There are two factors here. You have new network hash from new equipment and old marginally profitable hash. My point is, the ratio of old to new miners is important. With more established and larger network hash rates like Bitcoin, even when a new miner comes out, it has an impact but there is an attrition effect i.e. older miners at the end of their life are pushed off the feasibility edge and decommissioned. The result is that the NET network hash rate increase isn't 100%. Also the percentage increase in has rate is manageable. So in the case of something like SHA256 or scrypt you see that.

When Bitmain launched their L3+, you did see a significant difficulty increase but it wasn't x10 or anything. That's because scrypt has a decent hash rate and also many coins to mine. X11 is smaller and the new miners are a much bigger leap up so difficulty will increase a lot. Let's look at the payback though on a D3.

If you had an engineering sample today (someone has them somewhere

then your payback according to my calculations and the latest pricing would be a whopping 10 days. That assumes a power cost of around $0.075 (that's what CloudSigma sees in an average location, not the cheapest, not the most expensive). So ten days is clearly extreme, when the other D3s hit what will happen? Firstly understand there are THREE other major upgrades that came out within a month. You have:
- Baikal Giant+
- ibelink
- Dominator A5
- Antminer D3 (clearly biggest volume but not biggest hashrate, the A5 gets that price at up to 38Ghz overclocked)

So if difficulty goes x20 then you are at 200 days for a D3 payback assuming the same price for Dash. If it's x40 then 400 days. I think x40 is the outside amount and it will be less than that. So yeah D3 isn't a get rich quick opportunity unless Dash pricing goes up a lot. Speaking of this, interest is definitely increasing and having all these mining manufacturers drawing interest can only help so I would expect Dash price to start tracking up over the next six months.

In short D3 should be economically viable but it won't have some super quick payback unless you were lucky enough to bag a first batch unit (which was very limited). The main downside will be people with cloud mining contracts or old generation miners which for sure will become economically untenable after these new units hit the market.

Interested to hear others' feedback on my thoughts above!

Robert

rjenkin

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