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It's been what the young'uns would describe as a hot minute since we've last talked about the cryptocurrency space on this channel in large part

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Because the popularity has died down a ton since it became much less profitable to mine

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but then when Anthony stumbled across the bitmain ant router a

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Coin miner mixed with a Wi-Fi router

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We had to check it out. We just had to know

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Why?

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Why would this exist?

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Why would anybody buy this?

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So crypto mining is pretty much the pits these days

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But if you were to think hard enough, you might remember the golden days back in late 2017 early 2018

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When well actually that really wasn't that long ago

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Anyway, when Bitcoin was worth almost twenty thousand US doll hairs

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And every news outlet in the world was on the benches

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And there was a bandwagon with daily price updates projections and what have you

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Well as it turns out a natural consequence of that kind of hysteria is

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everyone and his or her dog trying to get in on the action and there ended up being a handful of

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Somewhat odd, but then seemingly functional products that were forged at the heart of the hype storm itself

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So one classic example is Carnot's

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QC1 space heater

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It's a mining machine based on their very similar

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QH1 which is an ambient cooled workstation that doubles as a heater when it's under load

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So the QC1 was pretty much the same thing just with a fancy app interface tailored for miners

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it was advertised as a way to subsidize your heating bill by mining cryptocurrency and

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While actually even today that machine probably would still be profitable on top of your electricity costs

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With its dual internal RX 580 8 gig GPUs

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The cost for some reason was thirty five hundred US dollars up front

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For a space heater, that's only effective for rooms between 150 and 300 square feet by comparison a

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100,000 BTU furnace, which is good for about

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2,500 square feet can be had brand new for just shy of seven hundred dollars now obviously that doesn't account for installation costs

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But I think you get the point

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Then there was the Bitmain R4 which was essentially just a cut down Antminer S9

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With a centrifugal fan that was spec'd to reach noise levels of only 52 decibels

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So they advertised it as being home friendly

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I don't know about you guys, but my wife wouldn't let that thing anywhere near our house, and we have a server room

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Bringing us finally to the crazy crypto contraption of

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of today's video

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the Bitmain Ant Router R3 LTC

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A litecoin mining open WRT router that pulls triple duty as a clock

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Not to mention that it kind of looks like a cheap Bluetooth speaker

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So we bought this thing and if you ask Bitmain, they'll say that it's meant to be a portable and ergonomic

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router

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Okay, I guess that so you can carry it with you on the go and have your watch

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Wi-Fi wherever you need as long as you also have an Ethernet cable and access to a power outlet

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Okay, and then as an added bonus you get a chance to win

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25 litecoins every 2.5 minutes

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Which is basically the fundamental principle of mining

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They're describing the chance to mine a block of litecoin every block cycle, which is about 150 seconds

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What they don't mention is that with this amount of computing power?

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Your estimated time to find a block is almost a hundred and four years

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But I mean hey man, it's still a router right? So it's got to be a pretty decent one, right?

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wrong

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So wrong. So the newer model that we have here

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The R3 is built for 802.11 BGN Wi-Fi with a maximum theoretical speed of 300 megabit across

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Only the 2.4 gigahertz band. That's right. It's not

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Even dual band Wi-Fi and then as unimpressive as 300 megabit is in 2018

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It gets even better because the single Ethernet port at the back

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Yes, that means no included switch is only a 100 megabit port

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But then I guess you know when you're carrying around your brick sized mining router to the Starbucks nearby. You're

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Probably not gonna get speeds any faster than that anyway. All right then so to say what we actually

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Think this thing is for I'm gonna need my cynicism hat. I don't have a hat handy Jake

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Find me find me a hat quickly

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because from everything that we've seen so far the only reason that this product could

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Possibly exist is as a way for bitmain to sell off. Thank you

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Extra chip stock as each one of these units has six ASIC chips inside

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so the whole thing where it's masquerading as a

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Portable and ergonomic router. I mean that's just plain ridiculous. Look at it. What the hell are they talking about?

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It would take up half your backpack just for a miniscule chance to mine a litecoin

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wherever you happen to be sitting with both Ethernet and power not to mention that

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The odds are that it would take longer than the amount of time that I still have on this earth

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Another possibility I'll still be needing this hat is that it's just a clever ploy to buff their own

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Ant mining pool as earlier units were actually unable to switch pools

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And this one is still only able to be switched via command line

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something that I doubt most people would do and then making this possibility even more likely is that most people even if they

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did get some money out of the pool probably wouldn't even bother to withdraw the

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$15.00 a year that they'd make based on current estimates further padding bit mains pocket book

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Okay, then so it's not really a mining machine. It's not really a router

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But at least it works as an expensive clock, right?

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Okay, yeah, but the next time I spend $50 on a mining router clock

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I would expect it to at least have alarm clock functionality

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Probably the only saving grace for this thing is that you'll be adding a whole new level of meaning to your Mimi Wi-Fi name

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So thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button

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But if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured

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Don't please don't buy the stuff we featured

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But but but we also have links to our merch store

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You can buy cool stuff in our merch store and you can buy stuff on our community forum

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Wait, you can't buy stuff there, but you can join it. It's cool. There's no loud it is

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What can you imagine having that on your nightstand?

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stupid