At the end of our last episode, we were waiting to see if Slush Pool would recognize our sad little GPU miner. Well it did, so now the question is – when do we get our money?!?
Slush Pool has what is called a “Payout Threshold”, which is the amount we need to accumulate in order to get some Bitcoin in our wallet. The default is 0.1 Bitcoin, which as of this writing is about six grand. Fortunately, our dashboard tells us exactly how long it will take to get there at the rate we’re going:
Yes, that’s right… it will take us 1.8 million years to make six grand.
Maybe we’re being a little lofty… how about ten bucks?
Let’s see, 10/6000 = x/1,800,000…. that will take us 3,000 years. I see now why everyone was telling me not to do this.
Let’s say we want to get crazy and go out and buy an ASIC. What’s the cheapest thing we can buy that will pay for itself, and make us a little cash before the earth falls into the sun?
Slush Pool’s payout formula is based on what percentage of their hash rate we can cough up during the search for a block. Their hash rate seems to hover around 4.8 Eh/s. What the heck is an Eh/s? It is Exahashes per second. That’s a quintillion. Super big. It seems like a block is found about every 4 hours 20 minutes on average, and the block value is about 7 Bitcoin. So let’s see, how much money do we want to make every four hours? A dollar? let’s go with a dollar. Start small. A dollar is 0.000016 Bitcoin. So we need to haul in 0.000016/7 = 0.0000022857 of the pool’s hash rate. That is a small number! But it is not as small as a quintillion is big. Put them together and we need 10,971,360,000,000 hashes per second. Let’s see, kilo, mega, giga, tera… I think we’re at tera. 11 Th/s. This seems large. My crappy little GPU miner was pulling in about 88 Mh/s. We need something a hundred thousand times more powerful. This cannot be affordable.
And it isn’t. The first result in a search for “ASIC miner” is the Antminer S19, at 95Th/s, for $16k. For sixteen thousand dollars, we can haul in about two bucks an hour. It will take this unit something on the order of a year to pay for itself. The next “Bitcoin halving” is not for three years, so that leaves a little time to make a profit, I suppose. Who knows what is going to change in the next year though!
The Antminer S9, at 13Th/s, is much more reasonable at around $700 with shipping. We could actually do this. A dollar every four hours, this unit takes about four months to pay for itself, and then it’s printing money after that!
I don’t have $700 lying around at the moment, but I could save that up in a few months. So this will be a summer project. Until then, back to writing some software!