• Bitmain has announced the launch of its latest product, the Antminer X5, dubbed the first professional Monero [XMR] miner.
• The XMR mining community is not thrilled with this development as ASICs are specialized hardware that can mine cryptocurrencies much more efficiently than general-purpose hardware like CPUs and GPUs.
• With the Antminer X5 set to flood the market soon, members of the XMR mining community are concerned about potential centralization of power in a few large mining operations.
Bitmain Launches Antminer X5 for Monero Mining
Bitmain has announced the launch of its latest product, the Antminer X5 which is designed to be one of the most powerful Monero [XMR] miners on the market. The miner has a hashrate of 212 kilo hashes per second (KH/s) and consumes 1,350 watts of power with a power efficiency of 6.37 joules per kilo hash (J/KH).
Growing Concerns for XMR Miners
The announcement from Bitmain has sparked concerns from members of the XMR mining community due to application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) becoming widely used for mining XMR. ASICs are specialized hardware that can mine cryptocurrencies much more efficiently than general-purpose hardware like CPUs and GPUs leading to a potential centralization of power in a few large mining operations.
Monero’s Resistance to ASIC Mining
In 2019, Monero underwent a hardfork to implement RandomX – an algorithm designed specifically to be ASIC-resistant so that it would be difficult for ASIC miners to successfully mine on their network. However, with current developments in technology manufacturers have found ways around this algorithm allowing them to develop efficient ASIC miners for RandomX networks such as Monero’s.
Impact on Current Price
The value of XMR has dropped by double digits in recent months but there may be hope yet for a rebound as these new ASIC miners launch into production and become available on markets worldwide.
Conclusion
The launch of these new advanced miners could lead to an increase in price or further centralization depending on how quickly they are adopted by larger scale mining operations and if other countermeasures are taken by developers such as implementing even more secure algorithms resistant against these specialty machines.