The Reasons for Antminer S9’s Survival

Antminer S9, the old-fashioned type from Bitmain can still generate profits by from crypto mining as Bitcoin “completes” a strong performance like the stellar move from $12,000 to $15,950 seen over the past few weeks.

Electricity charge for S9 mining is 0.34 CNY/kW·h (data from F2Pool)

Mining with a charge of 0.34 CNY/kW·h, Antminer S9 still gain a profit. Though the charge of electricity is indeed relatively high in China compared with that of other crypto mining machines, the electricity charge for Antminer S9 may be lower and the income will be higher if it migrate to abroad, such as Iran, Kyrgyzstan, and other Central Asian regions.

S9 has stable performance and is easy to reform and maintain

Stable performance is the most basic characteristic of S9. The crypto mining industry is often in harsh conditions. Some mining farms are located in the desert with a lot of dust, and some are near hydropower stations with high humidity, which will shorten the life of the machines. However, S9 has a better stability ratio because of its simple structure and relatively low computing power.

In recent years, with the pursuit of power consumption ratio by mining machine manufacturers, the main feature of a large number of new mining machines is the increase of the number of computing power boards, and the number of computing power chips on the force board. The previous Antminer S9 13T appears to be relatively weak, but now a mining machine often has more than 70 or 100 T computing power, and the design is compact, on the one hand, because of the mining space, on the other hand, is also for reducing the cost and power consumption.

The price increase of electronic components at the end of the year led to the improvement of S9’s cost performance

Due to the COVID-019 epidemic and complex international situation this year, many Chinese and international electronic component manufacturers have recently raised their prices. In Q3, the various major electronic components were in short supply.

Many international semiconductor manufacturers such as ST, TI, ADI, Intel, NXP, Infenon are out of stock. Although the production capacity of these original factories has been initially restored, the demand recovery is faster than expected.

These manufacturers’ previous judgment on the demand side tends to be conservative, and they hold a wait-and-see attitude towards the economic growth in the “post epidemic era”, which leads to cautious action. As a result, it is difficult to solve the long delivery period and price fluctuation in the short term. Industry insiders predict that the price rise trend may continue in the first quarter of 2021.