On March 24, the mining operation Slush Pool announced it had mined a block using the controversial ASIC Boost protocol and did so using a Halong Miner. The news follows the pool revealing it was compatible with ASIC Boost which sparked up a heated debate just recently.
Also read: What is Asicboost? — An Interview With Developer Jeremy Rubin
Slush Pool Mines Block 514882 Using ASIC Boost Technology and a Halong Miner
According to a recent announcement over Twitter form the mining operation Slush Pool they have mined a block using ASIC Boost technology. Further, the pool had stated they mined block 514882 using Halong Mining equipment. Halong Mining is also a contentious subject as a lot of skeptics believe the mining company and its devices are fabricated. However, Slush Pool says they got about “16 TH/s” of hashrate using the equipment created by the tendentious company.
“Our block 514882 is the first-ever block mined using the active version-rolling aka overt ASIC Boost,” explains Slush Pool.
According to the available evidence, it was mined by Halong Mining hardware. Congrats to the lucky miner from Guangdong, China.
A Halong Miner. Currently, most of the public is skeptical of this company because machines are not widely available for public review. Some believe Dragon Mint machines are a fabrication. Slush Pool, however, states that block 514882 was mined with a Halong mining device. The mining pool’s leaders denied having any affiliation with Halong when the company first announced launching.
Core Supporter’s Bitmain Hate Continues
After the announcement, the news went viral on social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit forums. Of course, bitcoin core supporters were pleased to hear the news and most seemed to forget about how controversial this technology was just a few months ago. Most of the proponents of core stated that they didn’t appreciate Bitmain using ASIC Boost because they may have been mining with it covertly. Ironically enough being covert no one can prove that anyone had used the protocol back then and it has never been proven that Bitmain used the technology. In many respects, core supporters were thrilled to see another operation be competitive towards Bitmain.
“Great to see competition in this space — Anything that hits Bitmain is a good news,” explains one core proponent.
However, one person confused by the comment writes:
Not sure what you mean — One of the reasons the anti-Bitmain sentiment grew so large was because of AsicBoost itself — Are you happy that there’s competition in the ASIC Boost space? Or just the mining space, even though the competitor is also implementing ASIC Boost?
Even though it was never proven that Bitmain used ASIC Boost covertly, many core supporters still believe Bitmain is their enemy.
