A new batch of Antminer S9, the specialized Bitcoin mining machines by Bitmain, is available for sale at the Chinese manufacturer's website. But the real news is that Bitmain will accept only Bitcoin Cash for payment.
The world's largest ASIC miner producer announced that it would release a new batch of the Antminer S9 on December 19, at 09.00 UTC. The ordered miners are to be delivered by the end of February 2018.
Demand for the new S9 miners was high, as usual, and Bitmain online store went offline for a while several minutes before the sale launch.
Antminer S9 is an integrated mining machine based on Bitmain’s BM1387 ASIC chip. The chip is built using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET technology and is advertised as the world’s most efficient bitcoin mining chip in the consumer market, "delivering a record-breaking 0.098 J/GHs". Each Antminer S9 employs 189 such chips to deliver hashrate from 12,5 to 14TH/s with a power consumption around 1300 Watts. It can be used for mining of all cryptocurrencies based on the SHA-256 algorithm, such as Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash.
Read Also: Bitcoin Mining: DragonMint 16T Miner Is 30% More Efficient Than Bitmain’s AntMiner S9
Without taking into account the increase in network complexity, the daily income from Bitcoin mining with Antminer S9 will be about $33. On the contrary, at current prices, BCH mining will have a revenue of $51 per day.
At the moment of writing, each Antminer S9 is priced at $2725.
Bitmain Says No To BTC, Yes To BCH
Bitmain included Bitcoin Cash in the list of payment methods recently, among BTC, USD, and LTC. But for this batch it went a step further. In the payment notes, the mining manufacturer warns that will only accept Bitcoin Cash (at writing: 0.89793228 BCH):
Only BCH(Bitcoin Cash) payment method is accepted in this batch...Payment must be in BCH. We cannot accept payment in BTC. If you send BTC to the BCH wallet the coins may be lost.
Bitmain became another big player in the cryptocurrency market, which switches from Bitcoin to other cryptocurrencies. In recent weeks, amid the dramatic increase in transactions fees in the bitcoin network, many services announced support for other cryptocurrencies. For instance, the processing service BitPay started supporting Bitcoin Cash.
As a result, BCH price increased sharply in the last 24 hours. At the moment of writing, it is traded above $2,800, increased almost 30% in a single day! Bitcoin Cash supporters predict further growth and many appear certain BCH will overthrow BTC.