Bitmain’s R4 to Bring an In-Home Experience to Bitcoin Mining

Leading mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain has recently unveiled its latest mining rig: the Antminer R4. This machine aims to bring bitcoin mining back to the home. Available for purchase on August 29, Bitmain claims the launch will make the R4 the world’s most efficient bitcoin mining chip in the consumer market.

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Bitmain’s ‘Groundbreaking’ Antminer R4 to Bring Mining Back to Hobbyists

Bitcoin mining for the home has been obsolete for a few years now. 

Between 2010 until roughly 2013, home mining was a big thing, until rising difficulty and costs made it largely unaffordable to run mining equipment on a small scale.

To keep pace with growing difficulty, miners like Artforz built large GPU mining farms, which made up a sizable portion of the network’s hashrate. Then, as time passed, Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) hit the market and proliferated throughout the bitcoin mining world. Industrial miners, taking advantage of their economies of scale, bought ASIC miners in droves, making difficulty rise to the point where home mining became too expensive to be worthwhile.

However, Bitmain believes the new Antminer R4, with its 16nm chips, will revive the hobbyist sector of the market.

Bitmain claims the R4 will significantly reduce electricity costs by lowering power consumption to 845W in use. Customers who purchase the new miner should expect a hashrate of 8.6 TH/s.

Alongside the new machine, the company suggests purchasing the new APW5 2600W power supply unit to reap rewards by optimizing costs even further.

Regarding the R4’s mining chip, Bitmain’s website states:

The BM1387 ASIC Chip is the world’s first Bitcoin mining ASIC based on the 16nm process node Bitmain’s BM1387 chip is built using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET technology and, delivering a record-breaking 0.098 J/GHs, is the world’s most efficient bitcoin mining chip in the consumer market. Each Antminer R4 employs 126 such chips to deliver more hashrate and efficiency than any bitcoin miner except the Antminer S9.

ROI Cannot Be Determined as R4 Pricing Has Not Been Revealed

The price of the Bitmain Antminer R4 will not be revealed until the rig officially goes on sale at 23:00 (GMT+8) on August 29. The R4’s retail price will be a large deciding factor in the machine’s viability for home or hobbyist mining.

Bitmain was founded in 2013 and has become one of the most reputable mining hardware manufacturers in the industry. The firm is headquartered in Beijing and has offices in San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong, Chengdu and Shenzhen. Jihan Wu, Co-Founder of Bitmain, says that the company’s growth over the past few years proves “there is still growing demand in this space, and bitcoin use will continue to trend upwards.”

What do you think about the Antminer R4? Do you think it will help put home-mining back on the map? Or do you think home-mining is non-existent from here on out? Let us know in the comments below.

Images courtesy of Bitmain.

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