Quote from: vegascoinpool on January 17, 2018, 10:27:01 PM

Quote from: notey on January 17, 2018, 10:11:28 PM

It is is good question. WHY would they make a miner for blake2b?

I asked that a few pages back... seems kind of random. Someone else here suggested maybe its to f--k with the team behind Sia, who is also making miners? Seems petty to spend so much money on miners just to funk with a competitor... but with only ONE coin to mine on this machine, who knows? At least with D3's one could play an Altcoin game and mine a few other random things with it. This is literally a brick once profitability dies, and you don't even get to play with anything else. Just seems weird.

Oh well... they still make $10M selling them.

It seems strange unless they are interested in some sort of collaboration or development that would compliment a decentralized cloud storage goal. From SOPHON:

"Deep learning sets off the explosive development of AI applications, leading humans to enter the intelligent era from the information age. It takes both the 'engine', massive computing power, and the 'fuel', a huge amount of data, to successfully launch the deep learning rocket into the AI sky. Based on its extensive experiences in the development and production of chip and system, Bitmain is dedicated to developing the tensor computing processor and related products focusing on accelerating deep learning and serving the better cost effective and the lower power consuming solutions for AI."

This new Antminer A3 miner appears to be a basis for Bitmain's entrance into a cryptocurrency which will support the massive off-site data storage requirements inherent in its AI operations.

From Blake2.net - This algo utilizes parallelism and other tools to increase speed. Q: Why is BLAKE2 so fast?
A: BLAKE2 is fast in software because it exploits features of modern CPUs, namely instruction-level parallelism, SIMD instruction set extensions, and multiple cores. BLAKE2 also benefits from the optimization work performed during the SHA-3 competition (see for example this paper by two of the designers of BLAKE2).

Q: Why do you want BLAKE2 to be fast? Aren't fast hashes bad?
A: You want your hash function to be fast if you are using it to compute the secure hash of a large amount of data, such as in distributed filesystems (e.g. Tahoe-LAFS), cloud storage systems (e.g. OpenStack Swift), intrusion detection systems (e.g. Samhain), integrity-checking local filesystems (e.g. ZFS), peer-to-peer file-sharing tools (e.g. BitTorrent), or version control systems (e.g. git). You only want your hash function to be slow if you're using it to "stretch" user-supplied passwords, in which case see the next question.