SHA-256 mining on retired hardware
This site is for people running SHA-256 machines the industry has written off — S9s, Avalons, 17-series, and the S19-class rigs now arriving on the secondhand market. The question it exists to answer is not “what is crypto”, it is whether the machine in your garage still earns more than it burns.
Is it still worth running?
Set your electricity price and see every common rig’s daily net and break-even rate. That is the whole decision: an S9 needs power near two cents a kilowatt-hour, while an S19-class machine clears a domestic bill.
9 legacy models priced, 2016–2020.
Open the calculatorWhat the network is doing
Difficulty and hash rate for every SHA-256 chain, with an honest freshness note: these values only move at a difficulty retarget, so “unchanged for 9 days” is the correct answer rather than a broken clock.
Jump to the tableNews that touches your trade
Headlines from 9 hand-picked crypto publishers, aggregated and tagged so mining, hardware and difficulty stories surface without wading through price chatter.
Read the news feedStraight answers
Why old rigs get switched off first, what underclocking really does to efficiency, how people actually lose coins, and where every number on this site comes from.
Browse the FAQBreak-even calculator
What each SHA-256 rig earns and burns at your electricity price, per rig per day, at BTC’s current difficulty and price. Stock manufacturer hash rate and power draw; subsidy only.
At $0.080/kWh, the best machine shown — Antminer S9k — nets -$1.77 per day after power, and breaks even at $0.018/kWh.
| Rig | Year | TH/s | Watts | J/TH | Coins/day | Revenue | Power | Net/day | Break-even |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Antminer S19 | 2020 | 95 | 3,250 | 34.2 | 0.000042 | $3.48 | $6.24 | -$2.76 | $0.045 |
| Antminer S17 Pro | 2019 | 53 | 2,094 | 39.5 | 0.000024 | $1.94 | $4.02 | -$2.08 | $0.039 |
| Antminer S17 | 2019 | 56 | 2,520 | 45.0 | 0.000025 | $2.05 | $4.84 | -$2.79 | $0.034 |
| Antminer T17 | 2019 | 40 | 2,200 | 55.0 | 0.000018 | $1.47 | $4.22 | -$2.76 | $0.028 |
| AvalonMiner 1066 | 2019 | 50 | 3,250 | 65.0 | 0.000022 | $1.83 | $6.24 | -$4.41 | $0.023 |
| Antminer S9 SE | 2018 | 16 | 1,280 | 80.0 | 0.000007 | $0.586 | $2.46 | -$1.87 | $0.019 |
| Antminer S9k | 2018 | 14 | 1,190 | 85.0 | 0.000006 | $0.513 | $2.28 | -$1.77 | $0.018 |
| AvalonMiner 921 | 2018 | 20 | 1,700 | 85.0 | 0.000009 | $0.733 | $3.26 | -$2.53 | $0.018 |
| Antminer S9 | 2016 | 13.5 | 1,310 | 97.0 | 0.000006 | $0.495 | $2.52 | -$2.02 | $0.016 |
Revenue and cost are per day, per rig. Coins/day is gross of pool fees. Data read 10/19/2026, 5:54 PM ET from Bitcoin (BTC). Not investment advice.
What this model includes, and what it leaves out
- Included: block subsidy at the current chain height, network difficulty, coin price, and your electricity price.
- Excluded: pool fees (0–3%), transaction fees (a few percent uplift on Bitcoin), cooling, maintenance, downtime, hardware depreciation, and network latency.
- Not modelled: the next difficulty retarget. Difficulty trends upward while the subsidy halves on schedule, so a rig that is marginally profitable today is usually unprofitable within weeks. A razor-thin margin is a stop signal, not a green light.
- Stock settings. Underclocking an S9 or 17-series machine lowers both hash rate and power, and power usually falls faster — so efficiency often improves. Check your own firmware’s numbers before deciding a rig is finished.
- One rig at a time. A garage of ten machines multiplies both columns and adds a cooling load the table does not charge you for.
SHA-256 network hash rates
Every proof-of-work chain using SHA-256, ranked by hash rate. This is the competition: the network total is the number your rig divides.
Loading SHA-256 hash rates…
Read this before spending money
Mining revenue is not income you can count on. Difficulty rises, the block subsidy halves on a fixed schedule, hardware fails, and a machine that is profitable this month can be worthless the next. Nothing here is investment advice and no figure is a projection. The calculator deliberately excludes pool fees, cooling and downtime — every one of which makes reality worse than the model, never better.