Dear Steemit Friends,
Mining has been a steady form of incremental cash flow for me over the past few years. I use it to supplement my income and pay for a lot of the extracurricular activities and now projects that I have going on to support various communities here on Steemit. As you can see from some of my previous unboxing and review posts, I generally participate in purchasing batch one of new ASIC releases from Bitmain when new technology is announced.
If you have been keeping up with the news from Bitmain, you will have gotten the announcement for the release of their new miner - the Antminer X3 (announced and released in batches starting on March 15). When I got the Tweet, I do what I usually do and drop everything to log in to the site so I can place an order - generally, new hardware sells out blazingly fast, and it is first-come-first-serve. Lately when dealing with Bitmain hardware, if don't get into the first shipment of new hardware, you stand the chance of not making your money back let alone a decent profit from mining and then reselling the unit.
I was all ready to buy the new miner up until the page loaded up. The first thing that catches your eye is the blazing red price tag on the miner - $11,999 USD. At first, I thought they were requiring a bulk order of the miner which made the price tag so high. Nope - this was the price for just one miner!
Let's look at the specs:
As you can see from above, there isn't much information on the miner. To top it off, this is a pre-order of the unit for a May shipment. The miner specializes in mining the CryptoNight algo, which for those of you who are not aware, means it mines cryptocurrencies such as Monero, Electroneum, Bytecoin, and a number of other lesser-known currencies shown below.
Monero, being the most popular of the CryptoNight coins is what most people who purchase this miner will mine.
With the high price tag this miner carries, it may be the first miner that I may not purchase. Especially with the recent history of Bitmain rushing ASICs out on the market which have had very short lifespans in terms of profit and earnings. I'm sure, however, that there are enough people out there who are willing to risk that amount of cash to pick up one of these - I'm just not sure I will be one of them. My curiosity, however, is peaked.
What do the earnings look like
Aside from being first to order, I consider the potential earnings when buying an Asic. I trust in blockchain technology and crytpocurrencies and feel that the overall value will once again moon, however, my nature is to take calculated risks that are within reason. Looking at the profits for Monero - like most Antminer ASICs before this one - they look good.
Using the projected specs from Bitmain and considering the expectations that performance will be greater then what they have quoted, I stand to ROI in roughly 2 months. Bitmain expects that the hashrate will far outperform what they have specified for the miner, which means I could potentially ROI even sooner.
Here is where I am more critical - especially with their recent ASIC releases. I look at weekly earning and consider the monthly earnings. With Bitmain's track recent track record, you have about 1 month to ROI and generate a profit. Anything outside of 1-month is a potential risk when it comes to mining due to the sheer amount of miners they ship out. Once those miners hit the network, generally earnings are cut in half. Earnings continue to dramatically drop as they ship more and more batches of ASICs out. Because this miner fails to ROI within the first month according to coinwarz, my fear is that I'm just going to be throwing roughly $2,500 - $5,000 USD away. Afterall, like most people - part of the reason why I'm into mining is the potential for making money.
Other Considerations
The one reason why I would buy this miner is for the fact that it mines Monero, which has a long-running history of being a solid currency. Monero has a pretty good support community behind it and a dedicated development team. I trust that it is one of the more stable currencies with a solid future.
Unlike many cryptocurrencies that are derivatives of Bitcoin, Monero is based on the CryptoNight proof-of-work hash algorithm, which comes from the CryptoNote protocol. It possesses significant algorithmic differences relating to blockchain obfuscation. By providing a high level of privacy, Monero is fungible, meaning that every unit of the currency can be substituted by another unit. This makes Monero different from public-ledger cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, where addresses with coins previously associated with undesired activity can be blacklisted and have their coins refused by other users. [Source].
What is concerning and something that all buyers should consider is the potential forks of Monero that are done to fight off ASIC mining - which could and probably will potentially make this miner useless shortly after it ships. Unlike mining with GPUs, updating the ASIC to adapt to the forks are not as easy and very unlikely causing this to be a major risk. Sure, you can always mine other CryptoNight currencies, but even some of them are proposing forks to fight off the use of ASICs to mine, leaving miners with very little and less profitable options.
Another factor to consider is that other competitors have released their own ASICs which will also impact the overall hashrate and earnings reducing the ROI and profitability window for these miners. Baikal Miner actually beat Bitmain to market this round and announced their miners a few days earlier.
It is assumed (and probably true) that some of these ASIC manufacturers including Bitmain have had these miners for a while now and have been mining Monero and other CryptoNight currencies and have just now decided to start releasing them to market due to the potential hardforks in an effort to unload the soon to be useless hardware. Bitmain's release was potentially a reaction to Baikal's release of their miner in order to sell off their reserves and/or generate income for future R&D given the "conservative" hashrate estimates provided for their miner.
Cryptocurrency mining and ASIC manufacturing is a cut-throat business. First in and first out is the only real way to make a profit nowadays when it comes to the latest ASIC releases and even then it is not a guarantee. I will still try and secure a unit to unbox and review, but when it comes to buying one of these Antminer X3s for myself, I am probably going to pass on this round. My neighbor has purchased a few of these so I will probably unbox, review, and share my thoughts using one of his units.
If you are interested to see that update, stay tuned! Go ahead and follow me and check back as I expect to have an unboxing and review in the May timeframe when the ASICs are delivered.
Let me know what your thoughts are about this miner in the comments section below. Would you buy one? Should I have bought one? If you do have any questions, inputs, or feedback, please also share those with me. I would also appreciate support in the form of Upvoting and Re-steeming my post if you found it informative.
