No way I will touch batch 2. GMO just made a big announcement on SHA256 miners running 7nm chips so I can bet we are going to see 7nm sha256 announcements from Bitmain soon. The S9 is old, hopefully I can use the coupons from the Z9's on that.
24 TH/s drawing 1950 Watts isn’t earth shattering, especially at $1,999.
Exactly my thoughts when I saw the tweet about GMO's new miner announcement on twitter. It still makes more sense to buy two S9is for a better price per TH even without coupons, and you're losing just a bit of efficiency that will be irrelevant in the long run, and you're more flexible with two machines instead of one using 2000W. Bitmain's being smart with GMO right now with the price the GMO miner is set at. They don't really even need to change S9i prices right now and they're still a better choice than GMO the way things stand right now.
I disagree. The thing about BTC mining at this point is the downward profit curve is super slow, you're not going to see the drops you're seeing with, say, the A9, because the network is too big to be tanked like that. So the difference in power draw (24TH/s for 1950 (spec) vs 28TH/s for 2640 for the S9) is, in the long run, a loss unless you're getting really cheap or free energy or using self generated renewables or something. At .11/kwh USD, you earn the same amount of coin after electricity at today's rates and you're wasting electricity, environmentally it's a poor choice too, but at any electric rate above .11? You're saving on the initial purchase but losing in the long run, unless BTC climbs significantly (but then, so will difficulty as more miners switch on, get turned back on, etc.). Not to mention the new miner numbers are speculative. I say if you think you can recoup in 4 months or less, go for the S9s but otherwise? You're probably better off waiting and seeing what the next gen looks like...
For me, SHA256 isn't a worthwhile algo for home/hobby anymore. If I had solar panels (thanks for fucking that up, Tesla) then maybe, but the cost, environmental and electrical, is too high for the profit margin, even with the much slower dropoff (note that I'm talking about buying now, the S9 brand new was probably the longterm most profitable ASIC ever in hindsight). YMMV, just my opinion.
As for the Z9? It really just depends on who forks and when, but AFAIK there's a sliver of a chance Zen won't and Zcash haven't made an announcement (I'm betting both will eventually, though), everything else currently of worth looks like it will. For comparison, the X3 is still chugging along, but the coins it mines now aren't really worth holding, and without Nicehash it will likely continue to slowly die.