Samsung is producing ASIC chips for upstart mining hardware manufacturer Halong Mining, at least according to one mining rig distributor.
On Tuesday, online mining rig retailer MyRig tweeted a picture of a wafer, a thin slice of semiconductor material used in the fabrication of integrated circuits. The company claimed that it was a 10 nm wafer produced by electronics giant Samsung.
Now Dragon Flying (Shipping), this is what powers DragonMint T1. Yes Samsung and Yes 10nm. i’m sure someone had seen some news in the past about it from big foundry about bitcoin and cryptos.
— MyRig (@MyRig_com)
As CCN , Samsung began producing Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chips built for bitcoin mining last year, chips which it supplied to an unnamed company. At the time, Samsung was tight-lipped about the identity of that company, confirming only that it was based out of China.
Little is known about Halong, whose first miner — the Dragonmint T1 — was announced last year and only recently began shipping to customers. bitcoin Core developer BTCDrak is involved with Halong Mining in some capacity, though it is unclear exactly how he is connected to the project.
At present, the DragonMint T1 is the most efficient miner on the market, surpassing even Bitmain’s Antminer S9 in performance. In March, Slush Pool confirmed that someone in its mining pool had mined a block using Halong hardware, which achieves its superior efficiency through a technological upgrade called overt AsicBoost.
Our block #514882 is the first-ever block mined using the active version-rolling aka overt AsicBoost. According to the available evidence, it was mined by hardware. Congrats to lucky miner from Guangdong, China 🇨🇳
— Slush Pool ⚡️ (@slush_pool)
Despite these endorsements, Cobra-bitcoin — who co-owns bitcoin.org and BitcoinTalk — has repeatedly said that he believes Halong Mining is a scam and that the Dragonmint T1 is really just a rebranded device actually manufactured by . Cobra has also refused to walk back these accusations now that the company has begun shipping miners to customers.
Halong Mining is a scam. They sold re-badged Innosilicon BTC miners obtained through dubious means, and sold fake non-existent miners for other algorithms (customers *still* waiting for these to ship). They are huge scammers.
— Cøbra (@CobraBitcoin)
Nevertheless, if Samsung is supplying chips to Halong, it could go a long way toward helping the upstart firm chip away at Bitmain’s dominance in the ASIC market, as Samsung has the ability to scale up its ASIC chip production quite easily to accommodate consumer demand.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Published at Wed, 11 Apr 2018 15:50:47 +0000
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