When i first heard about it in Vegas I was a shocked to see sub 10 W/TH. From a technical standpoint definitely impressive. I always expected Moore's Law wouldn't hold at *some* point due to quantum tunneling and other physical limits, but it seems like we're just not there yet.

Now it does seem to me that capital in mining really does flow primarily to the manufacturers and bitmain in this sense i think plays dirty to keep an unfair advantage in the marketplace. Their position of privilege due to the scale of being the early front-runner may be warranted, but I was told that they pushed Whatsminer out of the TSMC so that MicroBT was forced to go to samsung which does not have the same quality chips as TSMC. This imo makes it all the more impressive that whatsminer is able to compete given they are working with inferior chips... they make up for it with better board and chip design (I suppose).

So on the one hand, impressive that Bitmain keeps pushing these physical limits, but on the other it does feel like there are some anti-trust issues that don't allow for truly fair competition. Would be great to see some public pressure on TSMC to allow Whatsminer to source from them. Not sure where Auredine's chips are coming from, anyone know?

In any case, these new models do re-instantiate a prisoner's dilemma, where Bitmain is the prison guard and us miners are the prisoners constantly choosing selfishly (buy new machines) drive difficulty up and our profits down, instead of collaborate and boycott new machines (ridiculous premise i know, but theoretically...). We're just driving each other more and more to the brink and all the pubco's just play fiat games, diluting their shareholders and crowding us out, until the music stops and they can't keep up the charade anymore or move pivot to AI... in any case next halving will be v interesting. As a miner, i'm terrified...