“Important: In 2023, you can purchase a USB miner that hashes at 220 gigahashes per second. You would need to stack more than 61 of these USB miners (at $198 per unit) to equal the hashing rate of an older Antminer S9 mining at 13.5 terahashes per second (found used on eBay for about $100). And that’s only if your USB connection speeds and multiple hubs can handle the amount of information being processed.” - From the Investopedia article titled “What Is a USB Bitcoin Miner in Crypto, and How Does It Work?”
This model hashes at 300 to (possibly) 500 Gh/s, so you’d potentially only need 27 of them to match the Antminer S9. And yes, you really can buy an Antminer S9 for $100 on eBay. And with that you could earn $0.94/day…if electricity were free. If you have to pay for power, you’d lose $2.66/day at $0.10/kWh. That’s why they’re only $100 now instead of the $2100 they cost in 2017.
As to the ones being sold here, you could make $0.035/day if electricity were free (and if you can get 500 Gh/s out of it). But even though they are almost four times more power-efficient than the Antminer S9, you would still lose $0.001/day at $0.10/kWh.
TL;DR: You’ll never make any money mining with this thing.
All of these calculations are rough, and are based on mining Bitcoin. There are other coins you can mine, but you shouldn’t expect any better results.
Thank you. I don’t have the energy to post this, but this is all close enough. In the end, you will not make money, and that’s all people should know.
Every few years, I see some deep dive analysis like this. The specifics change, but not the ultimate conclusion:
If you see a discounted coin mining device, it’s discounted because it’s worthless as a mining device. People have mined with it until it was no longer profitable, and now they’re trying to sell the device to some sucker to squeeze a little more money out of it.
Because these ASIC’s are single purpose, there’s not even anything else useful other than coin mining you can do with them. Pretty good read here: