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
Because the popularity has died down a ton since it became much less profitable to mine
but then when Anthony stumbled across the bitmain ant router a
Coin miner mixed with a Wi-Fi router
We had to check it out. We just had to know
Why?
Why would this exist?
Why would anybody buy this?
So crypto mining is pretty much the pits these days
But if you were to think hard enough, you might remember the golden days back in late 2017 early 2018
When well actually that really wasn't that long ago
Anyway, when Bitcoin was worth almost twenty thousand US doll hairs
And every news outlet in the world was on the benches
And there was a bandwagon with daily price updates projections and what have you
Well as it turns out a natural consequence of that kind of hysteria is
everyone and his or her dog trying to get in on the action and there ended up being a handful of
Somewhat odd, but then seemingly functional products that were forged at the heart of the hype storm itself
So one classic example is Carnot's
QC1 space heater
It's a mining machine based on their very similar
QH1 which is an ambient cooled workstation that doubles as a heater when it's under load
So the QC1 was pretty much the same thing just with a fancy app interface tailored for miners
it was advertised as a way to subsidize your heating bill by mining cryptocurrency and
While actually even today that machine probably would still be profitable on top of your electricity costs
With its dual internal RX 580 8 gig GPUs
The cost for some reason was thirty five hundred US dollars up front
For a space heater, that's only effective for rooms between 150 and 300 square feet by comparison a
100,000 BTU furnace, which is good for about
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
But I think you get the point
Then there was the Bitmain R4 which was essentially just a cut down Antminer S9
With a centrifugal fan that was spec'd to reach noise levels of only 52 decibels
So they advertised it as being home friendly
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
Bringing us finally to the crazy crypto contraption of
of today's video
the Bitmain Ant Router R3 LTC
A litecoin mining open WRT router that pulls triple duty as a clock
Not to mention that it kind of looks like a cheap Bluetooth speaker
So we bought this thing and if you ask Bitmain, they'll say that it's meant to be a portable and ergonomic
router
Okay, I guess that so you can carry it with you on the go and have your watch
Wi-Fi wherever you need as long as you also have an Ethernet cable and access to a power outlet
Okay, and then as an added bonus you get a chance to win
25 litecoins every 2.5 minutes
Which is basically the fundamental principle of mining
They're describing the chance to mine a block of litecoin every block cycle, which is about 150 seconds
What they don't mention is that with this amount of computing power?
Your estimated time to find a block is almost a hundred and four years
But I mean hey man, it's still a router right? So it's got to be a pretty decent one, right?
wrong
So wrong. So the newer model that we have here
The R3 is built for 802.11 BGN Wi-Fi with a maximum theoretical speed of 300 megabit across
Only the 2.4 gigahertz band. That's right. It's not
Even dual band Wi-Fi and then as unimpressive as 300 megabit is in 2018
It gets even better because the single Ethernet port at the back
Yes, that means no included switch is only a 100 megabit port
But then I guess you know when you're carrying around your brick sized mining router to the Starbucks nearby. You're
Probably not gonna get speeds any faster than that anyway. All right then so to say what we actually
Think this thing is for I'm gonna need my cynicism hat. I don't have a hat handy Jake
Find me find me a hat quickly
because from everything that we've seen so far the only reason that this product could
Possibly exist is as a way for bitmain to sell off. Thank you
Extra chip stock as each one of these units has six ASIC chips inside
so the whole thing where it's masquerading as a
Portable and ergonomic router. I mean that's just plain ridiculous. Look at it. What the hell are they talking about?
It would take up half your backpack just for a miniscule chance to mine a litecoin
wherever you happen to be sitting with both Ethernet and power not to mention that
The odds are that it would take longer than the amount of time that I still have on this earth
Another possibility I'll still be needing this hat is that it's just a clever ploy to buff their own
Ant mining pool as earlier units were actually unable to switch pools
And this one is still only able to be switched via command line
something that I doubt most people would do and then making this possibility even more likely is that most people even if they
did get some money out of the pool probably wouldn't even bother to withdraw the
$15.00 a year that they'd make based on current estimates further padding bit mains pocket book
Okay, then so it's not really a mining machine. It's not really a router
But at least it works as an expensive clock, right?
Okay, yeah, but the next time I spend $50 on a mining router clock
I would expect it to at least have alarm clock functionality
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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Don't please don't buy the stuff we featured
But but but we also have links to our merch store
You can buy cool stuff in our merch store and you can buy stuff on our community forum
Wait, you can't buy stuff there, but you can join it. It's cool. There's no loud it is
What can you imagine having that on your nightstand?
stupid