Posts Tagged ‘Bitmain’

BitMain AntMiner U3 Bitcoin ASIC Miner for Home Miners

23, Oct 2014

bitmain-antminer-u3-usb-asic-miner

BitMain has revealed a new 63 GHS AntMiner U3 SHA-256 ASIC miner designed for home users as the successor of the previously available USB stick miners that the company offered. The device is apparently made for home users that do not want serious noise levels or high power usage. It is more of an interesting and affordable device for users that are new to ASICs or just for a fun “toy”, don’t expect the U3 USB miner to actually make you some serious profit or something like that. The Antminer U3 is based on four BM1382 ASIC chips resulting in 63 GHS worth of hashrate and is priced at $56 USD per unit or 0.151 BTC at the moment (without shipping). The AntMiner U3 USB miners (connected to a PC via USB, not powered by USB) should start shipping on November 5th, or with other words less than 2 weeks from now. There is however a catch, if you want to order the BitMain AntMiner U3 directly from the manufacturer you will not be able to get a single unit, the minimum order quantity is 20 units. So this kind of defeats the purpose of directly ordering it from BitMain if you are an end user, but we are probably going to see some of BitMain’s partners also offering the miner for people that might be interested in purchasing single units.


BitMain AntMiner U3 ASIC Miner Specifications:

– Hash Rate: 63 GH/s at 0.75V
– Power Efficiency: 0.8 Watt/GH/s on wall at 0.75V
– Voltage: DC 12V input, 6A
– Chip Quantity per unit: 4
– One 80mm fan
– Noise: ~25 DB at 25 °C ambient temperature
– Hashrate and VDD core voltage can be adjusted via cgminer command line
– USB connection
– 12V AC/DC power brick of 6A, but power line not included
– Certificate Compliance: FCC/CE

Note that the noise level of these should be pretty low indeed at just about 25 Decibels, there is no exact power usage quoted, but it should be less than 70W which the supplied power adapter is apparently capable of as maximum. With the cited power usage of 0.8W per GHS the actual power usage should be close to about 50 Watts for the whole unit or maybe slightly more. The devices should be overclockable apparently through the cgminer command line, so there should be some headroom for increasing their hashrate with the expense of a bit more power usage. Again do note that these miners are low hashrate and low powers, designed to be silent and used by home miners just for fun and not as a means to make profit as they many not even be able to get you a return of investment in the foreseeable future.

– For more information about the BitMain AntMiner U3 Bitcoin ASIC miner…

Bitcoin Mining Getting Harder and Harder for Miners

9, Oct 2014

bitcrane-bitcoin-asic-miner

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…

Hashnest Still Has ~2 PHS of Bitcoin Cloud Hashrate to Sell

3, Oct 2014

hashnest-new-hashrate-prices

It seems that Hashnest, Bitmain’s Bitoin cloud mining platform, is having trouble to sell their initial 4 Petahashes worth of Bitcoin hashrate even though they have recently lowered the price per GHS down to 0.001125 BTC from 0.00135 BTC. They still have almost 2 PHS unsold and the reason for that is very simple – with the current BTC price the maintenance fees you need to pay are about 60% of what you are mining with your purchased hashrate. The new lower price was apparently not the only countermeasure they have taken, as we have received 20% increase in our initial purchase of 100 GHS to try out the service when it was announced early last month. We have not seen any official announcement or received anything by email about the increase of the hashrate, but it seems that this is some kind of bonus…

The hashrate we have purchased on 2nd of September was 100 GHS for 0.135 BTC and now, a month later, we are checking how things are progressing with our earned coins for this whole time. What we have earned until 2nd of October in our wallet is 0.0318239 BTC or a bit short of 1/4th of the amount we have paid for 1 month. That however does not mean that we are going to be able to ROI in three more months, because of the constantly increasing network difficulty it will take more time than that, especially if the fees continue to remain as high as they currently are. So at the moment it may not be a wise idea to invest in cloud hashrate at Hashnest and people apparently are aware of that as the service is having trouble to sell the second half of their initial offering of 4 PHS Bitcoin cloud mining hashrate powered by Bitmain AntMiner S2 ASIC miners.


top