Basically testing for certain conditions for hash collisions for single and double SHA256, nothing that will break SHA256d but testing some thesis.

If anyone has a large supply of S9, T15, S17, T17 era miners, I might be able to work something out to make it profitable to start those machines up again. Else I may consider to purchase the machines and run them on a separate mining facility (not preferred). Basically I need machines that can run AsicBoost (overt) and non AsicBoost (version rolling).

Secondary to what I'm doing, I think it's good to reduce electronic waste and make some of these legacy machines possibly profitable again.

I'm planning to host a few miners in the coming weeks and was wondering which locations have the most famous mining facilities in the world. Could someone please let me know?

Thanks, I got the numbers! Really hard to mine if you don't have energy really cheap.

I have to agree. Back in 2017 we started construction on a general purpose datacenter in Oregon rather than a mining specific one. Between 2017-2020, crypto miners were the bulk of our revenue, but it was also the hardest earned and the most inconsistent.

The boom/bust cycle of crypto is difficult for any datacenter to accommodate. Just for historical context, in November 2018 the market dropped below profitability for our customers. Overnight everyone was asking us to turn their machines off, so we did. Unfortunately that also meant nearly 100% of our revenue stopped.

At the time, my colleague argued that if none of our customers were paying, we should evict them, have them collect their equipment and reclaim the space. However it would have been counter productive, there was absolutely zero demand to host new mining equipment. Which was pretty evident as some of our customers tried to sell their equipment with little success.

After 6 months, in May 2019 the price did turn around and all of our customers took control of their machines again. Unfortunately this only lasted 5 months until November 2019 when increasing difficulty forced all of our customers to shut off again. In June 2020 the halving occurred, which pretty much assured that equipment was never getting powered on again.

Over the course of operating 24 months, we only generated a profit for a combined 10 months. The other 14 months with non-paying "idle" customers consumed whatever profit we had managed to make previously and took us negative into the red.

Today we have almost no crypto customers, although we do have a growing number of "traditional" datacenter customers. If we hadn't built the facility with customer diversity in mind we would have perished like everyone else.

Which brings me to my point, the "mining facility" concept has little chance to succeed even with scales 10 MW and beyond. Even when you have low priced power, there are unavoidable overheads. Rent or mortgage payments, construction loans, staffing costs, local taxes, licensing, insurance, accounting fees, property tax, etc.

Obviously there are some economies of scale that can help average these costs out, but we have found that beyond a certain scale the cost actually goes up. There are a lot of cost saving opportunities when you don't have to buy everything new, pay premiums for expediting construction, permits, lawyers, etc.

No matter how you balance it, you always end up paying ~$0.04/kWh in overhead.

- Want to mine at home? Then your stuck paying for retail power with a 50% premium over commercial
- Found a mining facility with super cheap hosting in some remote country? Now your exposed to a very likely risk of losing your equipment.
- Found a warehouse to rent for $2k/month with 400 amps of power? That's $4k/month in power that your paying a 50% premium on thru rent.
- Decided to go big! Get a loan for $3M to build a 10 MW facility. Paying your loan is equivalent to paying a 50% premium on power for 24-36 months.

Ironically, I have been considering hosting mining customers again now that they aren't critical to the success of our business. I just need to find a creative way to more appropriately split the risk between hosting provider and miner.

A month or two ago, some people said that home mining at a rate of 10-12 cents was possible with the most efficient ASIC on the market, which was a Bitmain Antminer S19j Pro. But now, the power cost is half the revenue. Profit is half of what it used to be for that miner.

Now you need at least a Bitmain L7 or Goldshell KD2 for home mining to be viable. The only other option is a GPU rig for altcoins, but even that is not becoming worthwhile for many U.S. households who pay 15-16 cents for power. It's becoming more compelling to just sell the cards and buy the coin, since coin prices are low.