Bitmain has found itself in a war with words with the monero community over the release of its latest cryptocurrency miner, the Cryptonight-capable X3. The unit is being offered at a discounted rate to existing customers, but critics claim this is because the miners will soon be ineffective at mining monero, the main coin to use the X3’s Cryptonight technology. Monero lead developer Riccardo Spagni has emphasized that the units will not work on monero due to a scheduled hard fork designed specifically to outwit the Cryptonight algorithm.
Monero’s Crypto Nightmare
“We are pleased to announce the all-new Antminer X3, to mine cryptocurrencies based on the Cryptonight hashing algorithm,” tweeted Bitmain cheerily on March 15. The new units would start shipping instantly, limited to one per customer to prevent hoarding. The price would even be dropped to $3,000 for existing customers, according to an email. Posters on monero’s reddit board have urged buyers not to purchase the units due to the scheduled change to the coin’s Proof of Work algorithm. Others have gone so far as to accuse Bitmain of mining with the machines for months, and only shipping them now that monero’s algorithm is due to change, rendering them useless.
Cryptonight, the chipset fitted to Bitmain’s X3s, has turned into a crypto nightmare for anyone who’s been trying – and failing – to subsist off monero mining this year. As one keen-eyed observer spotted, after Bitmain took possession of the chips, monero’s hashrate rocketed. The monero team, led by Riccardo Spagni, who’s referred to Bitmain as “a known bad actor”, struggled to work out what had happened. A monero mining botnet that had infected millions of computers was one possibility floated, but this was discounted.
To combat the sudden increase in hashrate, Monero announced a PoW change on February 11 to make the privacy coin less susceptible to the Cryptonight algorithm…
Read Full: Monero Miners In Uproar After Panic Algorithm Change Due to ASICs Coming Online
