Is the Antminer L3+ a Buy or Not ? Want to Start Litecoin Mining ?

Hi Crypto Lovers,

there are rumours around that litecoin mining is and will be super profitable now and in the future cause of it's possibilities to gain in price due to segwit activation and new coming technologies like lightning network.

First of all a Mining operation is always risky and you should be careful:

There are 2 major factors that a mining operation will be a success:

1.) The difficulty should not explode
2.) The value of the mined currency should stay stable or even increase

So I want to share some information and calculation to help you to find an answer maybe to get into mining or not.

First let's demonstrate the beauty beast - the new Antminer L3+ 504 MH/s super efficient energy consumption:

Power Consumption is around 800 Watt that means 1,6 Watt per MH.

Let's see a Litecoin difficulty chart:

There were some heavy increases in the difficulty cause of the massive hashrate increase in the litecoin network over the last weeks.

See the details:

That was heavy the last 14 days. But now do the math.

There are different Mining Calculators online mostly demonstrated by some Genesis 3% Code Hunters to show you unbelieveable profitable pool mining is. But Let's do the math for our own equipment with electricity cost:

Let's use one of these calculators and say we setup one Antminer L3+ with 504 MH/s:

Now a lot of people get greedy and forget one thing these online calculators mostly miss out, too. The Difficulty Increase.
Let's do the math with a difficulty increase of 15% per Month:

As you can see the hashpower you own will loose in value really fast.

Let's to a calculation for the scenario with a 15% difficulty increase per month and a stable Litecoin price at 20 USD over the whole period (which is unlikely I know):

As you can see after 14 Month u will be forced to shut down the machine due to the high electricity cost. The question that stays open Is is there enough income in the first 14 Month to ROI the Hardware Invest ?

The New Antminer L3+ incl. Power Supply Unit Costs Around 2200 USD (Last price I got based on a quotation request by an european reseller).

Let do the sum of the first 14 month:

As you can see based on this calculation you will be in profit but it's not even close to that results of the online mining calculators. So be careful consider the network could grow really fast cause it's not that mature like the bitcoin network is already with 4 Exahashes.

If you want to take the risk you can gain really good. But be careful and think about the high energy and rising difficulty.

If you have any questions concerning mining or pool mining (i have interests in that one, too) just let me know. If I don't find an answer I am quite sure I can direct you to someone you can give us the answer.

Thanks for reading this article

Sascha