The Chinese cryptocurrency mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain rolled out its Antminer E3 for Ethereum mining on 3^rd of April. However, the so-called “most effective” ethereum miner has not aroused strong repercussions and been pursued by mining machine dealers and miners as it was supposed to.

According to the public information on Bitmain’s official, the Antminer E3 is claimed to deliver a hashrate of 180 mega hash per second with a power consumption of 800W and was priced at $800 USD. It is a quite competitive price: a RX 580 8GB graphics card produces 25MH/s for 175W,  to get a similar output, it requires at least 7 RX 580 which will cost over $3,000 USD.

In order to prevent hoarding and to enable more individuals to purchase Antminer E3, Bitmain has set a limit of one miner per user. The first batch will start shipping on July 16, also based on a first-order-first-ship basis and delivery only to non-China address. However, due to the bad performance of bitcoin and other mainstream cryptocurrencies in the first quarter of 2018, a lot of miners lose their incentives.

Miner retails have also stayed on the sidelines to avoid great lost. The preorder of the new E3 miner is far too optimistic. Bitmain has restricted purchases to 5 per customer and removed the delivery restriction of Hongkong, Macao and Taiwan to boost order. However, these moves could only bring a little effect.

In the previous time, the to order a presell miner in Bitmain’s website, customers were required to complete the payment within 24 hours. In this case, Bitmain has extended payment to three days which shows the Antminer E3 has given a poor performance in the presell.

“Only a little customers are willing to paid in full for it (Antminer E3). I have ordered five E3 miners on the official website but haven’t paid for it. If the client really wants it, after he complete the full payment, then I would pay for my order,” said by a miner retail.

Many negative comments highlight Bitmain selling the mining hardware months before shipping while the value of cryptocurrencies may have a spectacular increase or drop. Besides this, the biggest criticism is from the ethereum developers.

Antminer E3’s hashrate performance is several times higher than the conventional GPU hashrate and that may break the current balance in the ethereum community. It also brings about the issue of mining monopoly. Bitmian controls 35% of the hashing capacity of the bitcoin network, it is not surprised that one day, most of the hashing capacity of ethereum network would be controlled by Bitmain.

The core ethereum developer Piper Merriam has post the EIP 958 in the ethereum community in order to change the mining algorithm to make the ASIC miner incompatible with the ethereum network. Ethereum developers may also take actions through a hard-fork to prevent ASIC miners being used.