Last year today: $20,000 per Bitcoin
Since the beginning of winter, the weather in the entire cryptocurrency industry has been extremely cold.
According to non-small market data, on December 16, 2017, the overall market value of Bitcoin reached a record high of 326.5 billion US dollars. At that time, a Bitcoin could be exchanged for about 20,000 US dollars.
A year has passed. On December 15, 2018, a Bitcoin could only be exchanged for 3,194 US dollars, less than a year ago.
In a year, Bitcoin fell from the “top of the mountain” to the “bottom of the valley,” and the mining machines closely linked to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem also went from being “hot potatoes” to “hot potatoes.”
Recently, the Daily Economic News (WeChat: nbdnews) reporter logged on to the official website of Bitmain, the world's largest mining machine manufacturer, and discovered that the prices of mining rigs that had been hyped up to tens of thousands, or even tens of thousands, were hard to find, and even demanding to help smugglers have been drastically reduced. Compared with the original pricing at the beginning of the year, many models have been reduced to less than 10% off, and the minimum is only 300 yuan.
Futures and current prices both hit a 1-year low
On December 15, the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) Bitcoin futures BTC contract for January closed down $70, or about 2.18%, to $3145. It hit the lowest contract closing record for the current month for two consecutive trading days, with a cumulative decline of about 4.70% this week.
CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) Bitcoin Futures XBT's January contract closed down $95, down about 2.93% to $3,150. It also hit the lowest contract closing record for the month for two consecutive days, falling by about 4.04% this week.
The non-small market shows that at 18:15 on December 15, 2018, the unit price of Bitcoin was 3,194 US dollars, the lowest in a year. The overall market value was US$56.6 billion. Compared with the highest point on December 16 last year, it plummeted by 82.7% and evaporated US$269.9 billion.
One year since Bitcoin's highest market capitalization, the market has set several lowest records, and records may be refreshed at any time. This kind of scene is a bit disastrous.
Many models of Bitmain are less than 10% off
Recently, the Daily Economic News (WeChat: nbdnews) reporter logged on to the official website of Bitmain's Ant Mining Machine and discovered that the prices of the mining rigs that were once hyped up to tens of thousands or even tens of thousands at the beginning of the year have been drastically reduced. Compared with the pricing at the beginning of the year, many models have now been reduced to less than 10% off.
Among them, the price reduction of the Bitcoin mining machine T9+ is the most obvious.
According to the official website, the Antminer T9+ 10.5T (including APW7 power supply) has a unit price of 1,800 yuan. At the same time, the official website shows that the unit price of the APW7 power supply is 650 yuan, that is, the actual price of the Antminer T9+ 10.5T is only 1,150 yuan.
Back in the beginning of the year, on January 3, 2018, the “Antminer Sales” account launched sales information for the Antminer T9+. The provisional price of the Antminer T9+ was 24,900 yuan at the time. As soon as the news came out, the mining community was in turmoil. At the bottom of the article, some miners asked, “This mining machine only has 10.5T computing power. Is it that expensive to sell for gross?” Another miner added: “Yes, I'm also very puzzled. Compared to the S9, the computing power is low and the power consumption is high, so why can it still sell for twice the price of the S9? I don't know where my confidence is. Once I calculate it, the recycling cycle is 6 months long, and there are no surprises along the way.” At this point, some miners answered, “Can you grab it and talk about it again?” Someone quickly asked, “Can I buy this?”
At current prices, this mining machine has dropped to 4.6% at the beginning of the year.
In terms of Litecoin miners, the L3+ price reduction is also unambiguous
According to the official website of Antminer, the current unit price for the L3+ 504M model is 400 yuan.
Litecoin is a P2P currency similar to Bitcoin and is expected to produce 84 million LTC. Transactions are processed through the sCrypt Proof of Work Solution.
The reporter inquired that on March 11, 2017, a merchant evaluated the Ant L3+ Litecoin miner, showing that its price was 11,700 yuan.
In terms of mining machines with a single encryption algorithm, the A3 dropped most significantly. According to the official website, the unit price of the Ant Miner A3 815G is 300 yuan.
The reporter inquired that at 14:00 p.m. on January 17, 2018, Bitmain released a new mining machine, Antminer A3, on its official website. The most representative of these is Siacoin (also known as cloud storage, SIA is a decentralized cloud storage blockchain project).
A total of 6,000 units were sold in this batch, and each account was limited to one unit. Although the official website sold for 20,800 yuan, it was sold out by miners as soon as it went public, so it can be said that it is hard to find a single machine.
Some industry insiders calculated at the time. Taking SC (Cloud Coin Storage) as an example, an A3 mining machine has a rated computing power of 815G. According to the difficulty level at the time, it can mine about 15 SCs per day. The market price for each SC is about 0.21 yuan. One mining machine is 815G, which is equivalent to about RMB 2,567. Investing 20,800 yuan and earning 2,567 yuan a day, isn't this just a chicken that lays golden eggs? No wonder it was sold out in one fell swoop.
The reporter once again calculated that under today's currency prices and network difficulties, based on the 0.4 yuan/KW electricity price, the gross profit of an A3 mining rig is 3.12 yuan, the electricity bill is 12.24 yuan, with a net cost of 9.12 yuan. This does not include labor costs and maintenance fees. The mining machine is actually scrap iron.
In terms of Dash miners, the D3 fell just as miserably. According to the official website, the unit price of the Ant Miner D3 17G is 300 yuan.
D3 is a mining machine that specializes in mining DASH (DASH). According to the Daily Economic News reporter, Dash was born in 2014. Compared with Bitcoin, it has the characteristics of higher anonymity and faster transaction speed.
Since the beginning of 2017, the price of Dash has soared from a few dollars to hundreds of dollars. In August 2017, Bitmain officially launched the Dash Miner D3. At the time, the price was 11,300 yuan, but now it has dropped to 2.7% of the original price, leaving only a fraction at the end of the original price.
Bitmain's main source of revenue is mining machine sales
On the evening of September 26, Bitmain disclosed its prospectus on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and launched a listing plan. As the world's largest ASIC-based cryptocurrency mining company, Bitmain's market share is as high as 74.5%, and some people expect a valuation of $30 billion.
The prospectus published Bitmain's financial data as of June 30, 2018. According to data, Bitmain's net profit in 2015 was US$49 million, 2016 net profit was US$114 million, 2017 was US$701 million, and the first half of 2018 was US$742 million.
Corresponding to this, in 2015 and 2016, Bitmain sold 230,000 and 260,000 mining rigs respectively, and sold only 180,000 mining rigs in the first half of 2017. After catching up with the big bull market from the end of 2017 to the beginning of 2018, Bitmain sold 1.44 million units and 2.56 million mining machines in the second half of 2017 and the first half of 2018, respectively, for a total of 4 million units!
Also, it is worth noting that in 2017, Bitmain mining machine sales revenue already accounted for 89.9% of the company's total revenue; in the first half of 2018, it was as high as 94.3%.
In other words, in 2017 and the first half of 2018, Bitmain's net profit of 700 million US dollars was obtained from huge profits due to rising currency prices and shortages in supply of mining machines.
Source: Mainichi Keizai Shimbun
