POWERCOMPUTE BUYS 1,940 MINERS FOR $400,000 — THAT IS $206 A MACHINE AND A FOUR-MONTH PAYBACK

PowerCompute told the market on September 23 that it is putting 1,000 Bitmain Antminer S19 XP machines into its Oklahoma site by the end of the month and has ordered 940 more for October. The filing says the total cost for the 1,000 units acquired in September and the 940 units on order is approximately $400,000. Divide it. That is $206.19 a machine.

The company says the new units average 132 terahash per second. So 1,940 machines carry 256,080 terahash of capacity, and $400,000 against that is $1.56 per terahash. The same release estimates incremental revenue capacity of approximately $1.2 million per year from the new machines, on a stated hashprice of $40.00 per PH/s per day. Four hundred thousand dollars in, one point two million a year out. The fleet pays for itself in four months.

A four-month payback is not a normal number, and the release does not explain it. Three readings fit. The machines came from somewhere cheap and the filing does not say where. The $400,000 is net of a trade-in or a credit the filing does not name. Or the revenue estimate is doing work the cost figure is not. PowerCompute states the cost and states the revenue capacity. It does not state why the first sits that far under the second.

Worth knowing what else is on the books. The company held 323 bitcoin as of August 31, worth about $27.8 million at the $86,000 price it used. The entire miner refresh costs about 1.4 percent of that stack. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $85,553.