Proto Hashboards Cost $4,187: Our Payback Maths Says 10.9 Years
You can now buy one of Block’s Proto hashboards and have someone else run it. Sazmining started selling them to individuals on October 16. At today’s hashprice, we work the payback out to about 10.9 years. Here is what you get, what it costs, and how it compares with a used Antminer.
What Sazmining is selling
Each board does about 200 TH/s at roughly 15 J/TH, according to Bitcoin Magazine and Bitcoin.com News. The total price is $4,187. You can put $1,397 down and pay the rest over 18 months at 0% interest. You own the board. Sazmining hosts it at a U.S. site and sends the mined bitcoin to your own wallet. Bitcoin.com says boards should start hashing between November and December 2026.
Proto is Block’s mining hardware arm. Block pitches the Proto Rig as a 10-year machine, because you swap hashboards instead of the whole unit. That is the company’s claim, and the hardware is too new to prove it.
The fees, as reported
Crypto Briefing reports that Sazmining keeps 15% of the bitcoin each board makes. It also says power is passed through at about $0.063 per kWh. The other two outlets only say there is one rate for power and upkeep, so treat those two numbers as reported, not confirmed. CEO Kent Halliburton puts it this way: “Sazmining only earns when we produce bitcoin for our clients.”
The daily maths on a Proto hashboard
Network hashrate is about 1,070 EH/s, per mempool.space, and bitcoin is near $77,724. That puts hashprice at about $32.9 per PH/s per day. So one 200 TH/s board earns about $6.57 a day before costs. Take off the 15% fee, $0.99. Then take off power: about 72 kWh a day at $0.063 is $4.54. That leaves $1.05 a day.
Divide $4,187 by $1.05 and you get about 3,992 days, or 10.9 years. That assumes nothing changes. In reality, difficulty usually rises. Also, the next halving, due in 2028, cuts the block subsidy in half. Crypto Briefing puts payback at more than six years, so our number agrees with theirs.
How it compares with a used Antminer
Now take a used Antminer S19k Pro, which we sell at $379.99. It does 115 TH/s on 2,645 W. That is about $3.30 per terahash. The Proto board is about $20.93 per terahash. In other words, you pay roughly 6 times more up front for each unit of hashrate.
However, the Proto board uses far less power for each terahash. At the same $0.063 power, the Antminer S19k Pro earns $3.78 a day and spends $4.00. That is a loss of $0.22 a day, even before any hosting fee. Its break-even is about 6.0 cents per kWh. As a result, an old machine only works on very cheap power. A new, efficient board survives on more expensive power, but it costs more to buy.
What we think
This is a real step for small miners. One board, financed, hosted, with coins to your own wallet, is easy to understand. Still, easy is not the same as profitable. At these numbers it is a long hold on bitcoin’s price, not a quick earner. If you have cheap power of your own, used hardware still gets you more hashrate per dollar.
We work through that trade-off in our S19k Pro vs S19 XP comparison and the mining economics guides. You can also browse every miner in stock, or see our Bitcoin price prediction.
-Nick
ING Mining
This is general information, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile, and you can lose money. Please do your own research.