Altcoin mining pool 2Miners reported that Bitmain’s Antminer E3, once the “world’s most powerful” hardware for mining Ether (ETH), will allegedly stop Ethereum mining in April 2020.

2Miners revealed the news after its team asked Bitmain to comment on the recent issues surrounding Antminer E3 performance involving Ethereum Classic (ETC), an open-sourced blockchain platform derived from Ethereum hard fork in 2016 following the collapse of the DAO.

2Miners started receiving first reports last Friday on significant deterioration on the performance of the Antminer E3 mining rigs on the ETC pool. Some users reported a six-fold drop in hashrate on Antminer E3 — from the factory-declared hashrate of 180 MH / s to as low as 30 MH / s, according to 2Miners.

Bitmain Says Issue Caused By DAG Growth

2Miners managed to find out that the same drop in hashrate was reported across all global ETC pools, following an internal investigation. At the same time, on Ethereum pools Antminer E3 continued to perform fine, 2Miners said. The team immediately suggested that the issue would likely be linked to a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) — a file that generates every new group of 30,000 blocks known as a mining epoch.

When mining Ethereum, at the start of the mining process, each GPU requires a large file called DAG, 2Miners elaborated. As DAG files grow every 30 000 blocks, or mining epoch, the capacity of memory has apparently reached its limit.

2Miners was reportedly able to confirm that growth in DAG files limited the use of Antminer E3 for mining ETC following an application to the Bitmain helpdesk. Antminer E3, which is an ASIC miner, still contains a 4 GB video card for mining, while the DAG file approaches the threshold, according to Bitmain.

Bitmain said: “ Antminer E3 is a 4GB video card. E3 is related to ETH algorithm, and DDR capacity is up to the upper limit, so E3 will not be able to continue mining. The meaning is E3 only can mine until January 2020, then will not mine again.”

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