#1183
Very good point ! If ASICs are welcome, then using the same algo as Bitcoin would give access to a huge amount of hashpower and “strengthen” the network in that respect. Just officially hand over the project to Bitmain 2018-05-06 15:07:29 UTC #1184
Actually i believe it’s a mix of serveral issues that caused the hashrate drop at monero:
Botnet, i’am no way an expert when it comes to hacking or other criminal usage or botnets but i think there is a good chance that once the malcious program is installed it’s no more any easy to make changes, thus the adress or script are mostly hardcoded to avoid further detection if changes are made. I as well could imagine that accessing and changing of millions of devices isn’t the easiest thing either. This is speculation of course until someone familar with such botnets explains how exactly they work. One can be sure the amount of hashpower millions of such bots generate isn’t too small. Just an unbiased guess.
Baikal, i think they are the first that mined with Asics on cryptonite.
It’s as well the weakest known cryptonite asic miner with 20 kh/s and 40 kh/sfor the N+ version.
They are still for sale on promotion, buy 1, get 5, which makes me believe they have a lot of them. Delivered to the buyers for longer allready.
Innosilicon A8 CryptoMaster with 160 kh/s and the + version with 240 kh/s is the strongest version on the market and sold out and delivered allready since april.
The Bitmain X3 Antminer, with 220 kh/s, shipping just begin this week, means it’s the last one getting official into use buy buyers. Which makes me wonder a bit because Baikal shipped 1 month earlier allready.
Than there should be the gpu miners that did not change the algo immediatly but either did later or just switched away.
Eventually as well technical issues by some pools
I think these are the reason why there XMR hashrate dropped that much. It’s a combination of all these and someone can only guess which of the reasons caused x%. But saying ONLY bitmains asics caused the drop is just not right as like written above, there are some other very logic reasons as well.
However, and really not to defend bitmain in anyway, i personally even think they have been hit hard by Baikal on cryptonite.
The lower hashrate of Baikal makes me believe it’s a sooner developement and the late shipping by bitmain let’s me think they have been hit unprepared by the announcement of Baikal. But that’s just logical guessing common sense which is not necessary true and valid when it comes to crypto businesses. Just my guess. 2018-05-06 15:12:38 UTC #1185
In regards to botnets, no that’s the beauty of their design. The Botnet software creates a channel between infected machine and the Command and Control (CNC) network. All they literally have to do is “push” a new payload to update the software to the CNC network, or module that provided their mining activity.
The next time the infected machine(s) check in, they would pull the updated code. That’s why they focus on the CNC network when they try to take these networks down, cut off the head of the botnet, and it is far easier to kill it off. 2018-05-06 15:44:53 UTC #1186
ViaBTC was forced to move their cloud mining operation out of China. Maybe they did that because they didn’t want to be controlled.
2018-05-06 15:57:33 UTC #1187
You are mostly right about the botnets, just readed a bit about them and it indeed seems all they need is an updated miner that will be downloaded by the infected target again.
I studied now again the monero hashrate chart.
At the time of the fork, total hashrate: 1.0145G hashrate right after the fork, 157.2858M hashrate recoved some days later: 540.8917M
The unrecoved hashrate is about 473M
So about 473M are the asics from 3 companies (Baikal, Innosilicon, Bitmain), maybe a small percent users that did not updat and switched.This would be the case IF really ALL botnets had updated at all at some poin and continued with Monero and did not switch elsewhere which at least for me is hard to proof.
However, 3 interesting facts i noticed while studying the historical network graph right now:
1.
) After the hardfork and recovery the hashrate is going still down, it’s now at 471M compared to 541M after the fork and it seems it has a further decling trend. Why is their network hashrate losing over 15% after the fork. GPU Miners should be happy there and network hashrate should be raising and not further declining, not?
2.) In case that indeed the botnets recoved pretty fast from the fork and adapted, a not so small percentage are just that, botnets supporting and running the monero network.
3.) Price is decling the last 14 days whille nearly everything is in bullish trend at the same time.
296 USD on 25th April vs 234 USD today. .