Topic: Bitmain's Released Antminer S9, World's First 16nm Miner Ready to Order - page 34. (Read 531191 times)

I read the article. And it's 13% per month difficulty is way off. The article stated difficulty doubling every 5-6 months. But in actuality, it more than doubled in under 3 months! I used the mining calculators in the last week of Nov. 2017. I took a snapshot of how much bitcoin an S9 makes and it was only 0.92 bitcoin back then. Today an S9 only makes 0.43 bitcoins. Regardless of the price of bitcoin, that's more than a 50% drop in under 3 months. If this continues an S9 won't make much bitcoins, but it can still be profitable if the price of bitcoin moves up exponentially. If the price stagnates, you can forget about making a profit even with so called "free electricity". If difficulty continues to shoot up exponentially, bitcoin mining will go the way of dash mining! So all cryptos designed this way will become unprofitable to mine eventually, once difficulty gets high enough.

I think the litecoin fork they are trying to do with litecoin cash is going to be SHA256 Algo.

Yes, thank you. I am not naive, just optimistic.

I just find something like that exceptionally unlikely. If there were to be another SHA256 coin that comes out (happens very often), it'll likely be mineable by regular SHA ASICs, and there are plenty of algos besides SHA out there that are more popular for new coins. If you're looking into buying an S9 I wouldn't count on a miracle like this happening though, always plan for the worst.

Maybe, also maybe someone else comes out with another SHA256 coin, or maybe something we haven't thought of. Just never say never...

What do you mean? These machines can only mine SHA256 with the ASICs they are outfitted with (as ASICs are built to do one thing), and they can only hash SHA256 as a result and nothing else. Flashing them to mine something other than a SHA coin wouldn't work. Flashing for more algos only worked on the Baikal alt miners a while back as they were FPGA based iirc.

I have a prediction for all the naysayers. Let posit that BTC difficulty and price come to where there is basically no profit to be had. Some folks will still mine with free or almost free electricity, like Phil. But I would imagine with all this hardware out there that it would not be much more than just a firmware flash away to mine something else. Maybe that's SHA256 based or? Who knows, innovation is always driven by these kinds of events.

That's not to say buying this equipment isn't a risk. But I imagine we'll always find a use for it.

If you believe that article mathematically proves bitcoin mining to be useless right now you do not understand what a math proof is.  

Trust me the article shows a possible outcome that may be true or may be false. No more or less then that.


It based all calculation on a 10k btc.

And we are now over 11 k.
So it is already wrong.

Of course in the morning price may be 12k

Or 9 k

Or back to 10k

It also assumes 13% will continue well it may or may not .

But if we stay at 10 k price with 13% diff per month we will bust.

That could happen. That is possible. But the closer we get to busting out. Growth will go flat.

I can run 13kwatts 24/7/365 in a 1.2 acre solar array that has been paid off.

Yes I would earn less btc if diff goes up up and away but if I want I can use gpus and mine other coins.

I am not the only miner with gear and miners paid off.

There won't be a big jump anytime soon. The reason we had a big jump form S7 to S9 was that S7 was using 28nm chipset in 2015. And in 2015 we already had commercial production of even up to 14nm. But right now S9 is using 16nm which is pretty much the bottleneck. The next step is 10nm and that is barely getting into commercial production today and when it does the foundries will be booked by giants like Apple and Samsung for some time. So S9 is here to stay for at-least another year or two.

you can increase the hashrate by liquid cooling, better design, etc etc. But won't be anything like the S7 to S9

I'm feeling like there should to come new "S9", like there was jump from S7 to S9...4th > 13-14TH... S9 is becoming obsolete..Unless you have free electricity...Or Bitcoin jumps...But you can't just wait for it to jump...Difficulty is increasing enormous speed...And new Dragonmint...is ONLY 2TH better then S9...We need crazy jump in tech again

Wow, interesting article that mathematically proves bitcoin mining to be useless already (or in the very near times to come). It will be interesting to hear the other guys comments here.

Nvidia cries in public about the miners buying up all the cards, but in private they high five each other and count their money.

I just signed up to post this here. I think the math doesn't add up anymore for 16nm chips. Unless you are doing liquid cooling and even that is almost breakeven.

https://medium.com/@sisa83/bitcoin-mining-heading-towards-a-cliff-354961c73c26

Me too. I want to play video games in space.

Actually, I do hope Bitmain release that ETH ASIC, as it would be a total game changer.
It is totally not normal to pump for years the GPU production business, the stocks of ATI and NVIDIA skyrocket; on the other hand gaming business is declining as there are literally no video cards to be bought to play the latest top notch games.
Today I also read this article on BBC News (seems legit) which is even more sad if it is true - lack of GPU hinders space research.
https://twitter.com/coindesk/status/964039175686311938

So - "Go Bitmain"...

Unfortunately those numbers seem to be assuming no pool fee and free electricity in addition to difficulty and new miners being released.

Most pools charge some sort of fee near 2% and electrical costs usually land somewhere around 10 cents per kilowatt. Assuming those numbers are factored in you're near 8 dollars without difficulty being factored in. Not bad, but there's more.

Difficulty is always going to go up and with a couple new miners being planned I suspect difficulty will only go up. In a couple difficulty periods at a rate of 5-10% the S9 will only be making half of what it is making now. Difficulty isn't linear, but this is just for estimation.

In an ideal world you're making your money back in 280 days, but that's not so for 99% of people. Unless BTC's price jumps up again you're probably not coming close to ROI- assuming the absolute best scenario at this current price point you'll make back just around $2000 a year. BTC may be volatile and prices might swing wildly every day, but you have no way of knowing what's next. Prices could go up just as easily as they could go down. It's pretty much a gamble each time you buy a miner from Bitmain as you have no way of seeing ROI info when you get the miner unless you have a crystal ball. You might be lucky, maybe not. Even with free electricity the S9 is still a questionable buy.

I have no idea if true or not but it would not shock me.

Consider:
- Bitmain recently releasing previously unannounced blake miner with shipping within 10 days
- Competition heating up in sha256 mining space so bitmain looking for new markets
- Bitmain seems to be rolling out miners for new algos in blitzkrieg fashon
- Would fit pattern of bitmain building asic chips for gpu algos
- threats from dev teams to change hashing algos or switch to Proof of Stake does not deter them

Where it ends I do not know.

Well man, this is the bare truth. It is simply because the majority of forum guys are situated in the US, where things are totally different. I was surprised myself to realize a few months ago (thanks to the guys here) that there were almost no import duties into the US from China and also the DHL/UPS delivery costs were totally different...
Long story short - mining is a future investment, I doubt someone buys to get the cash immediately. When I ordered my first miners, the ROI (covering duties, taxes and everything) was 2 months in the best days. When they arrived, ROI was double; now it is double and a half. Tomorrow (as you can see Bitcoin price is surging like crazy today) ROI can be - who knows...

Thx for response 12Core! 

Thx for response Kobo_eth! 

Still can't believe in these numbers. Everyone in sources that I came through calculates payback period simply based on production price (2 320 USD) 

With 3 312 USD initial cost and 11.8 USD daily revenue (0.00127 BTC (Whattomine data as of now) * 9 300 (Coinmarketcap data as of now) = 11.8 USD) S9 will pay out itself in like 280 days and that's without taking into account complexity growth and risks of new Antminer release