Antminer S9 ROI: Bitmain vs Retail over 1, 1.5 & 2 yrsThis is in addition to my previous chart on miner roi for different Antminer models. The S9 is the only model making a profit now and is the only sha256 miner currently used by Bitmain according to news articles. My previous chart only looked at ROI for retail miners. Here I show estimates for Bitmain (area plots) itself who pay less for their mining equipment than their customers. I also compare with retail miners (lines). The three lines/areas represent three different amortization periods for mining equipment: over 1 year (green), 1.5 years (blue) or 2 years (purple). The longer the period over which you spread your costs the less dependent you are on BTC price so long as your miner does not become obsolete before the write off period ends. previously I only considered a 1 year write off period.
Lastly after some research I determine the average lifespan of a miner is just 1 to 2 years (www.cell.com(18)30177-6).
Area plot: Bitmain
Line: retail
Elec: 0.06 USD/kWh
Model: Antminer S9
Hrate: 13.5 TH/s
Unit cost: USD 500 (Bitmain), USD 900 (retail)
Operating time: 24 hrs/day, 365 days/year
see: medium.com
see: www.cell.com(18)30177-6
Antminer
BITMAIN: Antminer S-series Return on Investment (Bitcoin)Chart shows the return on investment of Antminer S-series miners:
S1 (yellow): approx released July 2013, power consumption 2 kW/TH/s
S3 (purple): approx released June 2014, power consumption 0.71 kW/TH/s
S5 (orange): approx released December 2014, power consumption 0.51 kW/TH/s
S7 (green): approx released Aug 2015, power consumption 25 kW/TH/s
S9 (blue): approx released July 2016, power consumption 0.1 kW/TH/s
Red curve is network hash rate (proportional to difficulty).
Chart of mining efficiency (TH/s/kW): drive.google.com (blue is actual trend, red is projected continuation of pre-S9 trend)
Bitmain has not publicly released any significant efficiency upgrades since July 2016. Innovation at the mining sector's biggest player seems to have stalled. If the exponential trend had continued we should have reached >40 TH/s/kW by Jan 2018, instead we are at 2016 levels. This is either because Bitmain cannot make more efficient ASICS or because they are keeping secret any innovations they have made.
Looking at the return on investment (ROI) chart. The white horizontal line is the breakeven line. Anything above is profit. The vertical lines are release dates of the various S-model miners. We see that a new miner is released to the public just when the previous model becomes obsolete. Normally there is a lead time before delivery of several months. Bitmain have not made any announcements regarding an S11.
Despite all of this the hash rate is increasing unabated. Have Bitmain been secretly mining with new hardware or have they simply been bringing more S9s online? If they have an S11 why aren't they releasing it?
Further reading
Bitmain now mines 42 % of the entire network bitcoinist.com
June 8 interview with the Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu fortune.com
This is where I explain how to calculate the conversion factor medium.com
