Crypto Mining Blog

Have you looked at the specifications of the currently available generation of Bitcoin ASICs lately while considering getting a miner in order to get some coins at home? As Bitcoin network difficulty is progressively increasing every ~13 days, the hardware manufacturers are already hitting the limits of the 28nm production technology and the BTC exchange rate stays at low levels things are not looking good. We have checked what you can expect to earn with some of the SHA-256 ASIC miners for Bitcoin and have done some calculations that you can see below using the current network difficulty as a base.

SHA-256 ASIC Miners for Bitcoin:

Rockminer R3 Box – 450 GHS @ 450W – $185 USD
BitMain AntMiner S3+ – 453 GHS @ 355W – $215 USD
Rockminer T1 BOX – 800 GHS @ 1000W – $349 USD
BitCrane T-110 – 1.1 THS @ 1100W – $1299 USD
Spondoolies-Tech SP20 Jackson – 1.7 THS @ 1100W – $1190 USD
BitMain AntMiner S4 – 2 THS @ 2000W – $1250 USD

Looking at the list of miners above you can see that they are actually not that many options available that you are currently able to order and get very soon in your own hands. There are some miners available for pre-order with next month shipping or Q1 2015 expected availability for example but we have not included these. KnCMiner’s Neptune is also not included as these are not being sold at the moment and even if they did at the last listed price nobody would be buying them anyway. We have not listed some other miners from companies that are supposed to be shipping, but we have not found a single trustworthy review or confirmation from anyone that actually received a product from them.

Expected daily mined BTC with the current network difficulty:

Rockminer R3 Box – 0.006466 daily, 0.04526 weekly, 0.194 monthly
BitMain AntMiner S3+ – 0.006509 daily, 0.04556 weekly, 0.1953 monthly
Rockminer T1 BOX – 0.01149 daily, 0.08043 weekly, 0.3447 monthly
BitCrane T-110 – 0.0158 daily, 0.1106 weekly, 0.474 monthly
Spondoolies-Tech SP20 Jackson – 0.02443 daily, 0.171 weekly, 0.7329 monthly
BitMain AntMiner S4 – 0.02874 daily, 0.2012 weekly, 0.8623 monthly

Do note that the above numbers represent what you can earn with the hashrate that the specific ASIC miner provides with a Bitcoin network difficulty remaining at 35,002,482,026 for the duration of the whole specified period. Also these numbers represent the mined coins and you would need to subtract the costs for the electricity from them based on the power usage for the miner and your electricity prices per kWh in order to get an actual profit you will get. As you can see even 2 THS are already not that much and you are going to mine less than 1 BTC per month with this hashrate and with the current sub $400 USD price for Bitcoin when you subtract the electricity fee (can get to half the mined coins) things do not look promising. So for small time miners Bitcoin mining with ASIC miners is not very interesting anymore and even for larger farms things might not be that bright as you might think, so it is no surprise that some of these are selling their hashrate in the form of cloud services. The only thing that could make Bitcoin mining attractive to normal users again is a significant increase in the price of BTC, so you can be mining now and keeping the mined coins waiting for that to happen…