Is it worth collecting old ASIC miners?

[Abiky]

I have a couple of old ASIC hardware lying around collecting dust, which I used to mine Bitcoin and Dogecoin in my early days in crypto. They are the Gridseed GC3355 and the Block Erupter USB Miner. Last time I've plugged them into my PC, they were still working like a charm. I'm wondering if it's worth holding onto these to sell them at a later time? Will they increase in price like physical crypto coins or not? I saw a couple of Block Erupters selling at more than $100 per unit (which is way more than what I've originally purchased mine a few years ago) on eBay so I've figured maybe I could sell mine?

Any suggestions and/or recommendations will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

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[MoparMiningLLC]

there are collectors of them.

I currently have a s1, s3, s5, bfl monarch, knc titan and a couple others that currently elude me as to their names for old miners.


I would like to eventually have the space to have room for more and have them displayed. One of everything is my motto

[krogothmanhattan]

Yep....for me they are collectable items and I have a few. Will send you a pm to see what you have in mind

[bestcoin_59]

I would say yes...Even today some old ASIC miners are being auctionned/sold for quite a fortune on Ebay. Of course, i can't tell if it will still be the case in the future, and if the price will still increase due to rarity, but it seems to be a good bet. If i were you, i would HODL them...

[yogg]

Back in the days, I had a BFL Jalapeno.

Received it in July 2013. I was the king in the castle with my 6,4 Gh/s
I mined around 0.1BTC / day at that moment for a week.
Then BTC's diff went up by 20% on the next diff readjustment.

I figured out it was better to resell it as there was a huge premium at that moment.
Sold it on Bitmit for 16BTC (~$1400).

Definetely, these are part of Bitcoin's history.

[bestcoin_59]

You are still the king of the castle thanks to CK nowdays

[yogg]

You are still the king of the castle thanks to CK nowdays

wa wa wee wa




I found some old pictures

Here was my mining setup
I remember placing an order to buy it in october 2012, for like ~$350.
Only then I realized it was a preorder and it finally arrived in July 2013.
I didn't pay attention to what was going on with this company (Butterfly Labs) back then, but what I know is they've ended up scamming big times.



This was the panel on my notebook laptop



There is a chance mine has been shipped among the first ones. Just look at how the diff went up around July 2013.
This is when the first ASICs have been made available.



And yeah, I think the wisest was to resell
I would have never mined that many BTC with it I think ...
Guy who bought it said he has some other great ASIC chips and needed my miner for the PCB.



It happened a long time ago and for sure I didn't have these BTC in 2014 any longer haha.
Well, a fun story and definetely, early ASICs belong in museums.

[BobbyCoins]

A while ago I thought about upcycling my KnC hashing boards into cold storages (KIALARA serves as model): placing orange LEDs in the mounting holes and a square coin capsule (e.g.: for privKey) onto the chip, making it as "cold" as possible by casting it all togehter in epoxy resin... and for pure security reasons I would have outsourced key generation to the Austrian State Printing House (they produce the passports for Austria and developed a 'no person involved'-production process) incorporated by Coinfinity's Card Wallets (if possible to cut the card small enough without destroying one of its security features... but AFAIK they also do personalized cards, IDK the minimum order amount)
With recycling in mind even the heatsink could serve as a stand... making it a series of 20 hashing boards + 1 controller board (with "The whole world, only one block apart" - D. Wolk printed on) or so...
The S7 on the picture only demonstrates that my miners were not intended to live for as long as possible (game theory'n'stuff)

Thought as a personal gift for close fellows along the way and of course offered to the community here (if ever produced)... but feel free to pick up the idea and make more out of it!

Most USB-Miners have logos on them what makes them kinda eye-catching and even small enough to store in albums with e.g.: ENCAP covers for slabs https://www.leuchtturm.de/kunststoffhuellen-encap.html
Early day FPGA-Miners (like the Ztex) or such small miners as the Gridseed could also relatively easy be transformed into artworks. I mean, they are small artworks... says the guy who has his first CPU framed hanging on a wall.

edit: just more info

[OgNasty]

I’ve got some Block Erupter USB miners collecting dust alongside some Butterfly Labs FPGA miners. I check back every couple of years to see if they’re worth anything to the nostalgic collectors yet. Same goes for my Butterfly Labs coffee cup. Hoping one day someone will offer me 400 BTC for it so I can finally recoup my funds from undelivered Butterfly Labs ASIC miner orders… A guy can dream. LOL

[DaveF]

I’ve got some Block Erupter USB miners collecting dust alongside some Butterfly Labs FPGA miners. I check back every couple of years to see if they’re worth anything to the nostalgic collectors yet. Same goes for my Butterfly Labs coffee cup. Hoping one day someone will offer me 400 BTC for it so I can finally recoup my funds from undelivered Butterfly Labs ASIC miner orders… A guy can dream. LOL

What didn't they deliver? Everything was very late and very under speed and needed more power then advertised but I thought in the end everything was delivered or was paid back by the government when they seized everything.

I stopped paying attention to everything else when I got my monarchs.

-Dave

[BobbyCoins]

Maybe that happened if you were/are a U.S. citizen... but local insurance companies (here in Central Europe) told me in 2014 that legal action against U.S.-companies would be unsuccessful and therefore the insurance companies themselves didn't offer insurance contracts/covering for the region of the USA (if I remind correctly the wording was:'They gone nuts.' So from an EU perspective, the U.S. were practically as uninsurable as North Korea. I don't know if anything has improved since then; I or it changed my business behaviour: buying miners only in person, catching some of the first second-hand miners available on EU mainland like a HashFast BabyJet or even earlier a KnC Jupiter which made me -a very short time- the pool-leader at triplemining.com... which doesn't mean anything but I'v got a screenshot of it^^ firing up the sheer power of 720GH/s in Dec.'13 compared to the 50-60GH/s BFLs available here back then. Far away from something one would call a mining-farm nowadays... more the OG-Mum's&Dad's-Garage-Style^^ so it happened to meet some very active people of that time in the crypto-sphere privately by accident through this 'buying strictly in person not to get scammed anymore'-attitude => the whole crypto-sphere got more tangible for oneself in a surrounding that hasn't gotten Bitcoin a single bit.

BFL is my personal Mt.Gox (you can't be everywhere )... but that didn't change a word in the whitepaper, so it didn't change my attitude towards Bitcoin.

edit: 4 more fun

[Abiky]

there are collectors of them.

I currently have a s1, s3, s5, bfl monarch, knc titan and a couple others that currently elude me as to their names for old miners.


I would like to eventually have the space to have room for more and have them displayed. One of everything is my motto

It was always my dream have my own mining farm full of ASIC hardware that would someday made me filthy rich. But back in my early days in crypto, I was in a very difficult financial situation. Hence, I could only afford the two miners described on the OP.

ButterflyLabs (BFL) used to make great miners back then, but the company turned into a scam. I almost fell for GAW Miners' own ASIC hardware, but I still lost a lot of money investing in the so-called "Hashlets". I can never forget that time where you purchased a "Hashlet" with the hopes of getting "Paycoin" in return. With so many shady mining companies, I decided to only "stick" with my trusted, good-old miners. I'm still considering buying other miners for collection/display purposes, though.

[phantitox]

i still have my Jalapeno on my computer desk, next to my old Mike Casascious coin from 2011, what a golden era of discovery. And btw butterfly maybe finish as scam but sure they make this miners hardcore badass this one still works, connects and mine  there is a quality diff between this and some of the chinese asic of this days.

[OgNasty]

i still have my Jalapeno on my computer desk, next to my old Mike Casascious coin from 2011, what a golden era of discovery. And btw butterfly maybe finish as scam but sure they make this miners hardcore badass this one still works, connects and mine   there is a quality diff between this and some of the chinese asic of this days.

They were making the best miners available back then. A shame that they were run by idiots who couldn’t manage a lemonade stand. If they had a CFO with half a brain they could be the biggest entity in crypto right now. Instead they’re a reminder of how you can’t trust people. Even those with the best tech. They lied, incompetently managed customer funds, and in the end failed to deliver anything to many people. I think they still owe me a few hundred BTC in unsent refunds. The last update I heard on the subject was that they were picking and choosing which accounts to refund, basically paying back their friends and screwing everyone else. The only member of this community that was keeping any heat on them was Bruno, and he’s no longer with us, so it seems likely that the folks who perpetrated this scam walked away with a ton of money and won’t ever be fully held accountable for the damage they caused so many.

[Dockin]

@TheCoinDad on Twitter has created the first bitcoin ASIC museum. He even has the Avalon2, an extremely rare piece that that came out just after the first ASIC miner was delivered to Jeff Garzik. Check out his collection: https://bitcoinminingmuseum.com/

[krogothmanhattan]

@TheCoinDad on Twitter has created the first bitcoin ASIC museum. He even has the Avalon2, an extremely rare piece that that came out just after the first ASIC miner was delivered to Jeff Garzik. Check out his collection: https://bitcoinminingmuseum.com/

  Nice website...thanks! Now I need to see someone create a website museum for all items Bitcoin related...especially physical Bitcoins.

   Thanks for sharing though!

[Dockin]

@TheCoinDad on Twitter has created the first bitcoin ASIC museum. He even has the Avalon2, an extremely rare piece that that came out just after the first ASIC miner was delivered to Jeff Garzik. Check out his collection: https://bitcoinminingmuseum.com/

  Nice website...thanks! Now I need to see someone create a website museum for all items Bitcoin related...especially physical Bitcoins.

   Thanks for sharing though!

I know this isn't quite a bitcoin museum, but I still think somebody might find this interesting; The "Scarce City" marketplace (https://scarce.city/) has physical collectible section that you can find and/or purchase. The search filters can narrow the results down to "Physical" and "Collectible" (https://scarce.city/marketplace/physical?refinementList%5Bcategory%5D%5B0%5D=collectibles).

While there isn't much on there ATM, there are currently a couple physical "Casascius" style loaded coins on there.

Also, if you go to the Scarce City homepage, you can scroll through the "Past Drops" section to find almost 100 different collection categories. For example, 1 of the ~100 collections is called "The Unconfiscatable Collection" which contains 22 items, including Casascius, TGBEX, and BTCC Mint coins (https://scarce.city/collections/unconfiscatable-1).

I also remember seeing many of the old USB miners (Block erupters, Antminer u1, u2 collections ect..). They are still on there somewhere. Search engines will find them.

The site is mostly cluttered with a bunch of pepes and artwork, but there are quite a few really cool/old physical pieces of bitcoin hardware and memorabilia in there if you take some time to rummage through the garbage.

Despite this, I agree that a dedicated/organized/formal physical bitcoin museum website is definitely missing in this space. I think it's probably a matter of time before somebody or some community in this space builds one. Heck if I had the money I would love to build it myself, but Casascius coins are (obviously) expensive!

[Timelord2067]

I've got some old items lying around gathering dust - Not sure if most are working or not.

Given Scrypt was the original format of Bitcoin, are you also considering adding graphics cards which predate anything else?

[NeuroticFish]

Given Scrypt was the original format of Bitcoin

I don't know if it only bad choice of words, but this looks like a mistake / incorrect statement to me. Bitcoin was not Scrypt. Litecoin was.


I've been thinking in the past to acquire an USB miner. At first I wanted it for hobby mining, then as a collectible, now I've given up completely the idea. And this is my answer to OP: I think that they can be seen as collectibles, but only with a limited value which may not grow much over time, unless you know how to monetize them (and open some sort of museum, for example).