How to Choose Crypto Mining Equipment in 2024
“Buy low, sell high” is possibly the most famous adage about making money in the stock market. The same phrase has turned into a meme among cryptocurrency traders. With ASIC prices at historic lows, is now seems like the right time to invest in Bitcoin mining equipment. But what factors should you consider when choosing mining equipment?
This article will cover the important elements you need to take into consideration when purchasing mining equipment. We’ll explore the different factors that will determine profitability and delve into the various ASIC Bitcoin miner manufacturers.
Crucial Elements in Selecting Mining Equipment
When purchasing an ASIC mining machine, it’s crucial to consider the following key elements:
- Hashrate Output (TH/s)
- Power (W)
- Efficiency (J/TH)
- Cost of the Miner ($/TH)
- Lead Time
- Spot vs Future Orders
- Condition and Warranty
Hashrate Output (TH/s)
The computational power, or hashrate, is typically the primary specification to consider. Hashes per second (H/s) denote the speed at which an ASIC completes operations. ‘T’ represents ‘Tera,’ which stands for one trillion. For instance, 1 Tera Hash per second (TH/s) equals 1,000,000,000,000 hashes per second. TH/s serves as the unit of account for ASICs. Higher TH/s indicates greater computational power and potentially higher revenue.
Power (W)
The power is measured in watts (W) and dictates your electricity costs. Lower power consumption is preferable, as it results in reduced electricity bills and greater profitability. Among two devices producing the same TH/s, the one with lower electricity usage is more profitable.
Efficiency (J/TH)
Bitcoin miner manufacturers and resellers measure efficiency using J/TH. Joules (J) measure the total energy consumed. Lower efficiency or J/TH is desirable. Newer models are often more efficient. For example, the popular Bitmain S19J Pro boasts an efficiency of 30.5 J/TH, while the latest air-cooled model, the S21, operates at 17.5 J/TH.
Cost ($/TH)
ASIC miners are not only sold at a fixed total cost but are also priced in $/TH. Some models offer various hashrate outputs, such as the S19J Pro with 96, 100, 104, and 110 TH/s variations. Batches of a single model may contain machines with differing hashrates. Hence, resellers and distributors often prefer indicating costs in $/TH. The ASIC Price Index, a benchmark reflecting the current prices of different Bitcoin mining ASICs grouped by four efficiency tiers, also employs $/TH.
Lead Time
The lead time is the duration between placing an order and the delivery or deployment of the machine. Most machines are produced in Asia and need to be shipped to foreign markets, which takes time. The longer the wait, the higher the opportunity costs because you are not mining. This is why some miners prefer to pay more for a machine that is already in the country, at a facility, or even on the rack hashing.
Spot vs. Future Orders
Production takes time. It often happens that existing models or new releases are not readily available on the spot market. Miners can place future orders to ensure their fleet for an upcoming period. Ordering future batches allows miners to negotiate a better price as it will guarantee manufacturers the offtake of their future production. The disadvantage of future orders is that certain manufacturers are infamous for their production delays.
Condition & Warranty
Alongside new mining machines, there is also a thriving market for used ASICs. When considering buying a used miner, it is wise to ask for a hash report that includes data on power usage and how many TH/s the miner runs at. This is important because machines might have malfunctions like failing fans, chips, or even a dead hashboard, which can result in poorer performance than the same model that is new.
New units from most manufacturers come with a 12-month warranty. If a used unit is older than 12 months, this warranty does not apply anymore. The warranty is also voided as soon as you tamper with the machine, for example, by changing firmware or replacing parts like the control board.
Is Bitcoin Mining a Good Investment?
Profitability
To determine if mining makes sense for you, it is important to analyse profitability. This involves not only revenue and initial investment but also operational costs. Operational costs (OPEX) consist of various elements such as electricity, maintenance, repairs, security, etc. When using a hosting service, these costs are often included in a hosting service fee. You can use proprietary data sheets to calculate profitability or utilize one of the online Bitcoin mining profitability calculators available.
Return On Investment (ROI)
In addition to determining profitability, it’s beneficial to compare Return On Investment (ROI) in days between machines. Depending on the initial investment and operational costs, a less efficient machine might pay itself off faster due to a lower purchase cost. However, more efficient machines protect a miner better from potential Bitcoin price decline, rapid difficulty increases and halving events.
Uptime
Mining equipment generates revenue only when online, making uptime a crucial indicator for performance in Bitcoin mining. The industry standard for operational uptime is 95%. Sometimes, a lower uptime might be worth considering if operational costs are lower. Participating in demand response programs might result in a lower electricity price or credits.
Uptime on an ASIC level is heavily influenced by the failure rate of mining equipment. ASIC miners are often exposed to harsh environments and high temperatures. Implementing cleaning and preventive maintenance schedules will minimize failures. However, it’s common for miners to break down after running for a while. Rapid repair capability is essential to maximize uptime. Having an in-house repair team and spare parts on-site reduces the time needed for repairs. In some cases, it makes sense to repair a miner on-site despite having a warranty. Shipping machines to a certified repair shop can increase the offline time of the ASIC.
Mining Equipment Manufactures
The Top 3 ASIC Bitcoin Miner Producers
There are various ASIC manufacturers to choose from. Bitmain (Antminer) dominates with a 74.34% market share, followed by MicroBT (Whatsminer) with 17.98%. Canaan (Avalon) is the third largest and the only manufacturer that is publicly listed. All these companies originated in China and produce in various Asian countries. Additionally, MicroBT also assembles in the US.
Throughout 2023, the top 3 ASIC manufacturers (Bitmain, MicroBT, and Canaan) all launched new models. In addition to air-cooled ASICs, Bitmain and MicroBT both released hydro-cooled models. The MicroBT 50 & 60 series, and the Canaan 14 series also include dedicated immersion miners.
Sub 20 J/TH Bitcoin Miners
In September 2023, Bitmain announced the launch of the S21 series, set to hit the market in early 2024. The air-cooled version of the Antminer S21 boasts an efficiency of 17 J/TH, while the hydro-cooled S21 Hyd achieves an impressive 16 J/TH. Following the S21, Bitmain also unveiled the T21 series. The T21 offers the flexibility to switch between Normal Energy Mode (NEM) and High Energy Mode (HEM). In NEM, it reaches 190 TH/s at 19 J/TH, while in HEM, it achieves 233 TH/s with an efficiency of 22 J/TH.
The Whatsminer M60 series is available in air-cooled, hydro-cooled, and immersion-cooling versions. The S series boasts an efficiency of 18.5 J/TH, while the non-S series achieves just under 20 J/TH. The M66S immersion-cooled miner can even reach an efficiency of 17 J/TH when operated in low power mode. Canaan introduced the Avalon A14 series. The A1446I immersion-cooled miner runs at 170 TH/s with a power consumption of 3320W, resulting in an efficiency of 19.5 J/TH.
Other Bitcoin ASIC Miner Manufacturers
In addition to the top three manufacturers, there are also smaller players in the ASIC miner market, such as Auradine, DesiweMiner, Ebang, ePIC, StrongU, iPollo, and Goldshell. These manufacturers often try to differentiate themselves from the top players by offering unique features. Here are some examples:
- ePIC Blockchain offers ASICs designed in North America. Their machines are air-cooled but immersion-ready and utilize a Universal Mining Control (UMC) board & firmware, allowing for dynamic tuning.
- DesiweMiner stands out with two notable features. Firstly, their smart boost machines automatically overclock. Secondly, the control board includes a display showing information such as the IP address, power usage, hashrate, and efficiency.
- Auradine, a Silicon Valley-based company, produces the TeraFlux miners which feature EnergyTune. This program allows for quick power adjustments without system rebooting. Both power and hashrate can be adjusted to the desired target, with the system automatically tuning accordingly.
More About Choosing a Bitcoin Asic Miner
Types of Miners
Crypto mining equipment comes in different types. However, the equipment’s hashing power, energy consumption, and mining rewards are what matters for mining profitability. Investors strive to balance miner cost, hash rate, power consumption, durability, and overall cost-effectiveness. Typically, a miner can be a CPU, GPU, ASIC, or FPGA.
CPU Mining in 2024
CPU mining was the first method used to mine Bitcoin. With around 10 megahashes per second hash rate, Satoshi used a computer’s basic central processing unit to verify the genesis block. However, due to the increasing mining difficulty on the Bitcoin network, the computing power provided by CPU miners could no longer keep up. Miners had to shift to GPU miners for profitable bitcoin mining. Though you can still mine some crypto using CPU miners, mining BTC with a CPU is unprofitable.
GPU Mining in 2024
Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) came to ease the increasing complexity of crypto mining. The first bitcoin mining with GPU happened in October 2010 to leverage GPU’s parallel processing power, enabling them to compute the cryptographic puzzles faster and more efficiently. Their primary advantage is their ability to run multiple operations in parallel, and miners can even use multi-GPU miners to run concurrently. With most modern GPUs, you have up to 2000 times the hashing power delivered by a 20 kilohashes CPU miner.
FPGA Mining in 2024
With the continuous volatility of the crypto industry in terms of crypto prices, mining complexity, and mining costs, there’s a constant need to mine more efficiently. Consequently, the field-programmable gate array miners were introduced to make mining more lucrative. The FPGA miner is an electric circuit that can be programmed and reconfigured to perform different tasks. They offer up to five times the cost and energy efficiency of GPU miners, and you can use the same equipment to mine different cryptocurrencies with different algorithms.
ASIC Mining in 2024
Despite the convenience of FPGA miners, investors still wanted more improved mining machines that provide efficiency in energy consumption and initial cost. In addition, crypto mining was growing to a large-scale billion-dollar industry, even as competition among nodes and mining difficulty increased.
Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) provided a workable solution due to their high computing power. Ideally, ASIC miners are much more powerful than popular GPU mining rigs. Unlike GPU miners, whose power is measured in megahashes per second, ASIC’s power is computed in terahashes per second. The first ASICs were also 200 times more powerful than the standard GPU miner.
While crypto mining remains an ever-evolving industry, ASIC miners remain the linchpin of bitcoin mining. They are uniquely tailored to validate transactions on blockchain networks more efficiently, and above all, their prices have come to an all-time low in the last couple of months.
Top ASIC Mining Rigs
The ASICs are the basis for the next generation that most investors prioritize. They have mining rig models released in November 2023 that top 300 Th/s. For instance, MicroBT WhatsMiner M63S has a hash rate of 390 Th/s and a power consumption rate of 7215 watts, while MicroBT WhatsMiner M63 has a hash rate of 334 Th/s and a power consumption of 6646 watts. Other ASIC miners set for release in February 2024 include:
| Miner | Hashrate | Power Consumption |
| Bitmain Antminer S21 Hyd | 335 Th/s | 5360 watts |
| Bitmain Antminer S21 | 200 Th/s | 3550 watts |
| MicroBT WhatsMiner M60S | 186 Th/s | 3441 watts |
| Bitmain Antminer T21 | 190 Th/s | 3610 watts |
| MicroBT WhatsMiner M60 | 172 Th/s | 3422 watts |
Miner Prices
After a long crypto winter that nearly became an ice age, the crypto industry is fast rebounding. Bitcoin dipped to lows of $16,000 in 2022 amid the second crypto winter but has regained traction, topping $42,000 in December 2023. However, the effects of the crypto winter can still be felt in crypto mining equipment prices.
As crypto prices generally declined, investors were less interested in mining activities. The crypto winter came when global energy prices rose, so Bitcoin mining was largely unprofitable. Many mining companies declared bankrupt, and mining entry costs came to a record low. However, as crypto prices continue to rebound, more people may be interested in acquiring new and more efficient mining equipment, more so in readiness for Bitcoin halving in April 2024. Others who invested in old equipment and have not yet used it will also need to update their equipment, and this could mean more demand for miners, hence a rise in their prices in 2024.
Investors looking to invest in updated miners like the MicroBT WhatsMiner M63S will have to pay between $9,000 and $11,000, depending on where they acquire the miner. However, older miners like the Bitmain Antminer S19 Pro with 110 Th/s are available for as low as $1,600.
How Will Halving Affect Miners?
After bitcoin halving, many miners will become unprofitable, but not all will be unprofitable to turn off immediately. Usually, there is a period when miners will accumulate enough Bitcoin and hold with the hope the price goes up so they can sell those Bitcoins to power their costs. However, that strategy doesn’t work because you usually have no idea how long the price stays where it is, and maybe it never goes up.
The market participants who have updated their equipment for a new one would be in a good spot. But it depends on which cost they update that equipment because, at the end of the day, bitcoin mining is a business like everything else. If you spend $1,000 to make $300 and then spend another thousand dollars to keep making $300, that doesn’t do anything for you.
Therefore, what’s important is to ensure that if you have all the equipment you need, it runs as long as possible at a low power cost until it actually fails.
“I think that those market participants who do not have equipment higher than a hundred tera hash per second will not make money within the 6 months after halving, unless, of course, Bitcoin price goes up.”
But if the Bitcoin price goes up, there will be more demand and fewer rewards to share. So, if you are a new miner, the only mining equipment that you should buy is with an efficiency of less than 21 Joules per tera hash. That equipment will be very competitive, and you will stay in a game for quite some time.
Will Older Miners Still Be Effective in 2024?
According to Sergii Gerasymovych, the CEO of EZ Blockchain, older mining equipment will not likely be effective in 2024 or any time in the future. During his webinar on Bitcoin Halving 2024, Sergii was candid about the fate of older mining equipment and how the bitcoin halving will affect them.
“Unfortunately, the Bull Run of 2021 to 2022 drove the cost of crypto mining equipment to insanity. Many people did buy the cryptocurrency mining equipment on the top, so that means that those players are still sitting with that equipment. They have not sold it because that equipment has not made any money yet and is far from making any money, and that’s a big issue. They will not survive the halving if they don’t throw more capital, small or big.”
Cooling
Crypto mining is a highly energy-intensive process, and as a result, it generates a lot of heat. The mining rigs emit a substantial amount of heat that can damage their components and must, therefore, be effectively managed. Primarily, miners choose between the cooling technologies of air and immersion cooling.
Air Cooling Technology
Air cooling is the most commonly used and most affordable cooling technology in crypto mining. Here, miners use strategically placed high-velocity fans to circulate air around their miners. The fans ensure that the hot air dissipated from the mining hardware is blown away while drawing in cold air to cool the miners. These cooling systems are cheap to install and maintain, although they are inefficient with large-scale mining operations with many mining rigs.
Immersion Cooling Technology
Immersion cooling provides the efficiency every investor needs for large-scale crypto mining. This cooling method completely submerges the mining equipment in a thermally conductive but electrically non-conductive fluid. Although the initial cost of the immersion cooling infrastructure is high compared to air cooling, it provides unmatched efficiency in cooling and additional benefits.
- Increased miner hash rate
- 100% noise reduction because there are no rotating miner fans
- Protects mining equipment from dust and debris
- Extended equipment lifespan
- Saves the energy used in running fans
Self Mining vs Hosted Mining
Self Mining
In its simplest form, self-mining is the process of assembling own miners in a private space for bitcoin mining. You’re responsible for developing all the necessary infrastructure, including the floor space, sourcing the miners, power, cooling infrastructure, and handling all mining operations.
However, due to the complexity of bitcoin mining, self-mining comes with drawbacks.
- High power rates – solo miners lack the advantage of economies of scale and are thus unable to negotiate favorable power rates with energy companies.
- Limited infrastructure – self-miners lack the resources to build the infrastructure required in crypto mining.
- Dealing with mining complexities – solo miners are responsible for their mining setup. They must handle all the complexities, including equipment breakdown, dealing with noise, and maintaining the appropriate uptime and internet bandwidth.
Hosted Mining
Hosted mining, on the other hand, refers to mining cryptocurrency from a rented space. Miners contract a hosting service company to handle all their mining operations for a fee. The hosting service will provide power, cabinets, racks, internet, cooling, and all operational aspects.
With a hosting service, miners are guaranteed of:
- Competitive power prices – mining hosting companies can negotiate better energy rates with utility companies. As a result, they provide affordable hosting packages to their clients.
- Cooling infrastructure – most hosting services like EZ Blockchain provide clients with different cooling infrastructure. You can choose between air and immersion cooling for your miners.
- Professional team – with a hosting service, mining rigs are left in the hands of professional teams, including experienced engineers and technical staff. They assemble the miners for you and handle all technical issues.
- No heat and noise pollution – mining hosting companies situate their data centers away from residential areas. As such, you don’t have to worry about your mining operations being a nuisance in your neighborhood.
So, What Should You Mine, Bitcoin or Altcoins?
Bitcoin remains the most popular and valuable cryptocurrency. It has the highest market capitalization and a relatively high trading volume compared to most altcoins. However, the crypto giant has received massive criticism in the past over its mining process. Bitcoin uses the proof of work algorithm, which is quite energy intensive, making bitcoin mining have a large carbon footprint.
Regardless, Bitcoin is still among the best crypto coins to mine when you have the right setup. Besides, it has a massive influence on the crypto industry, and with its reward reduction design embedded in its codebase, the crypto has vast potential.
Additionally, thought leaders like EZ Blockchain are quickly changing the narrative and turning Bitcoin mining’s high power consumption into a solution for wasted energy and a grid-balancing solution.
With EZ Blockchain hosting service, you can make up to 50% more from Bitcoin mining, thanks to their methodology that ensures efficient mining.
The company has a great relationship with and works with oil and gas companies to explore stranded and wasted energy, hence providing the best electricity prices on the market.
Additionally, the company uses alternative energy sources of wind, solar, nuclear, and gas to provide affordable hosting packages.
