Buying an ASIC Miner: Is It Still Worth It for Private Buyers?

Short answer: For most private buyers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, buying an ASIC miner does not pay off. Even a current machine earns only enough to cover electricity up to about 7 cents per kWh, and households pay three to five times that. Used older machines are cheaper to buy but need even cheaper electricity. An ASIC only makes sense with very cheap power of your own, as a heater, or as a small hobby device.

Whether bitcoin mining within your own four walls pays off is worked through in the article Bitcoin mining at home, with household electricity, solar power and waste heat. This article covers the question before that: which machine would you buy, how much may it cost, and what should you watch for when buying?

What an ASIC miner is

An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) is a chip that can do exactly one thing: compute SHA-256 hashes, the way bitcoin mining requires. An ASIC miner puts hundreds of these chips on several boards, the hashboards, plus a power supply, fans and a small control board. The machine is useless for anything other than mining.

Two numbers describe every machine:

• Hashrate in TH/s: how many trillion attempts per second it manages. It determines your share of the network and therefore your revenue.
• Efficiency in J/TH: how much electricity it needs for that output. Lower is better.

The hashrate tells you how much a machine earns. The efficiency tells you whether it does so at a profit.

Machine generation: new or used?

On the market you will find roughly four classes. The figures are rounded manufacturer specifications; actual values vary by unit and settings.

As of Nov 13, 2026: network hashrate 930 EH/s, reward 3.149 BTC per block, price €62’266, pool fee 2%. At that level 1 TH/s earns about 47.8 satoshi, or just under 3 cents, a day.

The last column is the most important one. It shows the electricity price at which the revenue just covers the power bill, not counting the machine, repairs and taxes. If your electricity costs more, the machine loses money every hour, no matter how cheaply you bought it.

A machine's hashrate plays no part in the threshold. A large and a small machine with the same efficiency earn exactly the same per kWh. The size only determines how much profit or loss adds up per day.

Why old machines are no bargain

A used machine of the S19 generation costs a fraction of a new one. That looks tempting, because the purchase price comes back faster. But the machine needs almost twice as much electricity for the same computing power as a current one. With electricity above 4 cents it earns nothing and eats money every month instead.

An S9 uses about six times as much electricity per TH as a current machine. With a threshold of 1.3 cents it is worthless to run, even as a gift. Large miners sell their old machines for exactly this reason: at their electricity prices of 3 to 6 cents they no longer pay off.

Electricity prices in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Households in the DACH region pay many times the threshold. The figures are gross prices including grid fees and levies.

No household tariff in the region is below the threshold, not even the cheapest Swiss municipal tariff. Only electricity that is much cheaper for you than for everyone else comes into question: your own hydropower, an old solar system without a feed-in tariff, a business connection with a special rate. The solar case is covered in more detail in Bitcoin mining with solar power.

The calculation until after the 2028 halving

You don't buy an ASIC for one day. The question is what it earns over its lifetime. That needs assumptions, and each of them is uncertain. We calculate with them openly:

• Machine: 200 TH/s, 3.5 kW (17.5 J/TH), runs 36 months without failure, November 2026 to November 2029.
• Hashprice today: 47.8 satoshi per TH/s per day after a 2% pool fee (as of Nov 13, 2026).
• Difficulty: two cases. It stays the same, or it rises by 2% a month, about 27% a year. In earlier years it often rose faster.
• Halving: at block 1’050’000, at today's pace around April 2028. After that the reward drops from 3.125 to 1.5625 BTC; fees of about 0.024 BTC per block stay the same.
• Price: constant at €62’266 (CHF 57’484). We look at a rising price separately below.

For Austria at 30 cents, the electricity cost is about €27’600 and the result lies between the columns for Germany and Switzerland.

The last row answers the buying question: this is the most the machine may cost so that you are not in the red after three years. On household electricity the answer is: nothing at all, you pay a five-figure sum on top every year. Even with your own power at 5 cents, not a single euro is left for the machine if difficulty rises. Only at 3 cents does the revenue carry part of the purchase price.

And if the price rises?

Then your revenue in euros rises. Assume the price jumps straight to the long-term Power Law trend of about €98’200 and stays there for three years. With your own power at 5 cents, the machine then earns €7’586 with unchanged difficulty or €5’804 at +2% a month. After electricity, €1’200 to €3’000 are left for the machine.

That sounds better, but there is a catch: a higher price attracts new miners, and difficulty then tends to rise faster than 2% a month. And if you are betting on a rising price anyway, you get it just as well by putting the money for the machine straight into bitcoin, without noise, electricity and the risk of breakdowns.

Calculate your own machine, your electricity price and your time frame. The calculator uses the network's current hashrate, includes the next halving and compares with simply buying:

Noise and heat: what you bring into your home

According to manufacturer specifications, an air-cooled machine of the current generation is about 75 decibels loud, similar to a vacuum cleaner, around the clock. In living spaces that is unbearable, and in a rented flat for the neighbours too. Water-cooled Hydro machines or machines in oil immersion are quieter. But they need pumps, a heat exchanger and more space.

Almost all of the electricity turns into heat. A 3.5 kW machine heats like a large fan heater. In winter that can be useful: a miner is then an electric heater that earns back part of its electricity cost. Against a heat pump it clearly loses. The numbers are in the article Bitcoin mining at home. In summer the advantage turns around: you then have to get rid of 3.5 kW of waste heat, or the room heats up above 40 degrees and the machine throttles or fails.

For the purchase this means: plan the location before the machine. Without a room where the noise bothers no one, a dedicated circuit for the continuous load and a way out for the heat, even a cheap machine is of no use to you.

Risks of buying used

Used ASICs mostly come from large mining farms that are switching to newer machines. They ran at full load for years, often in dust and heat. Watch for these points:

• Defective hashboards. A machine usually has three hashboards. If one fails, output drops by a third while power consumption hardly changes. Have the machine shown to you running, with the hashrate of each individual board.
• Fans and power supply wear out fastest. Spare parts exist, but shipping and repair cost time and money.
• No warranty. Manufacturer warranties are short and have usually expired on second-hand machines.
• Third-party firmware. Many used machines run modified software. Some quietly divert part of the computing power to other people's addresses. Flash the manufacturer's official firmware or a well-known open-source alternative.
• Scam shops. Fake dealer sites with suspiciously low prices demand prepayment, often in bitcoin, and never deliver. Bitcoin payments cannot be reversed. More on the schemes in Spotting bitcoin scams.
• Import. Many machines come from China. On import you pay import VAT (19% in Germany, 20% in Austria, 8.1% in Switzerland) and, depending on the case, customs duty and handling fees. Factor them in before buying.

A used machine is only a good buy if it makes a profit at your electricity price in the first place. Check that before asking about its condition.

Bitaxe and other mini miners: mining as a hobby

Small open-source devices like the Bitaxe are the opposite of a professional ASIC. They manage about 1.2 TH/s at around 15 watts, are quiet and fit on a desk. In a pool they earn about 57 satoshi a day, a little over €13 a year. The electricity costs about €49 a year in Germany.

So they are no source of income. As a learning tool they are very good: you set up a pool, watch shares and difficulty in real time and understand how mining works technically. How pools share out the reward is explained in How bitcoin mining pools work. Many let their Bitaxe mine solo and hope for a whole block. How small that chance is, Solo mining works out honestly.

Who an ASIC can pay off for

Buying an ASIC can work out if all of these points apply:

1. You permanently have electricity for well under 5 cents per kWh, for example from your own hydropower or a system without a feed-in tariff.
2. You buy a current-generation machine, not the cheapest used one.
3. You have a room for the noise and heat and a suitable power connection.
4. Your calculation survives the 2028 halving and a rising difficulty.
5. You know the tax consequences. Mining revenue is income; details are in the tax articles for Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

If any one of them is missing, buying bitcoin is the better choice. For the money a machine plus electricity costs, you get more bitcoin directly than the machine will ever find.