Crypto Mining Blog

We got our hands on a Bitmain Antminer X3 CryptoNight ASIC miner for a few days and have decided to give this soon-to-be or already way too expensive paperweight a quick test to see what you can expect from the device as they have been shipping for a week or two already to customers. The Antminer X3 is capable of delivering 220 KHS at 550W of power usage as per specifications and the device kind of manages to actually deliver on these numbers. The kind of part is because we’ve experienced some weird results trying to actually make the ASIC miner work properly on some popular pools and services such as NiceHash for example. When you point out the X3 to NiceHash’s CryptoNight (not CryptonightV7) stratum you get the device to connect and report extranonce support, but all you get are rejects and 0 as hashrate. So apparently the Antminer X3 does not work properly on NiceHash at the moment, even after flashing the latest available firmware that seemed a day newer than the one on the device we have tested. No go on NiceHash which seems as the best option for the moment considering that there are not that many CryptoNight coins left that offer good profit as most of the serious coins have already switched to the new ASIC-proof (for now at least) CryptoNight V7 algorithm.

Moving to a quick test on Nanopool’s Electroneum (ETN) mining pool as the next best thing after NiceHash in terms of profitability kind of worked, but not as we have expected. Here the miner connects and apparently works on the pool side, but the pool reports only about 20 KHS hashrate and not the full 220 KHS that it should. Locally the miner seems to work fine and the locally reported hashrate is also fine with a bit over 235 KHS average reported. People have reported success on some smaller ETN pools with the X3 ASIC miner, but even if you manage to make the device work properly on Electroneum you will not have a lot of time before ETH also forks and becomes unmineable with this miner.

The next thing to try was going for AntPool and Monero Classic (XMC) where with no surprise thins worked great out of the box, after all this is Bitmain’s mining pool, where they probably also test all the miners before shipping them to customers, so no surprise that it all works. The problem however is that you only get to mine XMC there and it is traded on only two exchanges according to CoinMarketCap, but at least it works and you can probably make a coin and a half to about two XMC coins per day at the moment or roughly maybe about $15-18 USD at the current rates and difficulty.

Here is how the situation looks profitability wise for the Antminer X3 ASIC miner on CryptoNight according to WhatToMine. The other possibly interesting coin to try mining with AntMiner X3 is ByteCoin (BCN) that has recently seen some boost in interest probably tied to the availability of the X3 ASIC miners in the hands of miners. So do you think that the BitMain AntMiner X3 is a soon-to-be or is already way too expensive paperweight? We definitely do not like the fact that it is not working properly on services like NiceHash or big pools like Nanopool out of the box, Bitmain should’ve had enough time to make sure possible issues have been resolved… and they can always release an update to fix problems like these while the devices are traveling to their customers. Can’t say we are happy for the short time we had with the X3 miner to give it a try and would definitely not recommend it at the moment, not that we did when they were announced either.