Bitcoin mining machine selection criteria that even novices can understand

Today, a single Bitcoin is worth $7,149. Have you ever thought about mining it yourself?

Mining does not require a high technical threshold, but you also need to understand some basic knowledge of mining machines. Below I will introduce to you the relevant content and some precautions for purchasing mining machines.

Why do Bitcoin mining require ASIC miners?

When Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin, he hoped that people would use their home computers to mine and use the CPU's computing power to collide hash values ​​to obtain Bitcoin. Later, people discovered that Bitcoin mining only performs SHA256 calculations, and CPU floating-point operations and other functions are completely unavailable. Large-scale mining is not cost-effective from a cost perspective.

In order to improve image processing capabilities, graphics cards have cut off a lot of useless computing functions, which is similar to the computing method required by Bitcoin. However, despite this, graphics cards still have a lot of computing power that is idle when mining, so ASIC mining machines came into being.

ASIC mining machine is a computer that is specially designed to execute mining programs. It can do nothing but mining. After sacrificing general computing power, the mining capacity and efficiency of ASIC are greatly improved.

For example, the current mainstream Antminer S9 uses 189 ASIC chips, has a computing power of 13.5TH/s, and the price of the whole machine is only 14,000 yuan, with a power consumption of 1350W. In comparison, the current flagship computer graphics card NVIDIA GTX1080Ti is priced at 6,000 yuan per card, with a power consumption of more than 300W, but the mining power will basically not exceed 60MH/s, which is hundreds of thousands times lower than the computing power of the Antminer S9.

Therefore, if you want to mine Bitcoin, you can only use ASIC mining machines.

We need to understand the following concepts before purchasing a Bitcoin ASIC mining machine:

1. Computing power. The computing power of a Bitcoin mining machine represents the rate at which Bitcoin is obtained. For example, the current computing power of the entire network is 32.54EH/s, and 1,900 Bitcoins are produced in 24 hours. Then a mining machine with a computing power of 4T can theoretically produce about 0.0002 Bitcoins per day, which is about 10 yuan.

2. Power. Power represents the power consumption rate of a Bitcoin mining machine. A 1000W mining machine consumes 24 degrees of power in 24 hours.

3. Cost. In terms of electricity consumption, ordinary household power is about 0.5 yuan/1 kWh. A mining machine that consumes 24 kWh of electricity per day has an electricity cost of 12 yuan. In terms of network, mining machines do not have high requirements for the network. 1M bandwidth can support 150 mining machines, and the cost is almost negligible.

4. Payback period (theoretical). Payback period = (daily income - electricity cost) / mining machine price. Payback period is only a theoretical calculation of the number of days. The Bitcoin market changes every day, the computing power difficulty is also increasing, plus the mining pool commission and transaction commission, so it is difficult to calculate the exact payback period time.

When we plan to buy a Bitcoin mining machine, the most important thing to consider is the price per terabyte of computing power and the ratio of computing power to power consumption. The higher the computing power, the higher the profit. However, if the price per terabyte of computing power is too high and the payback period is too long, the risk will increase. On the other hand, a mining machine is composed of dozens or even hundreds of ASIC chips, and the computing power can be increased without a limit, but high computing power also means high power consumption, and power consumption will also increase.

Note:

1. Do not buy mining machines with too high hashrate. The current ASIC chip technology is not much different. Too high hashrate means that there are too many ASIC chips in a single mining machine, and the structure inside the mining machine is too complicated, making it inconvenient to repair.

2. Don’t be too idealistic about the payback period. Power failure, network failure, and mining machine failure during operation will affect the final profit.