Equihash Mining Landscape before Antminer Z15
What is the status of the Equihash network pre-shippment of the Z15?
Just over 2 years ago, Equihash coins were being mined solely by GPUs. Since the release of the Antminer Z9 mini, more and more ASICs have been deployed to the network achieving a staggering 10x growth.
With the advent of the Antminer Z15 a 420KSol/s at 1510 Watts miner, would old-generation hardware be forced to turn off?
The Z15 is almost 3 times more efficient than its predecessor, the Antminer Z11, at 3.6 W/KSol compared to 10.5 W/KSol and almost 30 times more efficient than the Antminer Z9 mini. We decided to analyze our data to shed some light on the future of Equihash mining.
Some pools have miners with newer equipment than others. This analysis is solely based on Luxor’s data which we believe is skewed to newer and more efficient equipment.
Based on our analysis, we estimate that 6% of the network is running equipment that produces less than 17.5 KSol/s (Antminer Z9 minis), 25% of the network is running mid-range hardware like the Antminer Z9 or Innosilicon A9 / A9+ and ~70% of the network has upgraded to Antminer Z11s or Innosilicon A9++.
Given that Z9 minis are barely profitable at 4.5 cents USD all-in hosting we are safe to assume that these miners will shut down completely once the new, more powerful, Z15 starts shipping. This will reduce the network hashrate by about 360 MSol/s which will be rapidly filled by the first 800 unit batch of Z15's (~360 MSol/s).
The analysis is not so straight forward with the Antminer Z9. At current hashprice of 4.5 cents USD per KSol per day and 5 cents USD all-in power, these miners could resist a 40% network hashrate increase before they reach their break-even point and be forced to close their operations.
Given that not every miner has access to 5 cents all-in power some will be forced to shut down earlier reducing pressure on network difficulty. We estimate that at least three-quarters of Z9 / A9 miners will turn off their operations making room for an additional 4000 Z15 miners without affecting hashprice.
How many Antminer Z15' is Bitmain planning to produce? Anything above 5,000 miners will start to eat into the Antminer Z11 profitability.
Luxor Switch
If you want to maximize your Equihash miner earning potential check out Luxor Switch which is a profit-switching algorithm that increases the value of our miner’s hashrate by switching between chains.
Learn more here.
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