Releasing a mining device for Ethereum is a surprising decision. Ethereum is shifting to the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism in 2022, which will disable mining on GPUs and ASICs. However, there is more to it.
First of all, PoW mining will continue for at least a few months. It is confirmed by the fact that on June 30, 2022, Ethereum has delayed the difficulty bomb in the network by 700 thousand blocks or about 100 days. This way the developers made sure that the blockchain would function properly until the merge of PoW and PoS.
Plus, 100 days is just an estimate. Ethereum will shift to PoS after 100 days only if there are no issues and small bugs during testing.
There are two testing stages left to be held before the merge of the two different networks. The first is the update of the Sepolia test network that will be held today at about midnight. The second stage will be held in Goerli, the last public testnet of this blockchain. In other words, the end is not so close, so there is a good chance that the upgrade will be delayed.
For now, Ethereum’s developers plan to shift to PoS in the second half of September 2022.
And yet, despite all the uncertainties, Bitmain has released Antminer E9. The company is clearly quite sure that the new miner will pay off.
Antminer E9: Specs and Profitability
Antminer E9 will give out 2,400 MH/s which is indeed equivalent to 25 Nvidia RTX 3080 graphics cards. To give you a better idea, it is also equivalent to 54 Nvidia GTX 1080Ti graphics cards.
It consumes 1920 W, while its energy efficiency is 0.8 J/MH.
Antminer E9 lists at $9,999. Shipping is expected to start in the middle of June. Bitmain accepts payments in BTC, USDT, and USDC.
How profitable is the miner with such a hash rate? According to 2CryptoCalc, ETH is the most profitable coin for mining. At the current exchange rate and network difficulty, you can expect to get an equivalent of almost $42.
Keep in mind that it’s a gross profit, as you should subtract the cost of electricity consumed by the device, which will differ for everybody.
With the same hash rate, you will get $29 from mining Ethereum Classic.
If the ETH exchange rate and Ethereum network difficulty remain stable, the miner will start bringing a profit after $9,999/$42 = 238 days. In reality, the pay-off period may be longer if you also consider electricity costs.
So we can conclude that if you get Antminer E9, you will have to mine Ethereum Classic as well, because ETH network is...
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