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Nervos CKB Mining
Nervos CKB mining on the 2Miners pool started right after the launch of the main net in mid-November. Mining was going well, and the coin often ranked first by profitability, according to 2CryptoCalc. Since it was the most profitable coin, users were actively mining it.
At that time the coin even ranked third in SOLO on the 2Miners pool. And today the three most popular coins among miners are Ethereum Classic, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Gold.
In order to mine Nervos CKB, you need Nvidia or AMD graphics cards. As for the software, we recommend Gminer – we already mentioned it in our mining tutorial. Basically, anyone could make a decent profit from this coin. This ensured the safety of the network – the overall hash rate was provided by a great number of graphics cards located in different parts of the world. This is what decentralization looks like.
Nervos CKB Hashrate Issues
But now everything has changed. Since the hash rate increased ten-fold, it has become more difficult to mine CKB. And the profits went down. On November 19, 2019, three hundred Nvidia 1070Ti graphics cards were bringing $410 per day on Nervos CKB. Today it is much worse. According to 2CryptoCalc, today the same graphics cards would be bringing $4.46 per day.
Only two weeks ago profitability was ten times higher because the hash rate at the beginning of the month was much lower. Check the Nervos CKB Hashrate chart.
Why Has Nervos CKB Hash Rate Increased?
It is a rule that ASICs or FPGA’s are to blame for a sudden increase in the hash rate. Since ASICs are specifically designed to mine a certain algorithm, their mining performance is better than that of GPUs. They have a significantly higher hash rate – accordingly, they also have higher profitability.
This time Antminer K5 by Bitmain, that we first heard of at the beginning of March, may be responsible for the changes in the network performance. It is an ASIC for Eaglesong – the very algorithm on which Nervos CKB works. Its hash rate is 1.13 TH/s, and the consumption is 1580 W. By comparison, 300 Nvidia 1070Ti GPUs give out 0.22 TH/s. 2CryptoCalc confirms this information.
But Antminer K5 is not yet available to regular users. We have checked it: now it is listed on the Chinese version of the Bitmain website, but sales are planned to start in the first half of April. Here are the specs.
Even the WhatToMine calculator states that the miner is not available yet.
By the way, note the estimated profitability. $18.21 daily per miner at the electricity cost of $0.05 is 4.6 times higher than the profitability of 300 Nvidia 1070Ti GPUs. This is crazy.
Just a week ago the profit was as high as $200 per miner. In the 2Miners Telegram chat users were asking whether to buy this device. Clearly, the profitability will keep going down.
It seems that the first batches of ASICs are ready and being “tested” right now. This is one of the biggest known faults of ASICs. Sadly, nothing can be done about it. The devices are in the hands of the manufacturers, so they decide when to start shipping.
Why Nervos Developers Stay Silent
The silence of the Nervos CKB team seems especially strange. We checked their Twitter posts in March, and they don’t mention a sudden increase in the network hash rate or how to solve this problem. But they do announce collaborations, presentations, and listings on different platforms.
Why is it a problem? As mentioned above, the Nervos network hash rate has increased ten-fold since the beginning of March. It is likely that new Bitmain monsters are behind it. In this case, these ASICs account for 90% of the network. They are probably not interested in organizing a 51% attack – they are just making money. But this goes against the principles of decentralization in the crypto industry. The network must be supported by miners in different parts of the world rather than by one factory. And with much less power.
Nervos could follow Grin’s example – its developers performed a hard fork in June that secured the network against ASICs. Grin developers are constantly making changes into the mining algorithm to discourage manufacturers from making ASICs. After all, creating a new model every six months and throwing away the previous one is not the most profitable business. However, Nervos developers have never claimed their algorithm to be ASIC-resistant.
2Miners Has Decreased the Minimum Payout
The minimum payout for Nervos mining was always 500 CKB ($1.7). We realize that many Nervos CKB miners were forced to leave the pool due to the increased mining difficulty. For this reason, today (March, 21) we are performing the one-time payout for all the miners whose balance has reached 100 CKB (5 times less than the standard payout threshold).
Update. Toddminer C1 for Nervos CKB
We’ve just received the information from our miners that they have already received the new Todek Toddminer C1 for Eaglesong mining algorithm.
Toddminer C1 hashrate is 1.55 TH/s, and the consumption is 1380 W. The specifications are even better than Antminer K5. Both Antminer K5 and Toddminer C1 could be the cause of the sudden Nervos CKB hashrate increase in the past days.
What to Mine With GPU’s?
Sadly, today Nervos is not the best cryptocurrency for GPU mining. According to 2CryptoCalc, the best coins for mining today are ZClassic, ZCoin, and ZelCash.
We hope that Nervos developers will soon take the situation under control and CKB will regain its top position among the most profitable cryptocurrencies for mining. When mining profitability experiences such a drastic drop, developers must interfere. Otherwise, miners would turn away from the project and start mining other coins.
