so while it used to be possible to mine
for bitcoins on your old laptop
due to the constantly increasing difficulty it's no longer practical on
mortal computers not even with multiple high performance graphics cards
so then how do you do it allow me to introduce
the bitmain antminer s9
a bare bones computer of sorts except it has no
display output no way to plug in a keyboard and it only does one thing mine
sha-256 cryptocurrencies like bitcoin
oh and we've actually also got an l3
plus you want to open that one up Jake which does script coins like litecoin
and a d3 which mines x11 cryptocurrencies like dash
so the goal today is to find out if these things
are worth it and no austin that is not trademarked i
can say it
so if you've seen part two of mining adventure already you should have a
pretty good idea of what a fairly efficient GPU mining setup looks like
but even that is nothing compared to an
asic miner for example the Radeon hd
7970 was released in 2012 and mined
bitcoin at an efficiency of about 4 mega hash per watt so ignoring the few
companies that never really shipped an end user product in late 2012 avalon
released the avalon 1 an asic miner that
did an at the time astonishing
165 mega hash per watt a huge bump over
GPU mining so how could they possibly achieve this
well graphics cards and cpus are designed to
be able to process a huge range of
different calculations which is what makes them incredibly useful in our
everyday devices this versatility is great
but it limits their ability to do one thing
really really fast so application
specific integrated circuits or asics
these are as the name implies designed
and purpose built to do just
one thing and while that might not make sense for your gaming rig for a bitcoin
miner that only needs to run one specific formula it is a godsend
at least for the people who own them because of the nature of
cryptocurrencies the increase in overall
hashing power in the network that's caused by a massive influx of
specialized mining hardware is a big part of what made bitcoin's difficulty
go up even further and i mean way up so when the
avalon one came out bitcoin difficulty was at around 3 million by the same time
the following year it was 600 million so if you fast forward to
2017 there are a bunch of players in the asic
market including bitmain whose hardware we have with us today inno silicon and
by call thanks to whom bitcoin difficulty has reached a whopping 2
trillion so all the folks out there running gpus for mining
those guys are focused on alt coins like what we showed in part two so options
like monero z cash and ethereum are all
popular at this time by the way huge shout out to marshall at
ogbtc on twitter and francisco over at
byvm.net who helped hook us up with the antminer s9 the l3 plus and the d3 that
we're taking a look at today so let's crack the d3 open here not so much for
the warranty sticker we'll just uh put that
right there i mean what else would we do with a multi thousand dollar specialized
computer that's out of stock quite literally everywhere um i mean as a
general rule machines that does this not slide out ah it was the wrong way dang
it i called it hold on i'll just go you know we have
pokey with this there you go as a general rule machines that
essentially print money are in pretty high demand so unless you've got friends
in high or low places they're mostly obtained by
pre-order and the problem with that is that the wait lists can be as long as several
months meaning that by the time they arrive they might not even be profitable
anymore and that's a really relevant point here because this d3 miner now
makes barely five to ten dollars a day
before electricity costs while drawing a
massive 1200 watts from the wall by
default when these things were announced people were buying them left and right with
dreams of making their money back in a week and then it's just pure profit from
there on they definitely didn't learn from the
effects of early asic miners on the bitcoin difficulty curve which naturally
went way up so now that it's open then let's let's
have a look at what's actually going on here so the d3 unit has three of these
hashing boards each containing
uh hold on so 50
and i guess it would probably be the same on the other no it's just one side it is just one second oh wow so you
think that's both sides from both sides wow cool
so sorry yeah 50 asics they're held in
place by an aluminum case then which doubles as sort of a wind tunnel with
these high airflow fans on either side so most of the mass of this thing is
actually just the glued on heatsinks for each chip so
if we just plug back in the hashing boards to the
controller here
being very careful of course don't worry i got this
and then connect this wiring to our controller here which by the way see
this guy right here is a mini Linux computer
and then we wire up a power supply we got one yeah here we go here's a power
supply we should be pretty much ready to mine right i think so
i mean we should probably put this cover back yeah yeah okay maybe finish pouring
these back in yeah we'll be back in a minute
okay i know you really like dropping things but it'd be good
if you didn't drop them i'm not gonna drop them i don't trust you
so you can actually use a regular computer power supply
but with how short the supply of those is these days
in many cases people end up using
these mining specific ones so the only real
difference is just that it only outputs 12 volt and then it just has a whack ton
of 6 pin pci express connectors also because it's not designed for
consumer use the word on the street there
is that they are pretty loud
so you need a network connection because your miner
needs to be able to find and submit
any work that it needs to do okay here we go
that would sound too bad that's not too bad that's fine yeah
just give it a second don't be fooled my friend it gets worse
much much worse oh
oh oh such a great noise
so um here just like with uh blowing matron from
one of our recent videos i wouldn't recommend getting any
bananas or fingers anywhere near these things
so at this point with all three of them plugged in
updated and mining at current profitability levels
we can see the s9 making about 33 bucks a day the l3 plus
about 50 in a day and the d3 well the
efficiency is pretty poor as we noted earlier at about nine dollars a day so
we're gonna come back in a week and see what we've been able to mine
okay so we're back again it's been about 16
days since we installed the asics in the
the empty not to mention not heated room over here
and we're actually are you pulling up the pool statistics now
okay cool our s9 has been mining a fork
of bitcoin known as bitcoin cash and has
been earning actually over our estimated amount about 30 to 46
per day after our power is accounted for during
this period so if profit were to maintain like this
we'll be able to pay back the s9 at 2500
in about two and a half months not too shabby
with that said if you were looking to pick one up for yourself bit main isn't
even accepting pre-orders as of when we were filming this and we've been seeing
them priced at over 5000 us dollars on
the second hand market the l3 plus averaged about 13 a day
after power giving us around an eight-month roi time
definitely worse than the former even if you are overpaying leaving us with the
d3 which Jake actually found a custom
firmware that allows it to draw 900 watts instead of the stock 1200 watts at
about the same hash rate so we've been earning an average of seven dollars a
day after power giving us an roi time of just over seven months that's actually
better than the l3 plus since it costs less though
i wouldn't recommend picking up a ton of d3s since x11 miners are nowhere near as
far into their development as bitcoin and litecoin a6 and as such are likely
to see big improvements in efficiency as time goes on driving up the difficulty
curve so then in a nutshell
at the right pricing an asic miner takes up less space and can yield better roi
time with less software hassle and no
construction time compared to GPU mining
but it comes with higher risk worst case scenario gpus can be resold
for some fraction of what you paid but since an asic miner has no value outside
of mining the specific cryptocurrencies it's optimized for when the
profitability is gone it just becomes an expensive paperweight
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