Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Update Dec 2021: This miner would take 4072 days to mine enough for the minimum transfer amount for most pools. Transferring those proceeds to a wallet would cost about 2167 days of mined proceeds. Update Feb 2021: I wrote this review 6 months ago. If I was to have spent the purchasing price the time I wrote the original review and instead bought the top currency and sold it today, I would be up $200. If were to buy this device today and mine, and market conditions stayed the same for 6 months, this device would mine $52, but the electricity would cost me $105. Basically meaning I would have paid $105 in electricity and got $50 in return. I'll update if market conditions drastically change again. When I first wrote this review, it was the time to buy used miners and GPUs - as miners were sad and selling their stuff. Today, the coins are pumping, and people are gouging GPUs and miners. This is a description of my experience, and not advice on what anyone should do. Original review from July 20 follows: I ordered one of these and it was delayed in transit. The 3 days it has been delayed has allowed to do some investigation. This device has 2 ASIC chips on it and only hashes the SHA256. Identical and similar chips are used in many of the SHA256 ASIC devices - except they will have 150 to over one thousands of these same chips in them - essentially meaning this device is competing with something that has hundreds of times or more the hashing power. Granted, this only uses 5W of power and can be hacked to hash greater and take more power, but doing so voids the warranty. Direct SHA256 mining became unprofitable for a home causal miner many years ago. Big farms have popped up in countries where electricity is 10x or more cheaper and rooms filled with hundreds of the larger ASIC devices are mining SHA256. If someone were to use these device to directly mine for SHA256. the payout would be so small that it would cost more in fees to transfer the proceeds to a wallet than the actual proceeds. If someone wanted to invest in SHA256 crypto, this device is not the way to do it. A regular person doing this as a hobby would be better off taking the money that this device would cost and going to an exchange and outright buying the SHA256 currency. In today's market, a person who did that would already have more currency in the wallet than this device could mine in 100-years. If one were to look at used proper ASIC SHA256 machines with hundreds of chips in them, you can find them on Amazon or other sites for under $100 - and these devices would have many orders of magnitude the hashing power of this little device - as they have 50-1000x more of the same or similar chip in them. The farms I was talking about earlier are setup with millions or billions of times the hashing power of this device. But even buying a SHA256 ASIC rig used for under $100 is costing most people more in electrical power than what would be mined. Links can't be posted in reviews, but things have matured today where all commercially available rigs are tabulated for profitability and dozens of SHA256 ASIC rigs with hundreds of times the hashing power of this GekkoScience device can be had for just a little more. However, even with hundreds of times the hashing power in a proper ASIC rig, almost everyone would be better off spending that money directly on an exchange and outright buying the currency. One of the proper ASIC rigs would cost the average consumer who pays 10 cents US per KwH something like $500 or more a year loss to operate and would mining far far less than that. The Gekkoscience stick itself has hundreds of times less the hashing power of one of these ASIC rigs, but also consumes hundreds of times less the power - maybe costing 5 cents or less a month to operate. Hopefully, I've made it clear that investing in this device, or even an ASIC rig costing a little more will not make most people any profit in today's (July 2020) market conditions mining directly for SHA256. However, where this GekkoScience device really shines is as an introduction to crypto through SHA256 with very very little operating costs over time. In terms of value for the actual equipment, I think someone would be better off buying a used ASIC rig for just a little more than the cost of this device. But that ASIC rig will cost $30 or more a month for electric, whereas this Gekkodevice will cost less than 10 cents. Hobbies generally don't make anyone money and as long as they are a hobby, most of us do it knowing it costs us money and we don't actually make any profit from it. If you are looking at SHA256 mining as a hobby and don't want to spend the equivalent of $30 or more a month on electric costs, this is a very very sound and good investment. Be aware that many virus and malware defenses will see what this device (as well as any mining rig) do as malicious. Many work places will have blocked this device from communicating with the internet. It was for this reason that I cancelled my order and since it was more than 3-days late and had not arrived, it worked out quite well. Mining right now is at the point where computers were when it was just a DOS environment. Software is not that user-friendly and those that are uncomfortable doing things manually at a command prompt line will find crypto mining very puzzling and unfriendly. It hasn't matured to a point where everything is plug and play and neatly available in a window, although there are some companies moving in that direction. In order to obtain SHA256 currency, most will mine for what is called alt coins, and then exchange it for the desired SHA256 currency. If this is what you want to do, this device or any SHA256 rig will not do that unless you can find an alt coin that is also SHA256 - but then there's that user-unfriendliness that is part of the software today. Keep in mind that the latest SHA256 ASIC miner that uses similar chips hashes at 110Th/s - which is over 5000x more powerful than this Gekkoscience unit. But at the same time, the more powerful unit consumes 650x more power - meaning it is more efficient, but will also cost $300 a month in electricity, whereas this Gekkoscience unit costs under 50 cents a month to operate. The newer, more powerful unit also has a retail price tag of around $4000. The Gekkoscience has 2 chips in it and the pro unit has 342 chips. In today's market, both will operate at a loss, but the Gekkscience loses less than 50 cents a month and nets currency too fractionally small an amount to own and it will just be lost, and the big unit today will net about $260 a month in currency, leading to a net loss of about $20 a month with the average rate of 10 cents per kwH and today's market prices. This may change depending on the market. August 2020 update: The exchange of bitcoin is on the rise. At the time I wrote the text above this new addition has changed. Previously, no SHA-256 ASIC miners were profitable with an electricity cost of $0.10/ kWh. This has changed, out of the approximately 100 SHA-256 ASIC miners available, 4 have become profitable - with the top one netting about $60 /mo and the least profitable one (still makes a profit) at $15/mo. The other 96+ or so still operate at net loss. The Gekkoscience piece still is a great introduction into this hobby. It costs less than most of the ASIC devices would consume in electricity a month (The post profitable machine is 3.3 kW - like running a handful of hair dryers 24-7 - and sounds like it too) and consumes pennies a day - amounting to way way under $1 a month.