Excellent dig. It was interesting reading their SEC K-1 filings, particularly the higher-than-expected payroll expenses. Rolf Verslusius might have been right after all: the lone wolf miner who has no employees might have an advantage.
Let's pit them against a typical small miner in the U.S. I assumed all capital costs are amortized over 3 years.
- Warehouse rent + fixed costs: $3500 + $500 = $4k/month
- Equipment: 300x Bitmain Antminer S19 95T = 1MW load | $8000 x 300 = $2.4m --> $66.7k/month
- Electricity price: 6¢/kWh all-in x 720,000 kWh = $43.2k/month
- Equipment repairs: 15%/year net failure rate x $1.8m = $22.5k/month
- Buildout cost: $200/kW x 1MW = $200k --> $5.6k/month
- Farm hashrate: 300x 95 Th +5% custom FW = 30,000 Th
- All expenses: $142k/month
- Average difficulty in Q1 2022: 26.7T
- Average BTC earned in Q1 2022: 4.19BTC/month
- Average cost per BTC (pre-tax): $33,890
- Average cost per BTC (after-tax, 24%): $25,756
If the power cost is 4¢ instead of 6¢, the cost per
BTC is 8-10% cheaper, so $31k pre-tax or $24k after tax. This would make the per-Bitcoin cost of a small miner comparable to MARA or RIOT.
I do think Rolf was onto something when he
hypothesized that small miners have many advantages. This doesn't count the flexibility that a smaller operation has to sell/buy equipment, not to mention the ability to do GPU mining.
You left out cooling. 1MW = 3410000 BTU/h need to move and cool a lot of air. Which adds to electric cost. And big air efficient handlers are not cheap.
Once again sticking it in northern states will help that. Putting it in the south may save you money for rent & other things but you will be running the chillers longer and harder.