Looking to get into ASIC Miners - Where should I start?

[drybones99]

I'm interested in getting into ASIC Miners, and I have a budget of about $6,000. Where should I start? I don't have a lot of experience mining, having just begun mining on my GPU (1080 Ti) and making about $3-$4 per day on it. However, I see great potential in ASIC mining for passive income, and I'm willing to give it a shot. However, I'd like to first get some idea of what sort of machine would generate profit at the greatest rate and with the greatest consistency for the above stated budget. In other words, I don't want a machine whose monthly profit fluctuates too wildly but that also has the greatest potential for profit for around $6,000. As far as power is concerned, I would consider using a hoster, but I would also need recommendations for good hosters in the United States. Any thoughts?

Here are just a couple of machines for under $6,000 that I've been looking at:

https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/innosilicon/t3-57t
https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/bitmain/antminer-t19-84th

It seems to be difficult to get a good machine right now due to stock shortages, so I would definitely be interested in any potential good deals floating around.

[philipma1957]

There are very few if any good deals.

basically with a 43k coin price and a difficulty of under 15t

btc mining makes very good money this makes gear scarce and pricey.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Biggest factor that affects your profitability is your cost of power. Currently, anything more than around $0.10/kWH and you will most likely be losing money.

As for

I don't want a machine whose monthly profit fluctuates too wildly

That does not depend on the miner. It only depends on the price of the coin and how its diff rises over time. This being the Bitcoin area that means you have to put up with whatever the price of BTC is.

[drybones99]

I should also add that many of the machines I'm looking at mine altcoins instead of Bitcoin, and I'm interested in mining any cryptocurrency that can make good money for me. As for power, I'm thinking about using a hoster in order to minimize electricity costs (they're too high where I live much of the time). What would be some good hosters? Also, I'm still looking for ASIC recommendations. Are the two machines I linked any good? If not, what would instead be a good machine?

[kano]

If you want to ask about altcoins/scamcoins don't do it here, your posts will be moved or deleted.

[philipma1957]

I should also add that many of the machines I'm looking at mine altcoins instead of Bitcoin, and I'm interested in mining any cryptocurrency that can make good money for me. As for power, I'm thinking about using a hoster in order to minimize electricity costs (they're too high where I live much of the time). What would be some good hosters? Also, I'm still looking for ASIC recommendations. Are the two machines I linked any good? If not, what would instead be a good machine?

post in altcoin section

I have a thread you can post there.


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5144362.0

I run a long altcoin thread for years.

it addresses those that want to mine multiple coins.


I mine

Btc and five other coins I won’t  mention here at all.

[drybones99]

What do you all think of this machine?: https://www.asicminervalue.com/miners/canaan/avalonminer-1166-pro

It's around $5,000 new and it DOES mine Bitcoin. I'm very interested in it.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

All of Canaan's Avalon miners are very good machines with far fewer problems than those from any other maker. A nice plus is that they are currently available for a decent price. If you are in the USA use Blokforge.com, excellent company and they have miners in-stock. Aside from one old Bitmain R4, since 2017 my entire farm is all Avalons and has ran with pretty much zero problems.

That said, like all modern miners they DO have one weak point - the fact they use a built-in custom PSU that can be very hard to get replacements for if it dies. The good point is that unlike the Antminers, that is pretty much their only problem.

[n0nce]

All of Canaan's Avalon miners are very good machines with far fewer problems than those from any other maker. A nice plus is that they are currently available for a decent price. If you are in the USA use Blokforge.com, excellent company and they have miners in-stock. Aside from one old Bitmain R4, since 2017 my entire farm is all Avalons and has ran with pretty much zero problems.

That said, like all modern miners they DO have one weak point - the fact they use a built-in custom PSU that can be very hard to get replacements for if it dies. The good point is that unlike the Antminers, that is pretty much their only problem.

That's very good to know! Prices seem much better than Bitmain currently, hashrate and power consumption (efficiency) seems comparable.
Do you find them more reliable or which problems do other manufacturers have which Canaan does not? And I understood correctly that also these guys have proprietary PSUs?

Additionally, esp. since OP mentioned it in the start post: GPU mining is still quite profitable. For 7000$ (like 1x the linked Avalon 1246), you should be able to get 12 RX6800 cards (AMD direct buy), which should consume similar or lower amount of power but should mine around 50$ a day compared to ~28$ a day when mining BTC with Avalon 1246. What are the motivations for buying one ASIC over 12 graphics cards? Less hardware to service, less fans, less PSUs, less hardware (need 2 motherboards & CPUs for 12 GPUs I think)? So less running costs in terms of human work?

[kano]

...
What are the motivations for buying one ASIC over 12 graphics cards?
...

Simple: scamcoin mining is off topic in this area of the forum ...
(as I already reminded the OP in my previous post)

[jeyzeus]

Additionally, esp. since OP mentioned it in the start post: GPU mining is still quite profitable. For 7000$ (like 1x the linked Avalon 1246), you should be able to get 12 RX6800 cards (AMD direct buy), which should consume similar or lower amount of power but should mine around 50$ a day compared to ~28$ a day when mining BTC with Avalon 1246. What are the motivations for buying one ASIC over 12 graphics cards? Less hardware to service, less fans, less PSUs, less hardware (need 2 motherboards & CPUs for 12 GPUs I think)? So less running costs in terms of human work?

do you understand the difference between bitcoin mining and gpu mining? you don't mind bitcoin when you mine with a gpu. you mine another coin and if you want, they'll convert it into bitcoin for you.

you are not engaging in any manner with the bitcoin protocol in anyway other than being a deposit address. you are not earning fees from a block reward, you are not earning the block subsidy...it's not bitcoin mining. you are talking about completely different things. this forum is for people who want to talk about bitcoin mining, not how to make money on noobs who don't understand the technology and buy anything they might see on coinbase.

the motivation to buy an asic is cause we don't want to mine altcoins. bitcoin mining is competitive so you gotta accept the risks. it's called "proof of work"...you actually have to prove you did something relevant to the network to earn a reward.

turning on your gpu does nothing to help decentralize the bitcoin network, provide security or process transactions. people like kano have been on this board for years and get annoyed when new people don't understand the difference and don't read the sticky.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2415854.0

2. This section is for BITCOIN MINING and related discussion ONLY. All bitcoin forks and alternate cryptocurrencies and discussion of them should be directed to a dedicated forum for those, or one of the altcoin subforums on this forum. All discussion regarding them will be moved without warning to the altcoin sections. If your topic is related to multiple currencies, then unless it is primarily about bitcoin it will be moved. Even if it is about sha256d mining but not about bitcoin it will be moved. BITCOIN mining is done today ONLY with ASICs, and any discussion of mining with CPU, GPU or FPGAs will be moved to the altcoin mining section.

3. Mining BITCOIN is done exclusively with dedicated BITCOIN mining hardware based on ASICs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit . You CAN NOT meaningfully mine bitcoin today with CPU, GPU or even FPGAs. Bitcoin difficulty adapts to match the amount of mining done on the network and has reached levels trillions of times too high to mine meaningfully with PCs, laptops, tablets, phones, webpages, javascript, GPUs, and even generalised SHA hardware. You will not find software in this section to help you mine bitcoin in this absurdly inefficient manner in this subforum. It would cost you thousands of dollars in electricity per year to earn only a few cents in bitcoin. Even if you combined all the computers in the world, including all known supercomputer, you would not even approach 0.1% of the bitcoin hashrate today. Any discussion outside of ASIC related mining, except in the interests of academia, will be moved to the altcoin mining section. There isn't any point attempting to mine bitcoin with CPU or GPU even in the interests of learning as it shares almost nothing with how bitcoin is mined with ASICs and will not teach you anything.

TL/DR Summary:
 - You CANNOT meaningfully mine bitcoin with your PC or laptop no matter how powerful it is.
 - You CANNOT meaningfully mine bitcoin with your tablet or phone no matter how powerful it is.
 - Mining apps for your phone or tablet that claim to mine bitcoin are almost certainly scams.
 - You CANNOT find software here to mine bitcoin with your PC by itself.
 - You MIGHT be able to do one of the above with altcoins, but such discussion goes into the altcoin mining section.
 - You CANNOT find or post software here to mine on other peoples' PC without their permission.

[n0nce]

do you understand the difference between bitcoin mining and gpu mining? you don't mind bitcoin when you mine with a gpu. you mine another coin and if you want, they'll convert it into bitcoin for you.

Yeah, yeah I do, also sry for talking about GPU mining in the wrong subforum, I just thought it fit the OP's question since he specifically mentioned it and that his goal was not necessarily to switch to ASICs for supporting the network, but for:

generat[ing] profit at the greatest rate.

Of course I know that GPU miners don't do SHA-256 since graphics cards aren't nearly as efficient at doing that as ASICs, but are more suited for algorithms such as Ethash (which are also PoW, but ofc don't secure or decentralize the Bitcoin network, instead support in that case the Ethereum network).

people like kano have been on this board for years and get annoyed when new people don't understand the difference and don't read the sticky.

Hey, sorry for pissing you or anyone else off, it was not my intention - I did read all stickys and FAQs when entering this forum, as I always do when signing up in a new forum. I'd also say I do have a good understanding of Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining and most other technical aspects of Bitcoin, as well as the differences to other cryptocurrencies, differences between algorithms, PoW vs. PoS etc.  
I'm not really a 'new people' in the space, just new here on the forum and wanted to help by putting out an example calculation for someone specifically looking to 'generate profit at the greatest rate'.