Bitcoin Forum

At a difficulty level increase of 7%, I calculate the BTC per month mined by an Antminer S9 to be 0.011633 by December of 2020.

How is this a sustainable business model for Bitmain?  Who would buy these things if their shelf life is less than 18 months (including costs)?

I'm a new convert to bitcoin.  Love the technology.  Just not sure how the economics of mining can be profitable at all if the main supplier of miners ships a product that is useless after 18 months, from today.

Thoughts?

The Antminer S9 pays off 6 months after it has been used for 24/7, the rest is profit for the owner. I don't think that it is a huge loss on the miner's part knowing that they already got their money back within the first 6 months and the remaining months of the product's lifetime is a chance for the miner to make more than their initial investment. Also, the difficulty increase is not always constant; difficulty adjustment =/ increase. Give also the fact that bitcoin is ever increasing every single day. Would the $3000 be a hard target for miners to recoup?

Thanks for the reply!

I am getting into mining myself and have been playing with the numbers.  Everything looks really good until you factor in the difficulty changes.  Even with using the very worst case scenario of diff going up and btc$ staying flat, there is money to be made.

My post was my thinking out loud that there must be something coming up in the mining world, someone must be working on releasing a faster miner.  There's just too much money involved for there not to be. 

Anyways, thanks for chatting with me.

 

It depends on how much it costs to produce a single S9.

If say a single S9 costs $300-$1,000 to produce, and sells for $3,000 to $5,000 antminer could still be running a very profitable enterprise. Not everyone is in a position to mine crypto. Tweaking settings and finding cheap sources of electricity isn't something that appeals to everyone. Antminer could well be making good money without venturing into the mining industry.

It may be also be said that a decent percentage of professional grade mining is state sanctioned or partly funded by governments. Some mining outfits in china are situated next to hydroelectric power plants, which produce electricity at cheaper rates than coal power. Access to things like hydroelectric plants may be due to miners having state level connections--and that may be what is needed to be a truly competitive, top notch, mining outfit these days.

You can still use ASIC Antminer L3, at the moment it extracts 0.05 LTC (0.001 BTC) per day. It will pay off in about six months, then it will bring profit to its owner. Taking into account the fact that the rise in prices for crypto currency in the spring will rise, then the L3 yield should increase.