Last month we covered the story of the Long Island Iced Tea Company rebranding itself as Long Blockchain as part of a broader shift in corporate strategy. The company's stock price tripled over night.
On Friday, we got the first concrete details of the company's new blockchain strategy. Long Blockchain planned to raise up to $8.4 million with a stock offering and then use some of the money to buy 1,000 Antminer S9 bitcoin mining machines. The machines would be "installed in a world-class third-party data center experienced in cryptocurrency mining and located in a Nordic country."
But today Long Blockchain announced it was scrapping the stock offering. The company says that it's still planning to buy bitcoin-mining hardware. However, Long Blockchain says that it "can make no assurances that it will be able to finance the purchase of the mining equipment."
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 11 2018, @07:59PM (5 children)
Every time I have run-to-ground what my ROI would be for bitcoin mining, it came to something like $500 worth of mining gear, sucking down $0.04 per day of electricity should net about $0.04 per day worth of BTC, until the market gets more competitive at which point the investment stays the same but the return goes down.
Even without the increasing competitiveness of the mining market, ROI time was infinite, or worse. The only way this was a good deal was that the coins mined back in 2010 (say, 3.5 net coins per year, per $500 rig fully occupied), inflated 2500-5000x by today. Back then, mining all year on a NUC could cost you ~$18 in electricity to get ~$18 "worth" of BTC. If you managed to keep track of those coins safely for the following 8 years and not sell them on the way up, now you've got ~$50K.
Then there were GPU mining rigs, then FPGA, I looked at the latest mining rigs and return is still down under a nickle a day for several hundred dollars worth of gear - I expect that Long Island Iced Tea hadn't done that math, or maybe not done it correctly, before making their announcement.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday January 12 2018, @12:04AM (3 children)
Honestly I don't know.
Some Litecoin mining profit calculator I used predicted the Antminer L3+ [bitmain.com] would yield a profit of $10k per year. Electricity is relatively cheap here in the Pacific Northwest. IIRC it's 8.16 cents per kilowatt-hour.
It cost me $2,050 plus a $105 power supply and $140 for DHL from china.
My hesitation on buying two more is that I might not be able to tolerate the fan noise. Bitmain says it's 75 decibels but I really don't know how I will experience that. Would my music drown it out? Would I go deaf?
Bitmain mines with its own products, so there surely must be a case for them.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 12 2018, @12:15AM (1 child)
Check the actual coin (fractions) expected per mega-hash, and compare that to mega-hashes per hour.
For the noise, build it a soundproof box and pipe cooling air in through a muffler.
Keep us posted on how the mining goes - if you're really yielding $10K per year, that's a full coin per year - you should be seeing a clear indicator of your actual yield within a week of operation. Whatever specs I was reading were estimating closer to 0.002 BTC per year on a ~$300 mining rig, as of late 2017.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday January 13 2018, @07:24AM
thanks for the encouragement.
I will post my experiences to my journal.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @12:51AM
No, and somewhat slowly. I suspect you'd go somewhat crazy from annoyance first, though.
http://www.noisehelp.com/noise-level-chart.html
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 12 2018, @07:36PM
Well you could be that asshole who ruins things for everyone else:
https://www.chargepoint.com/support/driver-faq/ [chargepoint.com]
;)