or can get a used unit VERY inexpen$ively.
The amazing thing about Bitcoin ASICs is that, as hard as they were to design, analysts who have looked at this have said this may be the fastest turnaround time - essentially in the history of integrated circuits - for specifying a problem, which is mining Bitcoins, and turning it around to have a working chip in people's hands.
One major cryptocurrency which is using CryptoNight hash function is about to change their PoW algorithm, and according to their public statement, twitter users for cryptocurrency trade bcn news crypto is purposely to brick ASIC mining rigs including X3. Services Wallets Cards Spend your crypto.
Furthermore, because of their direct access to cheap hardware they can also dominate mining on the network, much like Bitmain and Canaan already do with Bitcoin Right now, there is strong evidence that the two mining juggernauts control between 25-50 percent of the SHA-256 mining hashrate based on correspondences between CryptoSlate and representatives at the companies.
As block difficulty increased, miners turned primarily to GPUs. If cryptocurrency is disrupting finance, then powerful computer chips known as ASICs are disrupting cryptocurrency. Unlike Bitcoin, Litecoin, or their countless derivatives that have been overtaken by ASICs, Ethereum and Monero are considered memory hard ,” meaning they require a decent amount of RAM to run their hashing algorithms.