 So while it used to be possible to mine for bitcoins on your old laptop, due to the constantly increasing difficulty, it's no longer practical on mortal computers, not even with multiple high-performance graphics cards. So then, how do you do it? Allow me to introduce the Bitmain Ant Miner S9, a bare-bones computer of sorts, except it has no display output, no way to plug in a keyboard, and it only does one thing. Mine SHA-256 cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. Oh, and we've actually also got an L3+, you wanna open that one up Jake? Which does script coins like Litecoin, and a D3, which mines X11 cryptocurrencies like Dash. So, the goal today is to find out if these things are worth it. And no Austin, that is not trademarked, I can say it. So if you've seen part two of Mining Adventure already, you should have a pretty good idea of what a fairly efficient GPU mining setup looks like. But even that is nothing compared to an ASIC miner. For example, the Radeon HD 7970 was released in 2012, and mined bitcoin at an efficiency of about 4 Mhz per watt. So ignoring the few companies that never really shipped an end-user product, in late 2012 Avalon released the Avalon 1, an ASIC miner that did an at the time astonishing 165 Mhz per watt, a huge bump over GPU mining. So how could they possibly achieve this? Well, graphics cards and CPUs are designed to be able to process a huge range of different calculations, which is what makes them incredibly useful in our everyday devices. This versatility is great, but it limits their ability to do one thing really, really fast. So application specific integrated circuits or ASICs, these are, as the name implies, designed and purpose-built to do just one thing. And while that might not make sense for your gaming rig, for a bitcoin miner that only needs to run one specific formula, it is a godsend. At least for the people who own them. Because of the nature of cryptocurrencies, the increase in overall hashing power in the network that's caused by a massive influx of specialized mining hardware, is a big part of what made bitcoin's difficulty go up even further, and I mean way up. So when the Avalon 1 came out, bitcoin difficulty was at around 3 million. By the same time the following year, it was 600 million. So if you fast forward to 2017, there are a bunch of players in the ASIC market, including Bitmain, whose hardware we have with us today, InnoSilicon, and Bycall, thanks to whom bitcoin difficulty has reached a whopping 2 trillion. So all the folks out there running GPUs for mining, those guys are focused on altcoins, like what we showed in part 2, so options like Monero, Zcash, and Ethereum are all popular at this time. By the way, huge shout out to Marshall at OGBTC on Twitter, and Francisco over at ByVM.net who helped hook us up with the Antminer S9, the L3 Plus, and the D3 that we're taking a look at today. So let's crack the D3 open here. So much for the warranty sticker, we'll just put that right there. I mean, what else would we do with a multi-thousand dollar specialized computer that's out of stock quite literally everywhere? I mean, as a general rule, machines that... Does this not slide out this way? It was the wrong way. Dang it. I called it. I'll just go... You want me to poke you with this? There you go. Let's like that. Okay. As a general rule, machines that essentially print money are in pretty high demand. So unless you've got friends in high or low places, they're mostly obtained by pre-order. And the problem with that is that the wait lists can be as long as several months, meaning that by the time they arrive, they might not even be profitable anymore. And that's a really relevant point here because this D3 miner now makes barely five to ten dollars a day before electricity costs while drawing a massive 1200 watts from the wall by default. When these things were announced, people were buying them left and right with dreams of making their money back in a week, and then it's just pure profit from there on. They definitely didn't learn from the effects of early ASIC miners on the Bitcoin difficulty curve, which naturally went way up. So now that it's open, then let's have a look at what's actually going on here. So the D3 unit has three of these hashing boards, each containing... Uh, hold on. So 50... And I guess it would probably be the same on the other side. No, it's just one side. It is just one side. Oh, wow. So it's just... Heatings from both sides. Wow, cool. So sorry. Yeah, 50 ASICs. They're held in place by an aluminum case, then, which doubles as sort of a wind tunnel with these high airflow fans on either side. So most of the mass of this thing is actually just the glued on heatsinks for each chip. So if we just plug back in the hashing boards to the controller here... Being very careful, of course. Don't worry, I got this. And then connect this wiring to our controller here, which, by the way, see this guy right here, is a mini Linux computer. And then we wire up a power supply. We got one. Yeah, here we go. Here's a power supply. We should be pretty much ready to mine, right? I think so. I mean, we should probably put this cover back. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Maybe finish plugging these back in. Yeah, we'll be back in a minute. Okay, I know you really like dropping things, but it'd be good if you didn't drop these. I'm not gonna drop them. I don't trust you. So you can actually use a regular computer power supply. But with how short the supply of those is these days, in many cases, people end up using these mining-specific ones. So the only real difference is just that it only outputs 12 volt, and then it just has a whack ton of 6-pin PCI Express connectors. Also, because it's not designed for consumer use, the word on the street there is that they are pretty loud. Pretty loud. So you need a network connection because your miner needs to be able to find and submit any work that it needs to do. Okay, here we go. That one's not too bad. That's not too bad. That's fine. Yeah. Just give it a second. Don't be fooled, my friend. It gets worse. Much, much worse. Oh, such a great noise. So just like with Blowing Matron from one of our recent videos, I wouldn't recommend getting any bananas or fingers anywhere near these things. So at this point, with all three of them plugged in, updated, and mining, at current profitability levels, we can see the S9 making about $33 a day, the L3+, about $15 a day, and the D3, while the efficiency is pretty poor, as we noted earlier, at about $9 a day. So we're going to come back in a week and see what we've been able to mine. Okay. So we're back again. It's been about 16 days since we installed the ASICs in the empty, not to mention not heated room over here. And we're actually... Are you pulling up the pool statistics now? Yeah. Okay, cool. Our S9 has been mining a fork of Bitcoin, known as Bitcoin Cash, and has been earning actually over our S9. About $32.46 per day after our powers accounted for during this period. So if profit were to maintain like this, we would be able to pay back the S9 at $2,500 in about two and a half months. Not too shabby. With that said, if you were looking to pick one up for yourself, Bitmain isn't even accepting pre-orders as of when we were filming this, and we've been seeing them priced at over $5,000. We've been seeing them priced at over $5,000 on the secondhand market. The L3 Plus averaged about $13 a day after power, giving us around an eight month ROI time. Definitely worse than the former, even if you are overpaying. Leaving us with the D3, which Jake actually found a custom firmware that allows it to draw 900 watts instead of the stock 1200 watts at about the same hash rate. So we've been earning an average of $7 a day after power, giving us an ROI time of just over seven months. That's actually better than the L3 Plus since it costs less. Though I wouldn't recommend picking up a ton of D3s since X11 miners are nowhere near as far into their development as Bitcoin and Litecoin ASICs, and as such, are likely to see big improvements in efficiency as time goes on, driving up the difficulty curve. So then, in a nutshell, at the right pricing, an ASIC miner takes up less space and can yield better ROI time with less software hassle and no construction time compared to GPU mining. But it comes with higher risk. Worst case scenario, GPUs can be resold for some fraction of what you paid. But since an ASIC miner has no value outside of mining the specific cryptocurrencies it's optimized for, when the profitability is gone, it just becomes an expensive paperweight. 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