Compass Mining Hosting ASIC prices on their marketplace are now available. Bitcoin mining & hosting is experiencing a huge increase in demand and issues with supply. Something similar than what happened to gaming GPUs at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Back then everyone and their grandma wanted a new GPU because everyone was suddenly locked at home. At the same time, there was a massive chip shortage and NVIDIA and AMD just couldn’t keep up with the demand.
Seems like the same is happening with ASIC miners demand and supply. Suddenly everyone wants to start mining BTC (including me), and there is just no availability out there. Especially if you want your ASIC miners to be hosted with companies like Compass or Wattum.
As I mentioned in my post about my order from Wattum and from Zionodes, I was able to buy ASIC miners for around $100-$113 per TH. Well let’s have a look what is happening with Compass right now.
Current ASIC prices on Compass Mining Marketplace
Several weeks ago I reached out to Compass with request for a quote for ASIC miners. My only condition was that they need to be live by the end of December, so I can write off the costs. The rep told me that they don’t have anything available right away, but that I should not be worried. Compass was planning to launch a Marketplace for ASIC miners hosted at their locations in a few weeks. In this marketplace, any individual can sell their ASIC miners to anyone, for any price. The rep assured me that after the marketplace is launched, I will for sure be able to buy miners which will be live by the end of 2021. And the marketplace was really launched around 1 week after my call.
I was watching Compass Hardware page closely almost every day. Here and there I saw some miners which were OK-ish in price posted by Compass Certified Resellers. Not great, but not bad – around $120-130/TH, with connection date in December. I did not pull the trigger on those fast enough and they got sold within minutes or hours. Since then, almost no ASIC miners were added by the reseller for sale until today. And the prices people started to list their miners for are just crazy.
These are just few examples, but other miners are for similar price. 110 TH/s machines hosted in Russia are listed for $20,700. That is $188/TH. Considering that it was possible to buy miners for $60-$90 per TH just few months ago. I honestly do not think that buying at this price you will ever get your money back – at least not by mining. The only way I can see this making sense is buying the miner, miner with it 2-3 months and hoping that you can re-sell it again for same or even higher price few months later. But this growth in prices seems to be unsustainable.
If I compare it to my Zionodes purchase, I paid $95/TH. And the miners were live immediately. Of course, with Zionodes the risk is probably greater, since it is not company as well known as Compass. And people are scared to give them money. I was too – but my miners there have been working well so far. I will write update on my experience with them soon.
Under what circumstances can these Compass Mining ASICs be profitable?
When calculating the ROI, there is a lot of assumptions. But with a price of $188/TH, you would have to get really creative with your assumptions to achieve profitability. Let’s check my favorite profitability calculator at BTC.com and test add these miners with some assumptions. The Compass hosting price in Russia is $0.057/kWh and in USA $0.067/kWh. I will work with the Russian rate. Also in each scenarios I am going to assume that the miner will work flawlessly for 4 years. All these results are based on HODL mentality – meaning you will HOLD your mined Bitcoins and not sell them as you mine them.
Scenario A: No change in BTC price and no change in difficulty
A lot of people calculate their ROI with these assumptions, and also the famous AsicMinerValue.com does the same. I believe this is the worst way to calculate your ROI, but let’s have a look at the results anyways.
So if nothing happens to the BTC price or the difficulty, it will take 656 days to get back the money invested. That might sound reasonable if you are opening a bakery or a coffee shop, but in the world of ASIC miners it is ages. Most people would not buy ASIC miner if this value is more than 9 to 10 months – that was the ROI just few months ago. 656 days is 22 months, so almost 2 years.
Scenario B: BTC will reach $100k and difficulty will increase 2% every 2 weeks.
I like this scenario as a middle road. Personally I think BTC will reach much higher than $100k, but also I think the difficulty will grow more than 2% on average.
In this case, the ROI goes down to 519 days, which approximately 17 months. Better, but not great. However the total profit in 4 years goes down from $36k to $29k. This is because the number of BTC mined significantly decreases due to increase in difficulty, and really after 1370 mining days it is better to turn the machine off because it will be losing money.
Scenario C: BTC will reach $200k and difficulty will increase 3% every 2 weeks
I really just made this scenario up because I was curious to see the results. Problem with the BTC.com mining profit calculator is that it will calculate everything as if the BTC was $200k right now, and not 2 or 3 years from now. Anyways, these are the results.
Under this scenario, it will take only 215 days to get your money back – if the BTC will reach $200,000 in 215 days, and if you don’t sell any BTC before that. Interestingly, because of the increase in difficulty your miner will stop making profit in 1221 days. Even though the BTC price will be $200k. That is less than 1370 days with 2% in difficulty increase and $150k BTC price.
To sum it up – the ASIC prices have gone bananas. Good luck getting your money back if you are paying $188/TH. I want to revisit this post in 1 year and in 2 years, to see what is the situation compared to now.