 It's been what the youngins would describe as a hot minute since we've last talked about the cryptocurrency space on this channel. In large part because the popularity has died down a ton since it became much less profitable to mine. But then, when Anthony stumbled across the Bitmain Ant Router, a coin miner mixed with a Wi-Fi router, we had to check it out. We just had to know, why? Why would this exist? Why would anybody buy this? So crypto mining is pretty much the pits these days. But if you were to think hard enough, you might remember the golden days. Back in late 2017 and early 2018 when, well actually that really wasn't that long ago. Anyway, when Bitcoin was worth almost 20,000 US dollars, and every news outlet in the world was on the bandwagon with daily price updates, projections, and what have you. Well as it turns out, a natural consequence of that kind of hysteria is everyone and his or her dog trying to get in on the action. And there ended up being a handful of somewhat odd, but then seemingly functional products that were forged at the heart of the hype storm itself. So one classic example is Carnaux's QC1 space heater. It's a mining machine based on their very similar QH1, which is an ambient cooled workstation that doubles as a heater when it's under load. So the QC1 was pretty much the same thing, just with a fancy app interface tailored for miners. It was advertised as a way to subsidize your heating bill by mining cryptocurrency. And while actually even today that machine probably would still be profitable on top of your electricity costs, with its dual internal RX 580 8-gig GPUs, the cost for some reason was 3,500 US dollars up front. That's two GPUs. For a space heater that's only effective for rooms between 150 and 300 square feet. By comparison, a 100,000 BTU furnace, which is good for about 2,500 square feet, can be had brand new for just shy of 700 dollars. Now obviously that doesn't account for installation costs, but I think you get the point. Then there was the Bitmain R4, which was essentially just a cut down Antminer S9 with a centrifugal fan that was spec'd to reach noise levels of only 52 decibels. So they advertised it as being home friendly. I don't know about you guys, but my wife wouldn't let that thing anywhere near our house. And we have a server room. My wife still doesn't believe in me. Bringing us finally to the crazy crypto contraption of today's video. The Bitmain Antrouter R3 LTC, a Litecoin mining open WRT router that pulls triple duty has a clock. Not to mention that it kind of looks like a cheap Bluetooth speaker. So we bought this thing, and if you ask Bitmain, they'll say that it's meant to be a portable and ergonomic router. Uh, okay, I guess that's so you can carry it with you on the go and have your Wi-Fi wherever you need. As long as you also have an ethernet cable and access to a power outlet. Okay. And then as an added bonus, you get a chance to win 25 Litecoins every 2.5 minutes. Which is basically the fundamental principle of mining. They're describing the chance to mine a block of Litecoin every block cycle, which is about 150 seconds. What they don't mention is that with this amount of computing power, your estimated time to find a block is almost 104 years. But I mean, hey man, it's still a router, right? So it's got to be a pretty decent one, right? Wrong. So wrong! So the newer model that we have here, the R3, is built for 802.11 BGN Wi-Fi, with a maximum theoretical speed of 300 megabit across only the 2.4 gigahertz band. That's right. It's not even dual band Wi-Fi. And then as unimpressive as 300 megabit is in 2018, it gets even better. Because the single ethernet port at the back, yes, that means no included switch, is only a 100 megabit port. But then I guess, you know, when you're carrying around your brick sized mining router to the Starbucks nearby, you're probably not going to get speeds any faster than that anyway. All right then. So to say what we actually think this thing is for, I'm going to need my cynicism hat. I don't have a hat handy. Jake, find me a hat quickly. Because from everything that we've seen so far, the only reason that this product could possibly exist, is as a way for Bitmain to sell off, thank you, extra chip stock, as each one of these units has six ASIC chips inside. So the whole thing where it's masquerading as a portable and ergonomic router, I mean, that's just plain ridiculous. Look at it. What the hell are they talking about? It would take up half your backpack just for a minuscule chance to mine a Litecoin, wherever you happen to be sitting with both ethernet and power. Not to mention that the odds are that it would take longer than the amount of time that I still have on this earth. Another possibility, I'll still be needing this hat, is that it's just a clever ploy to buff their own ant mining pool. As earlier units were actually unable to switch pools, and this one is still only able to be switched via command line. Something that I doubt most people would do. And then making this possibility even more likely, is that most people, even if they did get some money out of the pool, probably wouldn't even bother to withdraw the $15 a year that they'd make based on current estimates. Further padding, Bitmain's pocketbook. Okay then. So it's not really a mining machine. It's not really a router. But at least it works as an expensive clock, right? Okay, yeah. But the next time I spend $50 on a mining router clock, I would expect it to at least have an alarm clock functionality. Probably the only saving grace for this thing is that you'll be adding a whole new level of meaning to your Mii Mii Wi-Fi name. So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured. Don't, please don't buy the stuff we featured. But we also have links to our merch store. You can buy cool stuff in our merch store and you can buy stuff on our community forum. Wait, you can't buy stuff there, but you can join it. It's cool. Listen how loud it is. But can you imagine having that on your nightstand? Stupid.