Gadgetory

so while it used to be possible to mine for bitcoins on your old laptop due to the constantly increasing difficulty it's no longer practical on mortal computers not even with multiple high-performance graphics cards so then how do you do it allow me to introduce the bit main and minor s9 a bare-bones computer of sorts except it has no display output no way to plug in a keyboard and it only does one thing mine sha-256 crypto currencies like Bitcoin oh and we've actually also got an l-3 plus one open that one update which does script coins like light coin and a d3 which mines x11 cryptocurrencies like - so the goal today is to find out if these things are worth it and no Austin that is not trademarked I can say it so if you've seen part two of mining adventure already you should have a pretty good idea of what a fairly efficient GPU mining setup looks like but even that is nothing compared to an ASIC miner for example the Radeon HD 7970 was released in 2012 and mine Bitcoin at an efficiency of about 4 mega hash per watt so ignoring the few companies that never really shipped an end-user product in late 2012 Avalon released the Avalon 1 an ASIC miner that didn't at the time astonishing 165 mega hash per watt a huge bump over GPU mining so how could they possibly achieve this well graphics cards and CPUs are designed to be able to process a huge range of different calculations which is what makes them incredibly useful in our everyday devices this versatility is great but it limits their ability to do one thing really really fast so application-specific integrated circuits or Asics these are as the name implies designed and purpose-built to do just one thing and while that might not make sense for your gaming rig for a Bitcoin miner that only needs to run one specific formula it is a godsend at least for the people who own them because of the nature of crypto currencies the increase in overall hashing power in the network that's caused by a massive influx of specialized mining hardware is a big part of what made bitcoins difficulty go up even further and I mean way up so when the Avalon one came out Bitcoin difficulty was at around 3 million by the same time the following year it was 600 million so if you fast-forward to 2017 there are a bunch of players in the ASIC market including bit Maine whose hardware we have with us today you know silicon and Baikal banks to whom Bitcoin difficulty has reached a whopping two trillion so all the folks out there running GPUs for mining those guys are focused on altcoins like what we showed in part two so options like the narrow Z cash and aetherium are all popular at this time by the way huge shout out to marshal at og BTC on twitter and francisco over at by vm net who helped hook us up with the ant miner s9 the l3 Puffs and the d3 that we're taking a look at today so let's crack the d3 open here huh so much for the warranty sticker we'll just put that right there I mean what else would we do with a multi-thousand dollar specialized computer that's out of stock quite literally everywhere I mean as a general rule machines that dang it I called it I'll just go as a general rule machines that essentially print money are in pretty high demand so unless you've got friends in high or low places they're mostly obtained by preorder and the problem with that is that the wait lists can be as long as several months meaning that by the time they arrive they might not even be profitable anymore and that's a really relevant point here because this d3 miner now makes barely five to ten dollars a day before electricity costs while drawing a massive 1200 Watts from the wall by default when these things were announced people were buying them left and right with dreams of making their money back in a week and then it's just pure profit from there on they definitely didn't learn from the effects of early ASIC miners on the Bitcoin difficulty curve which naturally went way up so now that it's open then let's let's have a look at what's actually going on here so the d3 unit has three of these hashing boards each containing hold on so fifty and I guess it would probably be the same though it's just one side it is just ones from both sides Wow cool so sorry yeah fifty a six they're held in place by an aluminum case then which doubles as sort of a wind tunnel with these high airflow fans on either side so most of the mass of this thing is actually just the glued on heat sinks for each chip so if we just plug back in the hashing boards to the controller here be very careful of course don't worry I got this and then connect this wiring to our controller here which by the way see this guy right here is a mini Linux computer and then we wire up a power supply we got one yeah here we go here's a power supply we should be pretty much ready to mine right I think so I mean we should probably put this cover back yeah yeah we'll be back in a minute okay I know you really like dropping things but it knows if you didn't drop you're not gonna I don't trust you so you can actually use a regular computer power supply but with house port the supply of those is these days in many cases people end up using these mining specific ones so the only real difference is just that it only outputs 12 volt and then it just has a wack ton of 6-pin PCI Express connectors also because it's not designed for consumer use the word on the street there is that they are pretty loud so you need a network connection because your miner needs to be able to find and submit any work that it needs to do I want something done that's not too bad that's fine yeah just give it a second don't be fooled my friend it gets worse much much worse Oh Oh oh that's a great noise so just like with blowing mature on from one of our recent videos I wouldn't recommend getting any bananas or fingers anywhere near these things so at this point with all three of them plugged in updated and mining at current profitability levels we can see the s9 making about 33 bucks a day pl3 plus about 50 in a day and the d3 while the efficiency is pretty poor as we noted earlier at about nine dollars a day so we're gonna come back in a week and see what we've been able to mine okay so we're back again it's been about 16 days since we installed the a6 in the the empty not to mention not heated room over here and where are you pulling up the pool statistics now okay cool our s9 has been mining a fork of Bitcoin known as Bitcoin cash and has been earning actually over our estimated amount about thirty to forty six per day after our powers accounted for during this period so if profit were to maintain like this we'll be able to pay back the s9 at twenty five hundred dollars in about two and a half months not too shabby with that said if you were looking to pick one up for yourself it may isn't even accepting pre-orders as of when we were filming this and we've been seeing them priced at over five thousand US dollars on the second-hand market the l3 plus average de bout thirteen dollars a day after power giving us around an eight month ROI time definitely worse than the former even if you are overpaying leaving us with the d3 which Jake actually found firmware that allows it to draw 900 watts instead of the stock 1200 watts at about the same hash rate so we've been earning an average of seven dollars a day after power giving us an ROI time of just over seven months that's actually better than the l3 plus since it costs less though I wouldn't recommend picking up a ton of d3s since x11 miners are nowhere near as far into their development as bitcoin and litecoin Asics and as such are likely to see big improvements in efficiency as time goes on driving up the difficulty curve so then in a nutshell at the right pricing an ASIC miner takes up less space and can yield better ROI time with less software hassle and no construction time compared to GPU mining but it comes with higher risk worst-case scenario GPUs can be resold for some fraction of what you paid but since an ASIC miner has no value outside of mining the specific crypto currencies it's optimized for when the profitability is gone it just becomes an expensive paperweight this video is brought to you by skill share an online learning community with more than 17,000 classes in design photo work and more their premium membership gives you unlimited access to high-quality classes from experts working in their fields allowing you to improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work you love they've got great classes on things like video editing writing and Technology and skill share is also more affordable than a lot of other learning platforms out there with an annual subscription costing less than $10 a month so get the first three months of skill share for $0.99 by checking out the link in the video description but it's only available for a limited time so go look so thanks for watching guys this was crypto currencies part 3 if you just like this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description that is if you are into highly speculative crypto currency prospecting also linked down there we're gonna merch store which has cool shirts like the one I'm wearing underneath here and our community forum which you should totally join