No fear of Dragonmint T1 challenge Bitmain S9 Antminer is still the mainstream

Recently, Halong Ming, a rising star in the mining equipment manufacturing industry, announced that it has completed the delivery of the first batch of its Dragonmint T1 mining machines, which can generate 16 terahash per second of computing power, but the effect does not seem to be what they advertised last year - at that time, they said that compared with Bitmain S9 Antminer, the mining efficiency of Dragonmint mining machines will be increased by 30%.

This week, YouTube user "Miner Digi" released a video demonstration of the Halong miner. After connecting to a Myrig 1600-watt PSU, the Dragonmint T1 reached a mining power of 16 TerraHash per second on the Slush Pool mining pool. According to the demonstration video, this miner can maintain a computing power of 15.5-15.9 TerraHash/s for a long time. In addition, the Dragonmint T1 miner in the video is roughly the same size as Bitmain's S9 Antminer, but compared with the S9 miner, the Dragonmint T1 miner is noisier.

The computing power of Bitmain S9 Antminer is basically between 13.2-14 TerraHash/s, which is slightly inferior to the Dragonmint T1 miner in terms of performance. However, the price of a single S9 Antminer is $1,288, while the wholesale price of Dragonmint T1 is $1,595, and at least five units need to be ordered to enjoy this price. Although Dragonmint T1 also allows single-machine retail, it was quickly sold out on its website, and the website has been showing "out of stock". In other words, although Halong Ming's mining machine is 1.5-2.5TH/s faster than Bitmain S9 Antminer, its price is $300 higher. Not only that, from the perspective of mining efficiency, the situation does not seem to be 30% higher than Halong Ming's previous statement.

For example, another review of the Dragonmint T1 showed that while it was slightly more efficient than the S9, it wasn’t much. Especially when it comes to price/performance, the performance specs of the two miners don’t look that different. Even though the T1 is using ASIC Boost and claims to be deploying 10nm chips from Samsung, it doesn’t seem to be significantly more efficient. At least for now, calling the Bitmain S9 Antminer obsolete is ridiculous.