So it has been over 3 times since I started this blog and over 3 months since I had my first Zionodes order connected. My Wattum order got connected on December 15th, so over 2 months ago. Since then, a lot has happened – whether with the price of Bitcoin, or the mining difficulty. I already learned quite a lot about the industry. In this post I am going to summarize my experience with these platforms for the past few months
Update on Wattum Bitcoin hosting
Wattum was for me the first large order I made. To sum it up, I ordered 10 x Avalon 1246 85 TH. I paid $9,582 per one miner, which ended up being around $113 per TH. Looking back on this order, it was a pretty OK deal at the time of purchase. However at current BTC prices and difficulty, I would consider it overpriced.
The order was placed on November 15th, with delivery date of December 15th. BTC price on November 15th was a whooping $63,000. That is approximately 40% higher than the price now (around $45,000 on March 1st 2022). That is why that price per miner was pretty reasonable at that time. I am still a firm believer that price of Bitcoin will go up, and will reach these values again.
With that being said, let’s have a look at how my miners performed since being plugged in on December 15th.
Wattum Hosting Performance in Russia
My miners are placed in one of Wattum’s Russian facilities. With what is going on now in Ukraine (the war started just few days ago), I am little bit concerned about my miners location. I don’t want to get too political in this blog, so I am going to keep it focused on the performance.
Here is a chart of my hash rate on ViaBTC since I started to mine with Wattum on December 15th.
To be honest, I must say I feel really lucky. My miners have been hashing without almost any issues. There have been few downtimes, but none of them lasted more than few hours.
My average daily hashrate started great at 848 TH. However it has been hovering at 835 for last few weeks. Which is still acceptable considering the machines have been hashing almost non-stop.
The reason why I say that I think I am lucky is that there is quite a lot of negative Wattum stories out there. Especially with their locations in Kazakhstan and in Carthage NY, USA. Wattum has a status page for all their locations, and you can clearly see that these locations have been going through some serious issues:
Actually I just noticed that these locations are not anymore on Wattum’s status page. And all the history of the updates has been deleted from the website. That does not give good impression on the reputability of the company. In any case, these statuses are still available through Archive.org here.
Wattum Carthage NY, USA
Most people say that one should diversify with where is he having his miners hosted. And that USA is the safest location to have it hosted, and Russia should be avoided. I agree that from political stability point of view, USA or Canada is the way to go. However – if I decided to place my miners in Wattum Carthage NY location in USA, I would be extremely pissed and probably lose around $100,000.
The location has been offline since December 15th 2021. I have a friend with 60 miners in this location, and he is extremely unhappy how this has been handled by Wattum. When the issues started, Wattum was saying that it is only an issue with one of the power components and it will be fixed within few weeks. But in few weeks, they said they need another month. And then another. And things were just being delayed. Similar experience was shared on a very recent Reddit post.
Fortunately I do not have any miners here. But just the idea that my Avalon’s were placed here on December 15th, and I would actually not be able to start mining over 2 months later is making me really mad. The conclusion to take out of this is that there is a lot of luck in this business. And a lot of changing parts that you as a customer cannot really influence. I got the lucky card for now, hopefully it will keep going on.
Wattum Bitcoins mined
This is a screenshot of my wallet that I have for Wattum profits. As you can clearly see, so far I have mined (or more like received to my wallet) 0.29 BTC valued at almost $13,000 at current price. My original investment was $95k and monthly hosting costs are around $2000. And I have been mining almost exactly 2,5 months. That means 13% ROI in 2.5 months. Definitely much much lower than I expected when I made the purchase. With that being said, I also did not expect BTC price to be at $44k either.
Would I buy through Wattum at this price again? Probably not. But I also really needed to spend the money still in 2021 for tax purposes, so I still stand behind this decision and I am confident it will be wroth it in the long run.
Wattum customer support and account management after 3 months
This is definitely the weakest point of the whole Wattum experience. As I mentioned in my Wattum review before – there is no account login to see your information. They only sent me a link to Google Drive folder which is supposed to contain my serial numbers, pictures of my miners, etc…All it includes is a stupid performance report downloaded from ViaBTC.
Story time – I wasn’t sure what payment method and credit card did I submit to use for hosting costs when placing the order. So I emailed support to let me know what CC is on file (since there is no account with actual user interface). Support replied with last 4 digits of CC on file. I told them I want to change it, so I filled in a form to change payment method (since there is no account with actual user inferface. Am I repeating myself?). Their accounting team confirmed that they received the form and updated my payment method. Well fast forward few months – I still was not charged for any of my hosting costs. Isn’t that crazy? Does this company not want my money? There is just no invoicing system, nothing to keep track off, no information being sent to me. Now I am just happy I am mining pretty consistently. I will probably receive an email one day that I owe thousands for hosting costs…We will see.
As to customer support – I don’t have that much experience with it, since the hashing is going well. But I opened a ticket once when I noticed my miners are offline. And I never received response to that ticket. But when I logged in to ViaBTC few hours later, I saw my miners hashing again. So I didn’t pay much attention to it. There is however quite a lot of negative reviews out there about Wattum’s customer support. So be careful.
Summary
To sum it up, so far I am satisfied with Wattum. But that is mostly because I got lucky and I don’t really have to deal with many issues with them. My Russian location has been more than stellar for now, and as long as Putin doesn’t confiscate my machines, I am OK with the miners being there. With that being said, there has been already 2 Wattum locations which are going though serious issues and not mining for extended periods of time. Do your research before purchasing.