Antminer S9 (used)
The workhorse of the 2017 bull run, now sold for scrap value. 13.5 TH/s for under $100 looks like the best hashrate-per-dollar on this page — and it is, until you look at the 100 J/TH. It costs more in electricity every three weeks than it does to buy, and at 76 dB it is unusable indoors.
Typical street price, excluding shipping and duties.
No longer sold new — check second-hand listings.
Specs verified 5 Aug 2026. Source
What it costs, what it might win
Running costs across the site use this rate. The default is a typical household tariff — check your own bill for the real number.
The odds, honestly
At the current network difficulty of 1.262e+14, a Antminer S9 (used) is expected to find a block roughly once every 1.27K years. That is an average across infinite attempts, not a countdown — a block could come tomorrow, or never.
If you pooled instead
Point the same device at a normal mining pool and you would receive the statistical average steadily instead of gambling on it: about $13.35 a month, against $167.66 of electricity. At your electricity rate that loses money — every 679 sats mined costs $5.51 in power. Buying the same BTC on an exchange would be cheaper.
Full specifications
- ASIC chip
- 189× BM1387
- Stock hashrate
- 13.50 TH/s
- Stock power
- 1.35 kW
- Efficiency
- 100.0 J/TH
- Power input
- AC mains, separate 1600W PSU required
- PSU included
- No
- Connectivity
- Ethernet
- Noise
- ~76 dB
- Dimensions
- 350 × 135 × 158 mm
- Weight
- 4.2 kg
- Form factor
- rack
- Firmware
- Stock Bitmain or Braiins OS+
- Open source
- No
- Solo mining
- Yes
- Pool mining
- Yes
- Built-in full node
- No
- Released
- 2016
The verdict
Best for: Free or near-free electricity, and somewhere you cannot hear it.
Strengths
- By far the cheapest terahash up front
- Braiins OS+ can undervolt it to around 70 J/TH
- Plentiful and easy to repair
Trade-offs
- 100 J/TH — roughly 7x worse than a NerdQAxe++
- 76 dB, needs a garage or outbuilding
- Only viable below about $0.05/kWh
- Ten-year-old hardware with no warranty
About Bitmain Antminer
The dominant industrial manufacturer. Bitmain does not build lottery miners, but retired data-centre units like the S9 are sold cheaply second-hand and are still used for solo mining where electricity is nearly free.
www.bitmain.com →