Mining Calculator Extended to Siacoin and Decred

MINING CALCULATOR EXTENDED TO SIACOIN AND DECRED

February 4, 2018 by Rob No comment(s) Info, Learn, News

The Miners’ Union mining calculator has been extended. Supported currencies have been expanded to include Siacoin and Decred, in addition to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin and Dash. Default parameters have also been updated to reflect our revised estimates of hash rate growth for users of the “batch model”.

It’s important to consider not only Bitmain’s production schedule when considering hash rate growth, but hash rate growth. Given recent strain on the global power infrastructure caused by the explosion in demand and production for Proof of Work mining, it is not realistic to assume that all Bitmain units immediately have a home.

SIA MINING

Given the release of the Antminer A3, the calculator has been expanded to project Siacoin mining rewards. The default hash rate of units is set to 815 GH/s, the reported hash rate of the Antminer A3. Batch sizes have been set to 10,000 units to reflect the 15,000 A3s Bitmain reputedly sold in the first batch. There are already new batches planned, indicating the growth rate should remain greater than zero. If Dash is any indication, 10,000 additional units per month added to the global hash rate yields a similar number to the existing Antminer D3s comprising the Dash network.

We’re aware that Sia has recently gone through a brand remodel and that we are using the now-outdated logo. But we really like our black theme, and this would certainly not be the first time that things didn’t go the Sia team’s way. Too soon?

Sia mining rewards are computed a bit differently. The genesis block has a “block height” of 300,000 which decays by one each block. The Siacoin emission rate is therefore 300,000 minus the current block “height”, which will eventually stabilize at 30,000 Siacoin per block.

Block times are supposed to be calibrated to roughly 10 minutes. As we have observed a highly variable block time of over 30 minutes, we decided to pull this variable at the time of calculation and hold it constant over time. This should be a consideration when back-testing Sia mining projections.

DECRED MINING

We’re also releasing Decred mining projections, as there are several first generation ASIC miners forthcoming:

Obelisk’s DCR1 miner. We set the estimated hash rate to the 1.5 TH/s Obelisk purports it will be.

Baikal Giant-B miner which mines Blake256 concurrently alongside several other miners.

DCR ASIC miners. There is no scheduled release date.

Halong Mining (This always gets included in lists but we do not believe this company to be legitimate until we see clients looking to host them with us. They could however be “NOT Bitmain” brand miners…).

The inevitable Bitmain miner released as soon as they’re done selling Antminer A3s.

Decred, like Dash, divvies up the block_reward to multiple parties. Proof of Work miners (that’s us) get 60%, Proof of Stake miners 30%, and the dev team’s treasury 10%. Block times are pushed toward 5 minutes, but the total block subsidy itself decays over time in a unique way. Every 6144 blocks, the total reward declines by 100/101.

OTHER UPDATES

Bitcoin’s batch growth rate has been updated to 50,000 units to reflect our recent Q1 2018 Bitcoin Mining Projections. Although we conclude that there are likely 200,000-300,000 units scheduled to be produced in the next three months, we note that this is likely the sum total of miners across all currencies. We are quite skeptical about the grid’s capacity (literally and figuratively) to support the timely onboarding of that much hash power. If you disagree, change the rate to 150,000 units per month. The analysis doesn’t change much.

Bitcoin Cash, as always, shares the same parameters at Bitcoin as it can be mined by the same collection of machines.

LTC machines have been increased to 25,000 units given the multiple batches scheduled for March shipment.

Dash hash rate growth has been reduced to zero given the extreme dilution occurring from the first few batches of Antminer D3s. It is possible, if not likely that this circumstance might change in 2018.

Stay tuned – more analytics forthcoming!