Goldshell KD5 vs. Antminer L7 vs. Innosilicon A11

Mining & Hardware ASIC Mining
#1

Warning: Noob with more money than experience and no desire to “take it slow” or “buy a beginner rig”.
My background: Artist, Woodworker, Maker CNC/Digital Fabrication, IT Consultant, Derivatives Trader (traditional markets 15+yrs)

So I went down the rabbit hole of ASIC miners today and learned as much as I could tolerate in about 12-15 hours. I’ve narrowed my options to the above 3 rigs. For this to make sense to me, financially, I am only interested in rigs that will pay for themselves in <6months. Let me know if I’ve missed anything.

Summary of what I think I know, please feel to correct or expand upon any of the below:

KD5

  • PRO: Safer than ETH mining and higher ROI of $14,000k annually vice the L7
  • CON: Only mines Kadena and the has a higher likelihood of becoming a brick? (I have no idea how integral Kadena is)

L7

  • PRO: Wide variety of mineable coins and therefore less susceptibility to becoming a brick?
  • CON: Profitability going forward is heavily based on Lightcoin Network use and adoption and DOGE use and adoption?

A11

  • PRO: Unknown price per unit, but highest annual return of any of the 3 miners
  • CON: ETH changing to proof of stake and the impact on profitability of Ethash miners will be such that this is basically a brick?

Follow up questions:

  1. Will ETH Proof of Stake IMMEDIATELY make ethash profitability such that the A11 for anything more than $25k is a horrible idea?
  2. Where the hell do you get these things and not get price-gouged for double what they cost 1 month prior?
  3. I get why SHA256/BTC mining doesn’t really meet my goal of 6mo ROI, but are there other SHA256 Coins that would make it more profitable then the values on Asicminervalue.com
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#2

If you can manage the heat and noise, for the prices that you’ll currently pay for a KD5 or L7, you can nearly buy 3 Antminer S19j Pro 104Ths directly from Bitmain, https://shop.bitmain.com/. 180 day payback is aggressive at current prices for any ASIC. Now if you happened to buy a KD5 when they were $10k well . . .

But prices for KD5’s have absolutely shot through the roof due to recent KDA moonshot. Yes, KD5’s only mine a single coin. But Kadena is a very solid project that is starting to be recognized as such. There are growing use cases for KDA and rumor has it that it’ll soon be listed on Binance.com followed by Coinbase - I believe the Binance rumor, less so Coinbase. But, dyor. In the interest of full disclosure, I have two KD5’s so I’m hardly unbiased. That said, I also have six S19j Pros on order

With a L7 - once they start shipping . . . and I’ve heard rumors that they’re delayed by 1 month - you can mine other coins, that’s true. But merge mining LTC/DOGE would be the most profitable. Check out Antminer L7 mining calculator ⛏️ | minerstat. E.g., for a L7 9.5, you’d currently get ~$140/day merge mining LTC/DOGE vs $57/day for DGB and $51/day XVG. So to get anywhere close to your target payback period, you have to have at least some faith in LTC/DOGE. DOGE is a meme coin. So while there’s some talk that people are trying to develop use cases, I’m skeptical. But it does have some traction and is unlikely to disappear until after your L7 is paid off.

I do wonder if any of these meme coins survive the next crypto winter, which is why I suggested the S19j Pro as it’s my belief that BTC will survive anything. It’s right there with the cockroaches (I mean that in a good way).

I wouldn’t touch an ETH miner right now, not at today’s prices. It’s damn near impossible to predict an A11’s lifecycle - it could be a year, or only a few months. Yes, anything related to Etherium rollouts have been delayed historically. But do you want to bet the price of an A11 on this? So once Etherium does move from PoW to PoS, then the L7 will only be useful for mining much smaller altcoins (e.g. ZIL). Everyone with an ASIC hashing Scrypt algo will divert all that hashing power to these small altcoins, causing difficulty rates to soar and yield/day to plummet. An A11 would yield $162/day today vs $20 if ti were hashing ZIL. Now imagine what all that hashing power being diverted from ETH to ZIL would do to ZIL’s difficulty and daily yield, or any other Scrypt altcoin?

As far as sources, Vosk has a list of his trusted sources. There are also seemingly a couple of threads per day asking about this vendor or that vendor and people’s experiences. Be cautious. There are a lot of scammers out there. But not every reseller is a scammer. Good luck on your journey

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#3

Thanks for the thoughtful response @Zilina

Winter won’t be a problem. As for the summer, I installed a 100amp subpanel with a long run of 0ga cable where miners would go so I see no problem with running 3 of those on half of the subpanel and then a <50amp freestanding aircon unit using the some of the remaining capacity. I’m a bit of a BTC Maximalist so I get what you’re saying RE: longevity, but I was really looking to diversify and maximize efficiency.

Good point, especially when DOGE is the majority of that $140-190/day.

depends if its $22k or $50k…I can’t really tell based on all the scams out there. On the low-end you COULD make back $22k in… ~140days (~4Mo).

Did you mean “Ethash algo” here or is there something i’m fundamentally not understanding about Ethash vs Scrypt and/or switching algos on ASIC miners?