Bitcoin Forum

  When you buy a miner, what are you most concerned about?
   1. The total price.
   2. The hash rate.
   3. Brand
   4. Others(welcome to share your opinions)

As a European Citizen I care the most about energy consumption, because this will be my main cost factor. It is not too important how much I pay in the first place for the miner since I will quickly have paid more money in power than the price reduction for a inefficient miner.

Durability and longevity. This means using the latest industry standard design and technology. Metal backed circuit board, wettable flank ASIC, bolt on Heatsinks, etc.

Going with what @MinerMEDIC said. I have fixed cost power so it's better for me to have a miner that will last forever, then the latest & fastest that dies after 18 months.
I have stuff running that if WAY past being able to generate any BTC if power was a concern.

Also, as a side note 110V power would be nice. Yes, I know the rest of the world uses 220 and building for the little bit that uses 110 is probably not worth it.
But not having stuff that can run on 110V or lower amps for the rest of the world does limit some small home / hobby miner sales.

-Dave

My power cost is such that I can not lose money.

Except if:

 gear dies.
Gear is never delivered.
gear is stolen.

So a 38 watt per th

is better than a 29 watt per th

if the 38 watt gear never breaks.

IE:

 an avalon 1246 87 th at 38 watts a th

is better for me than a s19 110th at 29 watts a th.

As Philipma said, is one of the main reasons I stopped using Bitmain miners after batch-25 of the s9 series. Just too many hash boards dying. Up to the s9 they were much much more reliable.

Switched to the Avalon's starting with a couple 721's and never looked back. Out of several dozen of the Avalon miners over the years only 1 failure and that was the fan on 741 - which even after 2 years Canaan replaced no-charge. These days it seems that the PSU's are the main failure area und ja, Bitmain has the same issue (along with other problem areas) as do the Whatminers.

That's true. The electricity costs more than ever before :(

Which does kind of loop back to my low power QUIET mining comment.
3 or 4TH at a couple of hundred watts to act as a small space heater.

10TH as a slightly larger space heater. You can still make them dead quiet if built properly with modern chips.

Bitmains R4 came out 6 years ago and did 8.5TH and 850W
What can you build today that will keep my office warm or the back bedroom of my condo without blowing out my ears?

-Dave

120V Power would be fantastic - So many miners are built to run on 3000+ Watts and require 220V+ Electricity. Scale them down! Same chips - less or smaller hashboards, smaller form factor... I understand that it is easier from an electrical engineering stand-point to design something for the most "ideal" electrical input. However, North America (the USA especially) is a massive, potential, market and there are VERY few companies taking advantage of the, nearly, untapped potential that resides here. That's my 2 sats anyway.... Aside from that - I personally try to seek out build quality and products that will stand up to the test of time.

If someone care about the price, just visit here, it is probably one of the best prices on the market:

A1246-93T: https://shop.canaan.io/products/st-avalon-miner-a1246-93t-3420w?DIST=REVF

A1246-90T: https://shop.canaan.io/products/st-avalon-miner-a1246-90t-3420w?DIST=REVF

A1166Pro-81T: https://shop.canaan.io/products/st-avalon-miner-a1166-pro-81t-3400w?DIST=REVF

All of these are from canaan offical shop and shipping by canaan directly.

Well, don't forget that those prices ignore the taxes you may have to pay on top of that, if you ship them from china to a country that requires you to pay those rather large extra taxes.

Sorry for ot but i see you have alot of avalons and i have my eye on A1166pro series. Do you have any of those and would you recommend them?

They are not shipping everything from China, they have miners in stock in the US and other countries that they ship from.
Not saying that there are no other taxes involved and depending on from where to where the amounts could still be large. But they seem to be trying to save customers some money.

-Dave

I have a1166 it works fine , if you are usa based this one is good

https://shop.canaan.io/products/avalon-miner-a1166-pro-81t-3400w?VariantsId=10012

decent price
stable gear

good luck with your mining I hope that you do well with your choice of gear.

My partners and I will be getting more of them soon.

[/quote]

I have a1166 it works fine , if you are usa based this one is good

https://shop.canaan.io/products/avalon-miner-a1166-pro-81t-3400w?VariantsId=10012

decent price
stable gear

good luck with your mining I hope that you do well with your choice of gear.

My partners and I will be getting more of them soon.

[/quote]


Thanks for voting for us :)

Hello, could you please send us an Email at customerservice@canaan.io with your address? Our online shop team wants to send you a gift :)

Email sent at 3:42p EST
Thank you very much, it will be interesting to see what it is  ;D

Yeah, we have confirmed, just wait patiently :)

1. Run-time without needing to be repaired
2. Software Customization
3. Price

I would like to see more single hash board BTC miners, and updates that don't brick your control board. I don't know anything about manufacturing but letting customers fix their own hardware for common points of failure and giving them the information and parts to do so doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.

my criteria to buy a miner machine:
1. reliable for long running.
2. technical transparency on hardware and software.
3. repairable and good service.
4. low price.
5. less power consume.

Noted with thanks.

Thanks for your precious advice, we do appreciate it.

Me personally, it would be electricity usage. Tons of miners out there, but most consume so much electricity, that it's not even worth it anymore.

I used to GPU mine back in the day and that was pretty profitable, but even now, that can be pretty expensive. Electricity can make or break a mining rig.

Well this is the big difference between canaan miners and bitmain miners

The latest canaan miners use a lot more power per TH than the latest bitmain miners.
(and this has been the case also for a long time)

The latest bitmain miner using 23W/TH vs the latest canaan miner using 35W/TH actually is a very big issue.

When that 35W/TH is borderline running no profit or even loss, i.e. run cost power = 100% or more of reward
the 23W/TH miner is using only 66% of the power, so that 33% may go into profit instead of paying for the power.

The catch of course is when BTC price is low like it is now, you need really cheap power to make only a small profit on a canaan miner.
However, many people will find that they run the newest canaan miners at a loss at the moment,
but might be able to run the newest bitmain miners at a profit.

I will add, that I've always considered this surprising how bitmain always can make mining chips with better power characteristics than canaan can ever do.

Thanks for all your suggestions

power and hash rate is the most important
then a realistic ROI with current prices of 12-14 months
more than this is purely speculative and has many chances to go wrong

Thanks

As far as I understand this works only because there is quite a big portion of people that has business contracts that include unlimited power. Since running a miner in a large company building will also not make a huge difference there are more people that you would think that are not really interested in power consumption even if in the first place you can not imagine how somebody could run this miner on a profit.

Welcome to share your ideas with us 8)

4. How is the open source support for the hardware, firmware and software!

Well noted with thanks !

Any more ideas? We are all ears :)

There is an incredible big market worldwide for heating equipment that is electrically powered. If you could just get 1 % of those customers to use a bitcoin Miner for heating instead of a simple heater you would probably already sell more miners than any other company. The needs for this miner would be:

-Low Noise
-High Safety
-Power Output of 3-5 KwH
- Good Build quality and design

I agree, but not with the power output requirement.

It should have lower power output so that it can be plugged into a standard wall outlet.

1.2-2.4kW max. Plug and play/heat.

For 3-5kW you need to have a dedicated high current cable to where ever you want to plug it in.

I brought that up directly with Canaan in the past and their response was that they're not interested in making home miners.

I then followed up about getting chips from them for someone else to make home miners and they ignored my emails.

There are a few key things to consider when choosing a bitcoin miner.

• First, you should make sure that the miner is capable of mining at a high hash rate, as this will increase your chances of successfully mining bitcoins.
  
• Second, you should consider the energy efficiency of the miner, as this will determine how much it will cost to run the miner and how long it will take to earn back your initial investment.
• Third, you should consider the price of the miner, as well as any additional equipment or accessories that may be required to use it.
  
• Finally, you should also consider the reputation and customer support offered by the manufacturer of the miner. Buy something that comes with a long term warranty support.
  

There are more experts here to give you more suggestions. So try and follow them.

Haha, that means these users can mine BTC in a warm house. Noise is really a problem so far.

Thanks, we are listening :)

This aged rather well, clearly someone was listening at Canaan considering the Nano 3's release.

The nano 3 is pretty good.

Not perfect but decent.


I have 2 of them. I run them on medium



If they were to take 1 board from the a1446 model

make it do 3 speeds and use a 120/240 volt psu it would sell to USA home miners.


A 400 - 600 - 800 watt miner simple plug and play.

Wow, you bought it from our shop? We will have an event for the July 4th soon, stay tuned.

1) would definitely be Wattage because electricity is crazy expensive in the UK.
2) Efficiency Th/Watt
3) Price of the unit

I have the Avalon nano 3 as well and it`s great! I bought it on ebay (I think it was unwanted) I`m just waiting for the price to come down on Amazon so I can buy another ready for the winter.

its all about efficiency 100% and secondly the size/noise of machine (home miner here)

an option at 100W/500-1000W and 3000-5000W that can achieve 15J/TH is what we need, make it happen!

I second that, for home mining, 3kW+ is just mental. The ring mains here in the UK won't be able to handle the current - not to mention the cost of electric at the end of the month would just be insane.

An option for 500W would be a sweet spot IMHO.

exactly, if the nano had 15W/TH efficiency and cost 20-50% less, I would buy one for every room!

We will have more new items coming. Stay tuned 8)

Hi,

I had purchased nano 3 from your website directly to India. First please bring back credit card payment option, I was able to buy nano 3 via CC in may but from july this was removed. I had to use bitcoin to pay for the adapter last month. WIRE transer is a hassel for 100$ product.

secondly please have a nano 3 or nano 4 with ethernet version. wifi causes health issues and hacking issues.

third your upcoming mini miner series which  will take 800w and give 40T. please have an ethernet option. You can atleast add usb type C and the consumer will buy the Ethernet to type c adapter separately to keep costs down.

please have 2 usb type c. One for power, other to install ethernet adapter.


Please have credit card option. Your indeogogo does not ship to India.

Also please send the cooling fan to users who live in high heat areas.

thank you for pivoting towards home mining.

ps: please sell nano 3 accessories like a bag, fans, battery fan, heatsinks  etc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_iCB5cIY

Hello, well noted with thanks.

My main concern is the quality of shipped equipment. Antminers are produced in China, I'm too far from China, it takes up to a month to receive a shipment from Bitmain. What happens when you receive a bad batch? Or if miners get damaged because of bad quality? You have to ship them back and in my country, shipping back to China costs almost half the price of bought equipment. Also, the shipment will take up to a month to send and two months can affect your ROI. So I'm afraid to order anything from China and for this reason, I've been only mining with GPU in 2016-2017 and 2018. I know that I'll almost always receive a high-quality GPU from Nvidia or AMD but now GPU mining is dead and I gave up on mining.

the home mining space needs more competition. If someone could make a miner with 20TH, using under 300 watts of power with a 110v outlet and costs less than $300 the manufacturer would have a hard time keeping up with demand.
I don't even know if that possible, but if one could even get in the ballpark of that, I would buy certainly buy it.

Oh and the noise needs to low too. 50db max

The ROI is the most important.

I look at how long it takes for the machine to produce what it cost me. Now, if it's more than 9 months, I don't buy.

Several of my latest machines did not produce the BTC they cost me. Because of the low reliability of bitmain machines, the increase in difficulty, plus import taxes, it's hard.

If a machine that costs 0.1BTC only produces in it's working life 0.08BTC, there is no reason to buy it, it is better to keep the money.

I don't know how other miners do it, but for me in Europe it's no longer profitable, even with free electricity.

The issue is, if manufacturers released cheap powerful machines, the difficulty would just sky rocket even further, by a lot.

It became unprofitable a long time ago when machines needed to consume 1kW+ of power. The electricity cost in Europe is insane. The only way to do it profitably is to either have a mass amount of solar power and battery storage, or somehow have free electricity from some other form of renewable power, which realistically, how many people live next to a river/stream or has a wind turbine?

Fortunately for US miners, in some places, they can't send power over vast distances, so they have a lot of spare power in areas so it's cheap as chips. At least that's my theory anyway. Please correct me if i'm wrong, I'm eager to know!

1. hashrate / price
2. hashrate / power consumption
3. hashrate / volume during operation

I agree ROI is important. The home mining price needs to come down. I was seriously considering buying the mini3 when it was launched but the price point is so high. $899 for the miner + something like $120 for shipping. It would take something like 18 months before I got my sats back, and that assuming difficulty doesn't go up during that time.

price point for home miners needs to be below $600 for units like the mini 3

well If you can get the mini 3 on a cc and have a good cc deal it is okay.

These days it's the firmware that concerns me the most.  As is the case with IoT devices/home automation, people/manufactures are getting into nasty habits with ASIC miners.  Things like forcing you to use an app in order to configure it, integrating with the "cloud", and lack of control over the hardware you own.  Some vendors are even adding 'dev fees'.  When I buy a piece of hardware, I expect it to have full control of it, function offline without an app, with a built-in web server.

The second most important is power consumption.  Not so much efficiency, but density.  The manufactures are trying to stuff so much power in one place, and now we have devices that are require thousands of kW.  I'd rather have 10 machines consuming 500w power each rather than one big one consuming 5000w.

Third is cost.  I remember when I purchased my first S1.  It was about $1k.  I thought that was over priced then.  Now we have manufactures price gouging ASIC miners as far as $30k each.  There's clearly something wrong and I hope that we see more manufactures from the USA setup shop.  A lot of that may be because manufactures are trying to stuff so many chips into a single device (see previous point), but no doubt there is greed.  Something's not right with the way these machines are being priced and (I as much as I dislike regulation and government involvement) hope to see something done about it if manufactures don't stop.

Yes, you are right, machines are becoming more and more powerful and expensive if you don't buy hundreds of them, which makes it difficult for small players or mining at home.
It is difficult to exploit the heat produced when the machines are very powerful.

For remote control there is a way to do it differently. (Remote-controlled sockets, remote PC control), that's not the most important thing i think.  

When mining at home, noise is important too. But generally speaking, most of this technical limits (noise, remote control, cooling, etc.) can be managed efficiently. 

Which means that ROI remains the most important in my opinion.

ROI depends on the cost of the machine with import taxes, its reliability, the cost of electricity, the evolution of the network's computing power, crypto value evolution for paying bills and your ability to use the heat produced).

Consequently, to have a chance of having a positive ROI, it is preferable to have low-cost electricity that is stable over time to make the machines profitable before they are outdated. 

You also have to be lucky (or well informed) to know if a new generation of chips will not make them obsolete quikely.

And if you don't have a lot of machines you also have to be lucky for it to be reliable... (If you have a lot you know that you will lose ~10% of your hashrate during first mounths burn-in)

 The main problem is that it will lose its efficiency quickly because the manufacturer can produce millions of miners and any new miner in the network is competing against your miners. And when there is a better, more efficient one in the market, it is over for your rig instantly because you can’t compete anymore. In this picture buying miners make no sense at all.

It is a never ending chase for the buyer and only the manufacturer is making money.

I made decent money mining, but the right move for me would have been just do a signature campaign and hodl til we reach 100k.

Cannan do you use ESP 32 firmware for the nano and mini series?
https://unionrayo.com/en/bluetooth-chip-backdoor-esp32/

No they do not use that ridiculously under powered micro-controller & firmware...
They uses their own Kendryte AI chip and firmware same as their full size miners.

if you are lucky you lose 10 of 100 miners in a small-medium  mine.

I have 4 s21xps 1 of 12 boards = dead.

I have 4 t21s issues with 3 of them

I am repasting them which seems to have worked.