It’s been around 10 days since I purchased Bitmain Antminer S19 from Zionodes, and I have been mining successfully with it. I took the risk and bought from an unknown company hoping not to get scammed. I talked about the price of the miners and the hosting rate in my first post, so head over there for that information. I am still waiting for my Wattum order to get delivered. This is a detailed Zionodes review after the first 10 days of using them.
My Zionodes Bitmain miners purchases
Originally I just bought one as a test to see whether these guys are a scam or not. And since the miners were working perfectly and immediately, I decided to invest some more and buy 7 additional miners. So now I have 8 x S19 95 TH mining non-stop somewhere in the beautiful country of Moldova. I can see all the miners in the “My Hardware” section of Zionodes account.
I can check whether they are online, what is their hash rate and temperature. And also what pools are they mining at. The pool settings are completely customizable from the account interface. They can be changed to mine on any pools I want. And this can be changed as often as needed without the need to contact customer support.
I decided to do a little experiment for another blog post and have 4 of them on Slushpool and 4 of them on Viabtc. In about 4 weeks I will compare the results and see where did I mine more. Just a little real word simultaneous experiment. (Update Slushpool vs ViaBTC blogpost is ready)
Zionodes S19 95TH miners performance
The only miners available at this point in this farm in Moldova are S19 95TH. So let’s have a look at how they are performing.
Performance on ViaBTC.com
Each of the miners is active. The 10-min AVG has rate can be rather volatile, that’s why the 1-day average is the value to focus on. All of the miners are mining on average at advertised 95TH/s.
Looking at the chart, performance is really stable most of the time. There is an occasional dip, but also occasional spike. The average is the most important value to look at again, and at total 380TH it matches the performance of 4 x S19 95 TH units, so all looks really good.
Performance on Slush pool
Similar to ViaBTC, the miners I assigned to Slush Pool are performing very well at their advertised hash rates. The scoring Hashrate at the time of the screenshot was 375.5 TH/s, so around 4.5 TH/s below advertised total of 380 TH/s. But this value tends to jump up and down, and there are times when it is below and when it is above the official miners rate.
Zionodes customer support
My main worry before purchasing miners through Zionodes was that it is a scam and that I am going to lose all my money invested. My 2nd biggest worry was that if by any chance it is not a scam and I actually get my miners, if something goes wrong with them I will not get any customer support. I must say I was wrong on both of these points. So far the customer support has been amazing.
Support during ViaBTC shutdown
The day after I decided to risk it and purchase additional 7 miners, the first thing I did after I woke up was to check my Slush Pool and ViaBTC apps to see whether my miners are still working. I checked Slush Pool first, everything looked good – around 400 TH/s there with 4 workers. Then I checked ViaBTC and almost had a heart attack.
All 4 workers I assigned to ViaBTC showed as offline. This was day after I decided to spend extra $70,000 with completely unknown company. Of course the first thing that came to my mind was that I was scammed – I was too greedy and purchased something which was too good to be true. I was still in my bed, processing this news. Fortunately my Slush Pool workers were still working OK, so I did not panic.
After I processed what is happening, I started to check my emails and telegram messages. And I noticed that Zionodes contacted me on Telegram:
And later during the day they also sent me this email:
So this definitely made me feel better. I logged in to Zionodes account, and changed 4 miners from ViaBTC to Slush Pool. And in just few minutes my Slush Pool hash rate started to increase significantly
By this point I still did not receive any email from ViaBTC about this issue. But found some articles online, describing issues with multiple Chinese based Bitcoin Pools. I was really pleased by the pro-active support from Zionodes though. I have a feeling like I am their only customer right now.
Another Issue with one of my Zionodes miners
Few days later I received following email from Zionodes:
Hi,
The worker ID xxx has shown high temperature and been arranged for maintenance & cleaning. The other worker is added to your pool account to replace the current worker under maintenance.
The new worker is added to slushpool – please check it out.The original worker is expected to be back online by tomorrow.Until that time the replaced unit will be on your pool account.
Please write us back to confirm a new unit replaced.
Thank you,
Zionodes Team
I logged in to Slush Pool to see what is happening. And they really added a new miner to my pool, with different username. I did not see this miner in my Zionodes account, but I saw it mining in my Slush Pool.
My outage only lasted around 2 hours before they added different miner to my pool. When they fixed my miner, they actually left their miner on my Slush Pool for extra few hours. So I was mining with 5 instead of 4 minters for about 7 hours. During these 7 hours Slush actually mined 3 blocks, so I made more in BTC thanks to this repair.
This seems to be much better support than what I read online about large reputable companies like Compass Mining. So far, I am very satisfied with the Zionodes customer support. All I can do is hope this will be an ongoing thing.
Current offer of miners on Zionodes
As explained in the first part of Zionodes review – Zionodes does not operate any hosting facilities them selves. The company cooperates with multiple operators. This is their reply to my Telegram message on this topic:
‘Both crypto farm and sellers passed the verification process along with the mining machines that have been tested and configured. Each one has to go through due diligence and contract Zionodes agreeing on the Terms of Use. We do not allow whoever gets listed on the marketplace as it should fully comply with our terms.
The advantage of the marketplace compare to other solutions is that all miners available are already configured and online. Machines are running in the crypto farm now and once the order is placed it’s immediately available for the pool setup & the ownership is transferred.’
Based on the list of mining operators accessible on their website, it looks like they mostly worked with Chinese and Russian mining farms. There are no miners available in these locations at this moment. The China mining ban probably hit the company hard, and they lost most of their supply.
Currently the only farm with any availability is a mining farm in Moldova called MD farms. Today (December 14th 2021), the farm has 16 more Antminers S19 95 TH, available for $9500-$10000 depending on the size of the order. That is extremely limited supply, good for 1 or 2 small customers.
The good news is Zionodes is actively working on increasing this offering. Based on a Telegram message they sent to their followers, they are looking to purchase Bitcoin miners in Europe. Hopefully these will be hosted in one of their partner mining facilities and make available to public.
Zionodes review summary, pros and cons
To sum it up – so far everything is going really well. My miners are mining, and there has not been any issues. It seems like I lucked out and found the cheapest bitcoin mining hosting out there while they had some supply. The biggest negative is that so far this is really small operation. There is just handful of miners available. This looks like a great product, but Zionodes needs to start expanding in other areas of the world, like North America.
- Significantly lower prices than competition
- Miners are already online, no waiting
- Superior customer support
- Cheap electricity rates
- Easy to navigate interface
- Uknown company, lack of online reviews
- High risk
- 2% payment processing fees
- The whole payment process is little confusing
- Small supply as of now
- Poor marketing
- No presence in North America
Any update with Zionodes? Still going well. Was looking to pull the trigger on a couple s19s.
Hey Mike. Yes Zionodes still going great. I have now 14 miners there and no issues with them so far.