Reading an ASIC Miner Spec Sheet Without Getting Misled
ASIC specification sheets are written to sell hardware, and the headline number is almost always hashrate. Hashrate alone tells you very little about whether a machine will earn money. A handful of less prominent figures matter considerably more. Efficiency Is the Number That Counts Efficiency, expressed as joules per terahash, describes how much electricity a machine consumes for the work it does. Two miners with identical hashrate can differ substantially in efficiency, and over a year that difference translates directly into profit or loss. A higher-hashrate machine with poor efficiency frequently earns less than a slower, more efficient one once...