My Experience w/ Bitmain - SPOILER ALERT - It Was a Nightmare!!

When Bitmain launched the new Antminer D3 with their first batch release it definitely caught my attention. I had successfully built and used a GPU rig for Ethereum for a few months and when I looked at the potential profitability of the D3 it definitely caught my attention. I was able to get my hands on one D3 from the second batch which was due to ship in September. When I told a friend of mine that is also very active in crypto investing he said that we should try to get a few more and split all the costs and profits between the two of us.

All in all, we ended up ordering 6 of the D3s from 4 different batches. We both went into it with tempered expectations, knowing that the profitability would likely skyrocket upon shipment of the new model.

When we received the first miner in September, we hooked it up and it ran fine right out of the box…for about a day. After that one of the 3 hashing boards dropped to 0 MH/s. We reset the miner and the board started back up. Thinking that there might be an issue, I contacted Bitmain. They replied that I should update the firmware and that I could send the hashing board back for repair. I got the impression that if the brand new unit that passed their QC didn’t work right, I was skeptical of taking the board out of service and shipping it back to China for ‘repair’. Especially as the mining difficulty continued to skyrocket.

We next received 3 more D3s from the next batch. When we hooked these up, over the next few days each one had the same issue with hashing boards randomly dropping to 0 MH/s until resetting the machine. It has turned into a constant battle trying to monitor them to keep them all running at full capacity. One of the hashing board only registered 54 ASICs instead of the usual 60. I contacted Bitmain and got the same generic response about updating firmware and returning the board for repair.

Upon doing a fair amount of research, I found out the hashing boards going to 0 MH/s is a common problem across all of their miners and is not specific to the D3. I also saw several posts from people who sent boards back to Bitmain only to get them back with the same problem. At this point we decided it would be best to keep the miners running and reset them as needed.

At this point I was fairly disappointed in the quality of the product and lack of technical support from Bitmain. It boggles my mind how they can sell thousands of miners with full knowledge that they all have hashing board reliability issues.

But wait, there’s more!! We had 1 miner ordered for each of their last two batches. When I went to pick up the next miner from the UPS store, they informed me that the PSU was delivered to Louisville, KY which is hundreds of miles from my delivery address is Madison, WI. After inquiring with UPS, I found out that Louisville was where Bitmain addressed the PSU to be delivered. I started ANOTHER support ticket with Bitmain to find out what was going on. After waiting two days without a response, they proceded to ship my next, and final miner and PSU. Once again the PSU was addressed to Louisville, KY. This leaves me with 2 miners that I can’t use because I have no power supply. Knowing how slow Bitmain usually is in responding to support tickets I was forced to pay $500 for two APW3++ power supplies from Amazon so that I could at least start running the last two miners.

I picked up my last miner over two weeks ago. 5 different support tickets later, and two weeks of frustration, I still have NO response from Bitmain, much less the PSUs! After spending well over $10,000 and being treated so poorly by the customer service I now understand why so many people have a less than positive view of the mining giant. I was interested in getting some BTC and LTC miners as well and unfortunately Bitmain essentially has a monopoly on affordably priced miners. But if it means dealing with them anymore, I’m quite content sitting on the sidelines and simply hodling instead.

With the DASH profitabililty dropping to almost zero, the entire experience has turned into one big headache. In retrospect, ordering 6 miners before they even shipped the first model was definitely a mistake and a costly one. Had I held the nearly 4 BTC that was spent on all the miners, PSUs, import charges and shipping, I would have almost $28,000USD instead of 6 very loud space heaters!

DO BUSINESS WITH BITMAIN AT YOUR OWN RISK! ONCE YOUR MINERS ARE ORDRED AND PAID FOR, YOU HAVE LITTLE TO NO RECOURSE WEHN THEY DON’T DELIVER WHAT WAS PROMISED.