1. Why this comparison matters
A new chain's biggest day-one risk is concentration. If most of the initial hashpower can be supplied by a small number of large mining operators, the cost-of-attack is whatever they charge to rent it. Bitcoin's SHA-256 has 15+ years of specialised hardware development; BLAKE3 has effectively none. That asymmetry is the single biggest reason B3Chain is launching on a different PoW.
2. SHA-256 ASIC market (mid-2026)
| Manufacturer | Flagship | Hash rate | J/TH |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitmain | Antminer S21 XP Hyd | ~473 TH/s | ~13.5 |
| MicroBT | WhatsMiner M66S | ~298 TH/s | ~18.5 |
| Canaan | Avalon A14 Pro | ~250 TH/s | ~22.5 |
| Bitdeer Tech | SealMiner A2 | ~226 TH/s | ~16.0 |
| Auradine | AT2880 (water) | ~600 TH/s | ~14.5 |
Total Bitcoin network: ~700+ EH/s as of writing. Top 5 pools control over 75% of hashpower. Public miners alone hold ~30% of the network in capital terms.
3. BLAKE3 ASIC market
There is no public BLAKE3 ASIC product as of writing. The reasons:
- BLAKE3 was published Jan 2020. The first PoW chain to adopt it (Alephium) launched late 2021. The economic incentive to design a BLAKE3 ASIC has existed for <5 years vs ~16 for SHA-256.
- BLAKE3 already exposes much of its parallelism through SIMD, which top-end consumer GPUs and CPUs already exploit. The ASIC speed-up over commodity hardware is therefore smaller in absolute terms than SHA-256's ASIC-vs-CPU gap.
- A handful of GPU miners (Bzminer, GMiner, lolMiner) support BLAKE3-family algorithms. Estimated capex to reach 100 GH/s on commodity GPUs is roughly $100K.
4. What this means for B3Chain
- Year one: cost-of-attack is bounded by the CPU/GPU rental market (EC2, Vast.ai, Akash). This is much more diffuse than the SHA-256 ASIC market and harder to corner.
- Eventually: as B3Chain accumulates economic value, B3PoW-Scratch ASICs will follow. The memory-hard design caps the ASIC advantage near the memory-bandwidth-per-watt frontier (see B3PoW-Scratch vs SHA-256d), but no algorithm is permanently ASIC-resistant.
- Counterweight: SHA-256's enormous ASIC market is also why Bitcoin's PoW is so secure today. B3PoW-Scratch trades immediate ASIC scale for initial decentralisation. These are different security properties at different time horizons.
5. What this comparison is NOT
- Not a claim that BLAKE3 is ASIC-resistant. It is not, in any meaningful long-term sense.
- Not a claim that B3PoW-Scratch is more secure than SHA-256d PoW. SHA-256 PoW is enormously secure precisely because of the mature ASIC market and the resulting honest-hashrate cost-floor.
- Not a claim that B3Chain is "more decentralised forever". The decentralisation advantage is initial-conditions; it erodes as the market matures.
6. Update protocol
The full text in
compare-asic-landscape.md
lists the trigger events that cause us to re-evaluate this analysis:
- A public BLAKE3 ASIC product announcement.
- Any single miner's BLAKE3 hashrate exceeding 1 PH/s.
- The first BLAKE3 mining pool controlling >25% of any major BLAKE3 chain.
Any of these triggers a reassessment of B3Chain's launch-time security margin and may motivate the checkpoint ceremony described in the roadmap.
7. Sources
See the full Markdown document for citations: Bitmain, MicroBT, Canaan, Bitdeer, and Auradine product pages; blockchain.info hashrate chart; Alephium official documentation; the BLAKE3 paper.