Is Bitmain Clearing House? New Miner Announced and New Batches released - New Miner Speculation

Dear Steemit Friends,

With increased regulation and tighter controls from the government on cryptocurrencies, it is expected that the landscape of cryptocurrency investments, trading, and mining will change. Bitmain in a flurry of tweets and e-mail announcements just announced new batches of several of it's existing miners and even managed to announce a new miner this morning.

As you can see from the image above, a new batch of the Anminer L3+ (Litecoin), Antminer T9+ (Bitcoin and sha-256), Antminer A3 (SC and blake-2a), and the ever-popular Antminer S9 (Bitcoin and sha-256) are now available for order and purchase on the Bitmain website. They even released a new batch of the AntRouter R1-LTC.

Antminer V9???

What was surprising was the announcement of a new miner named Antminer V9, 4TH/s. Which is a cheaper entry level Bitcoin/Sha-256 miner priced at a more affordable rate of $345 USD.

At first glance, this looks like it has similar specs to the older Antminer S7s, however, this unit seems to run a bit more efficiently and uses a different Chip type - BM1580 vs the S7 BM1385. Below are the detailed specs from the Bitmain website:

This "Fire Sale" as I call it, comes at a time when China has increased its restrictions on Bitcoin mining facilities and cryptocurrency trading and all but seems like Bitmain is just trying to clear its inventory of mining hardware to potentially move its facilities or make room for a newer not yet announced miner. It is hard to tell what Bitmain has planned, but clearly, a move like this is eyebrow-raising and a cause for wonder as to what they have planned.

I typically like to buy-in on new hardware from Bitmain, but the V9 Antminer is something that I may not pursue. There are a lot of people out there who are interested in mining but haven't made the jump to do so because of the high upfront cost of investing in the hardware. Instead, they can use this cheaper entry model to get their feet wet by buying this more affordable miner. Keep in mind though, that you will probably need to go in as a group since the minimum order quantity is 5.

From a cost perspective, you do get more hash power for the price at $345 per unit. Multiply that by the minimum 5 and you get 20TH/s at $1,725 USD vs the $2,320 USD price tag for 13.5 TH/s of the Antminer S9. What you save from initial upfront cost though, you pay for in electricity costs given that each Antminer V9 uses ~955 Watts for a total of ~4000+ Watts vs the S9s 1200 Watts. You will also need to consider the amount of noise since these suckers are just as loud as the S9.

Bitmain has recently established a subsidiary in Europe and has been rumored to be eyeing Canada as well for it's Bitcoin mining operations expansion. According to a report by Reuters, the company is looking at potential mining sites in Quebec due to the availability of cheaper hydroelectric plants. Canada's colder environment and cheaper electricity is the perfect match for Bitmain's needs and could be a leading reason for the immediate selloff of excess equipment, however, I also feel another miner might quite possibly be in production and on the eve of release.

I myself will probably invest in 1 or 2 more S9s and an L3+ to grow my mining operation and then wait for the next version Bitcoin miner to be released. I'm sure between now an then, we will also see other new algo miners which Bitmain is probably working on behind closed doors.

What are your thoughts? Does Bitmain have a new miner in store for us or are they just selling everything they have in order to shut down their facilities and move to a new one? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below and If you do have any questions, inputs, or feedback, please also share those with me. I would also appreciate support in the form of Upvoting, Following, and Re-steeming my post if you found it informative