Bitcoin’s
Price Rise Made Old Mining Machines Profitable Again
Bitcoin’s recent price rise to
a two-month high above the $9,000 mark has seen old mining equipment become
profitable again. The miner profitability index, tracked by mining poolsPoolIn
andF2Pool,
shows mining rigs such as Bitmain’s AntMiner S9 and Canaan’s Avalon A851 can
generate a gross margin of 10% to 20%.
The margin takes into account
an average electricity cost of $0.05 per kilowatt-hour (kWh). Miners who
adopt efficiency improvement methods, such as lowering voltage or merging to
S9s into one, could see the margin grow to 30% or even 40%.
If bitcoin’s mining difficulty
doesn’t increase until the block reward halving and the price remains stable,
S9 ASIC miners could be marginally profitable even as blocks come with a 6.25
BTC reward in them.
Dmitrii Ushakov, chief
commercial officer of Russia-based miner hosting firm BitRiver, said:
”Today's price
movement would bring back even those miners that were recently disconnected
due to profitability concerns. After halving, we believe that the price range
of 3 to 4 cents [USD] is sufficient to continue mining profitably with S9
miners if the current price movement continues."
Bitcoin’s hashrate has surged
from 48 million TH/s to a high of over 120 million TH/s over the last 12
months. The cryptocurrency’s hashrate dropped during the March 12 market
crash, but soon recovered as miners are betting on BTC ahead of the halving.
