What Your ASIC Will Actually Be Worth in Two Years, and Why It Belongs in Your Profitability Math

What Your ASIC Will Actually Be Worth in Two Years, and Why It Belongs in Your Profitability Math

Ask a home miner what their machine earns and you will get a confident answer within seconds. Hashrate, watts, electricity price, current difficulty, coin price. Those five numbers are on every spec sheet and in every calculator, and most people running a miner at home can recite their own from memory.

Ask the same miner what their machine will be worth when they switch it off for the last time, and the answer gets vague. Most people have never put a figure on it. That is a problem, because for a home setup the fall in the value of the hardware is often larger than the electricity bill over the same period. It is the biggest cost in home mining that almost nobody models.

This guide puts a number on it. It explains what actually drives ASIC resale prices, how to estimate the depreciation on a machine you already own or are about to buy, what preserves value and what destroys it, and how to fold the whole thing into a real return figure rather than a daily revenue figure that flatters itself.

What this guide covers

• The line missing from every profitability calculator
• What actually drives ASIC resale value
• Efficiency in joules per terahash is the real depreciation clock
• A worked example: capital cost per terahash per month
• Three ownership strategies compared
• What preserves resale value, and what destroys it
• Buying used: the checks that matter
• How to fold depreciation into your own numbers
• Frequently asked questions

The line missing from every profitability calculator

A standard profitability calculation looks like this. Take your hashrate, take network difficulty, work out your expected share of block rewards, multiply by the coin price, subtract power draw multiplied by your electricity tariff. What comes out the other end is a daily or monthly margin.

That calculation is correct as far as it goes, and it is genuinely useful for the decision it was built for, which is whether to run the machine today. Nothing in it is wrong. It is just incomplete, because it treats the miner itself as free.

Consider a home miner bought for 2,000 euro that returns a healthy margin after power. If that machine is worth 800 euro eighteen months later, the owner has quietly spent 1,200 euro over those eighteen months, or roughly 67 euro a month, on nothing but the passage of time and the arrival of better hardware. For a lot of home setups that figure is comparable to the electricity bill, and in some cases it is larger.

The fix is not complicated. Depreciation is simply another monthly cost, and once you know roughly what it is, you can treat it exactly like your power bill. The hard part is estimating it honestly, which is what the rest of this guide is about.

What actually drives ASIC resale value

ASIC prices do not fall on a calendar. A machine does not lose a fixed percentage every year the way a laptop roughly does. Mining hardware is priced almost entirely on what it can earn from here, which means resale value is set by four forces.

1. The efficiency of whatever launched after it

This is the dominant one. The moment a machine arrives that produces the same hashrate for meaningfully fewer watts, every older machine has to reprice downward to stay attractive, because a buyer comparing the two is really comparing lifetime electricity bills. A generational efficiency jump can knock a large chunk off the resale value of the previous generation in weeks, with no change in difficulty, price or anything else. If you want to see where any given model sits on that ladder, Mineshop keeps a ranking of the most efficient Bitcoin ASIC miners ranked by joules per terahash, and that ordering is a better predictor of resale behaviour than release date.

2. Network difficulty

Rising difficulty reduces what every machine on the network earns, and it compresses older hardware hardest because those machines have the thinnest margin over their own power cost to begin with. When difficulty climbs far enough, an older model stops being a mining machine and becomes scrap with a fan in it. If the mechanism is new to you, their explainer on what mining difficulty is and why it matters is the right starting point. You can track the live figure on the Blockchain.com network difficulty chart, which shows the full history alongside the current value.

3. The halving cycle

Every halving cuts block rewards in half, which has the same directional effect as a very large one off difficulty increase. Older machines near their break even point get pushed under it on the day, and the second hand market usually floods in the months either side as operators clear inventory ahead of the change. Mineshop covers the mechanics of this in their piece on the halving's impact on home miner profitability. For depreciation purposes the practical point is simple: if you are planning to sell, selling into the months before a halving is usually better than selling into the months after it.

4. Coin price, in both directions

A rising coin price lifts resale values, sometimes dramatically, because every machine suddenly earns more in fiat terms and buyers compete for supply. This is the one force that can push ASIC prices up rather than down, and it is why depreciation estimates should be treated as a central expectation rather than a certainty. It is also why anyone modelling a fixed percentage decline per year will be wrong in both directions at different points in the cycle.

Efficiency in joules per terahash is the real depreciation clock

If you only take one thing from this guide, take this. The number that predicts how fast a machine loses value is not its hashrate and not its age. It is its efficiency, expressed in joules per terahash, relative to what is currently for sale.

The reasoning is straightforward. A prospective buyer of your used machine is choosing between your unit and a new one. What they care about is the total cost of getting a terahash of work done, which is the purchase price spread over the ownership period plus the electricity to run it. If your machine burns significantly more power per unit of work than a current model, the only thing that can make it competitive is a lower price. So the price falls until the maths works for the buyer. That is the entire mechanism.

Two practical consequences follow.

First, a machine that was near the efficiency frontier when you bought it will hold value better than a cheaper, less efficient machine bought at the same time, even though the cheaper machine had less absolute value to lose. Buying the efficient unit costs more on day one and usually costs less across the whole ownership window.

Second, your local electricity price changes how fast your machine depreciates in the eyes of buyers near you. In a region with cheap power, older and less efficient hardware stays viable for longer, so it holds value for longer. In a region with expensive power, the same machine falls out of usefulness sooner. Eurostat publishes household electricity price statistics across the EU, and the spread between the cheapest and most expensive member states is wide enough that the same model genuinely has different useful lives in different countries. Mineshop's guide to getting the best electricity price for Bitcoin mining is worth reading alongside this, because your tariff is doing more work in this calculation than most people realise.

A worked example: capital cost per terahash per month

Here is how to turn all of that into a single number you can actually use. The method is deliberately simple, because a precise model of an unpredictable market is false comfort.

Take three figures: what you paid, what you think the machine will be worth when you sell it, and how many months you intend to keep it. The difference between the first two, divided by the third, is your monthly capital cost. Add it to your monthly electricity cost and you have your true cost of operating.

The worked figures below are illustrative. They use a 2,000 euro purchase price and a 24 month horizon to show how sensitive the answer is to the resale assumption, and nothing here is a forecast of any specific model.

Notice the range. Between the optimistic and the pessimistic case there is 50 euro a month of difference, on a single machine, and none of it appears anywhere in a standard profitability calculation. If your modelled margin after electricity is 60 euro a month, you are profitable in the first scenario, roughly at break even in the second and third, and losing money in the fourth. Same machine, same power bill, same difficulty, four very different answers.

This is not an argument against home mining. It is an argument for knowing which of those four rows you are actually in before you buy, because the choice of machine and the choice of exit both move you between rows.

Three ownership strategies compared

Once depreciation is visible, the ownership decision becomes a real decision rather than a default. Broadly there are three approaches, and each suits a different kind of miner.

There is a fourth option that deserves a mention, which is buying new and keeping the machine because the heat it produces has real value to you. If a miner is displacing electric heating you were going to pay for anyway, the economics change completely, and the depreciation matters far less because the machine is doing two jobs. That is a legitimate strategy rather than a rationalisation, and it is covered well in Mineshop's piece on heating your home with an ASIC miner.

What preserves resale value, and what destroys it

Some of the variance in resale price is market wide and outside your control. A meaningful slice of it is not. These are the things a private seller can actually influence.

Things that hold value

• Remaining manufacturer warranty. This is the single biggest controllable factor. A used machine with time left on its warranty sells faster and higher than an identical unit without, because the buyer's downside is capped. Keep your proof of purchase and know the process before you need it. Mineshop documents the procedures for the major brands, including the Bitmain Antminer warranty claim process, the MicroBT Whatsminer RMA route and Canaan Avalon claims.
• The original box, PSU and accessories. Trivial, and it consistently adds to the sale price. It also means the machine can be shipped safely, which matters more than people expect on a unit this heavy.
• Stock firmware, or a clean return to it. Aftermarket firmware can be a sensible choice while you own the machine, but many warranties do not survive it, and a buyer who sees unfamiliar firmware assumes the machine has been pushed hard. Mineshop's guide to why firmware matters covers the trade off properly.
• A clean, documented service history. Dated notes and photographs of filter cleaning, thermal paste work and fan replacements turn an anonymous used machine into one with a provenance. Very few private sellers do this, which is exactly why it stands out.
• Being physically located where your buyers are. A machine already inside the EU avoids import duty, VAT complications and long shipping for an EU buyer, and that convenience is worth real money at sale time.

Things that destroy value

• Sustained aggressive overclocking. Buyers discount heavily for it and they are right to. Heat cycling is what kills hashboards, and a machine that has lived at the top of its thermal envelope has had a harder life than its hour count suggests.
• Dust and corrosion. A dirty machine photographs badly and signals neglect even when it runs perfectly. A machine run in a damp garage or anywhere near salt air can have corrosion that no amount of cleaning will hide.
• Dead or mismatched hashboards. A unit running on two of three boards is not worth two thirds of the price. It is worth considerably less, because the buyer inherits a repair.
• Waiting too long. The most common and most expensive mistake. Machines are held past the point where anyone wants them, usually because the owner is anchored to what they paid. The market does not care what you paid.

Buying used: the checks that matter

Everything above works in reverse if you are on the buying side. The used market can be genuinely good value, because someone else has already absorbed the steepest part of the decline, but the risk is concentrated and it is mostly invisible in photographs.

Before money changes hands, establish these things.

• Actual sustained hashrate, not the sticker figure. Ask for a screenshot of the dashboard after several hours of continuous running, not a figure from the first minute after a reboot.
• Per board chip counts and temperatures. The dashboard reports these. A board with missing chips or a temperature well above its siblings is telling you something.
• Error and reject rates over a real period. A rising hardware error rate is the clearest early signal of a board heading towards failure.
• Firmware state and history. Ask directly whether it has ever run aftermarket firmware and whether it has been overclocked.
• Warranty status and whether it transfers. Some do, some do not, and the answer changes what the machine is worth.
• Where it has been running. A machine from a clean, climate controlled room is a different asset from one out of an uncooled shed, even at identical hours.
• Your own break even, at your own tariff. This is the one people skip. An older machine at a tempting price can still lose money every day it runs if your electricity is expensive. Work out the break even before you are emotionally committed to the bargain.

That last point is worth dwelling on, because the used market's best deals and its worst traps look identical from the outside. The difference between them is entirely your electricity tariff, and it is arithmetic rather than judgement.

How to fold depreciation into your own numbers

Here is the whole method, compressed.

1. Work out your monthly margin after electricity the normal way. Hashrate, difficulty, coin price, power draw, tariff.
2. Decide how long you intend to own the machine. Be honest rather than optimistic. Eighteen to twenty four months is a common real world answer for home setups.
3. Estimate the resale value at the end of that window. Look at what the equivalent generation from two years ago sells for today and apply the same proportion. That is a crude method and it is good enough, because the error in a sophisticated method would not be any smaller.
4. Subtract the purchase price from the resale estimate, divide by your ownership months, and subtract that figure from your monthly margin.
5. If the result is still positive, you have a genuinely profitable setup. If it is negative, you have a machine that pays its electricity bill but does not pay for itself, which is a different thing and worth knowing before rather than after.

Step one is the part worth automating, because difficulty and price move constantly and redoing it by hand gets old quickly. We maintain a free mining profitability calculator that handles that side, pulling live hardware specifications so the hashrate and wattage figures are the real ones for the model you are looking at, and letting you set your own electricity price rather than a regional average. It gives you the margin after power. Steps two through five are the part you have to think about yourself, and this guide is the thinking.

One closing thought on what all of this means practically. Depreciation rewards two things: buying efficient hardware rather than cheap hardware, and deciding your exit before you need one. Both of those decisions are made at the point of purchase, when the machine is still an abstraction and the numbers are easy to change. Once it is humming in the corner, your options narrow considerably.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an ASIC miner depreciate per year?

There is no reliable annual percentage, because ASIC values track the efficiency of newly released hardware rather than the calendar. A machine can hold its value for a year and then fall sharply in a single quarter when a more efficient model ships. A useful planning approach is to model a range, from roughly 60 percent of purchase price retained after two years in a favourable scenario down to 20 percent or less if a generational efficiency jump or a halving falls inside your ownership window.

Is depreciation really bigger than the electricity cost?

For many home setups it is comparable, and for efficient machines on a cheap tariff it can be larger. The general pattern is that the more efficient your machine and the cheaper your power, the more depreciation dominates. It matters most precisely for the people who assume it matters least.

When is the best time to sell a mining machine?

Before the event that will reprice it, not after. That usually means selling ahead of a halving rather than into the supply glut that follows one, and selling when a more efficient successor is announced rather than waiting until it ships and buyers have already adjusted. The most expensive habit in this market is holding on because the current offer is below what you paid.

Does a warranty actually change the resale price?

Yes, and noticeably. Remaining warranty caps the buyer's downside on a purchase where the main fear is an expensive repair, so it both raises the price achieved and shortens the time to sell. Keep the proof of purchase and know the claim procedure for your manufacturer.

Should I buy used to reduce my depreciation exposure?

It is a legitimate strategy if your electricity is cheap and you are comfortable inspecting hardware or handling a repair. You avoid the steepest part of the value decline because a previous owner absorbed it. What you take on instead is a worse electricity cost per unit of work and usually no warranty, which is why used hardware suits cheap power and suits expensive power very badly.

Does using the miner for heat change the calculation?

Substantially. If the machine displaces electric heating you would have run anyway, a large share of the power cost is no longer attributable to mining at all, which pushes the break even point a long way out and makes depreciation much easier to absorb. The strategy works best in a cold climate with electric heating and considerably less well anywhere the heat is unwanted for most of the year.

What is the single most useful thing I can do about depreciation?

Choose efficiency over sticker price at the point of purchase. Every other lever in this guide is smaller. The machine nearer the efficiency frontier costs more on day one, earns more per unit of power for longer, stays wanted by buyers for longer, and is the one you will be glad you bought when the next generation lands.