Best Bitcoin Mining Hardware (April 2018)

 In early 2018 there are lots of new Bitcoin ASIC miners being announced, but many of these won't be available to mine with for a few months.

This guide will go through some of the miners you can buy right now, estimating how profitable these are based on the latest Bitcoin difficulty & price in April 2018.

We have a Crypto Coin Tracker that supports coin wallets, this can be used to track your mining profit in fiat (USD) and generate data needed for tax reporting.

One Year Break Even Comparison

Using our ASIC Bitcoin miner calculator, we can give optimistic and skeptical estimates for profitability. This guide is useful for an initial comparison, and the calculator can be used to get the most up-to-date data. We assume that if mining stops being profitable, you'll turn the miner off - so for the Antminer S9 for example, the yearly income is $0 (but this would actually be negative if you kept it running).

The links to Amazon below are affiliates, so we'll get some money if you buy something using these.

DragonMint 16T

Purchase cost $2,500 on eBay, power usage 1480W, hashrate 16TH/s.

Optimistic yearly income: $962 (US)
Skeptical yearly income: $224 (US)

Antminer S9 (14TH/s batch)

Purchase cost $1,193 on Amazon, power usage 1372W, hashrate 14TH/s.

Optimistic yearly income: $785 (US), $7 (UK)
Skeptical yearly income: $181 (US), $7 (UK)

Antminer R4 (quieter than competitors, designed for home use)

Purchase cost $2,499 on Amazon, power usage 845W, hashrate 8.7TH/s.

Optimistic yearly income: $514 (US), $6 (UK)
Skeptical yearly income: $118 (US), $6 (UK)

Antminer T9+ (more reliable competitor to the S9)

Purchase cost $875 on Amazon, power usage 1332W, hashrate 10.5TH/s.

Optimistic yearly income: $308 (US), $0 (UK)
Skeptical yearly income: $80 (US), $0 (UK)

Antminer S7 (predecessor to the S9)

Purchase cost $400 on Amazon, power usage 1300W, hashrate 4.7TH/s.

Optimistic yearly income: $0 (US), $0 (UK)
Skeptical yearly income: $0 (US), $0 (UK)

If the miner you want isn't available on Amazon, we wrote a guide suggesting some alternatives here.

Assumptions (this is just if you're interested, not required reading):

1. Block reward of 12.5 (as this won't change until June 2020).
2. We assume a monthly difficulty increase of 15% for optimistic predictions, and 40% for skeptical predictions.
3. We assume Bitcoin's price will increase by 10% monthly for optimistic predictions, and 8% monthly for skeptical predictions.
4. Electricity costs vary massively worldwide, so we provide estimates for the US (where we assume power is $0.10 per kWH) and the UK (where we assume power is $0.20 per kWH). Countries like China are cheaper, so you'd get a higher return.
5. The largest mining pool (AntPool) charges 2.5% fees, so we use this fee for calculations.