The $12k Monero ASIC Miner
Yesterday, Bitmain announced a new ASIC miner for the Cryptonight algorithm. The miner specs are as followed:
Hashing algorithm: CryptoNight
Power consumption: 550W
Hashrate: 220KH/s
Now this miner will be able to mine coins like Monero, Sumo, and Electroneum that all use the cryptonight algorithm. There have been rumors for the last month about an ASIC miner coming out soon or that one has been mining for a while now.So is $12,000 worth it for this miner?
An RX580 AMD GPU gets around 680 H/s on the CryptoNight algo. The ASIC miner will get a hash rate equal to 318 RX 580 Graphics cards. The RX 580's would be using 36,6666 W's versus the ASIC miner's 550W. That is a huge difference! If you were to buy 318 RX Graphics cards you would be looking at around $133,000 just for the mining cards and you would need all of that space for the mining racks. It would take 678 days to pay that back at current rates of returns. You need to account for difficultly changes so your profit will decrease over a 678 day period. This number does not include the motherboards, RAM, hard drives, power supplies, and other GPU mining components. You can read more about how to build a GPU mining Rig here.
With the CryptoNight ASIC miner you could be making $196.20 a day from mining nicehash on the current date 3/16. It would only 61 days to pay back at the current rates of return. The first shipments will not go out until May and then again in July. Difficultly on CryptoNight Algos will go up in from 3/16 to then. So overall profit will go down. I do not except the $196.20 a day to last for much longer.
You also need to see this tweet from FluffyPony the lead Developer of Monero.
https://twitter.com/fluffypony/status/974182821437825024
Monero will be hard forking their code soon to prevent ASIC miners from mining their chain. This means that Monero will be ASIC resistant and this $12,000 miner will not work to mine Monero. No one will spend the resources to develop a public miner for Monero because the code will be changed and the ASIC will be useless for their algo. In the future, I see Bitmain keeping their ASIC miners private for Monero and keeping it a secret to dominate the Monero mining until the code is hard forked and the miners are made useless. Then the processes of development restarts and new ASIC miners are made secretly.
Also with the hard fork of Monero It will also be interesting to see how many botnets no longer work mining Monero due to the change of code. If you don't know a botnet is a group of computers that are maliciously controlled to perform tasks. A trend has been lately to create and spread a botnet with Cryptonight mining software pointed to the hacker's wallet. The hacker then get rewarded while all of the infected computers mine to his wallet.
What does all of this means?
A $12,000 CryptoNight miner is profitable in 66 days at the current rate. The rate will change depending on hard forks, prices, and difficulty. You need to keep your time horizon's long and check your profitability for the long haul. The key question is for how long? Developers will fork their code if they want to keep it ASIC resistant and Bitmain will keep their ASIC miners private to avoid others forking their code. It is a risky endeavor to buy a miner. It may pay off it may not.
If you think you can find an CryptoNight coin to mine other than Monero and think the Dev's for that coin will not change their code to ASIC resistant that It may be something worth considering.
Please as always Do Your Own Research.
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.