What Happens to Old Bitcoin Miners? Resale, Repurposing and Recycling

A Bitcoin miner rarely just switches off. It moves to cheaper power, gets resold, turns into a heater or is stripped for parts. Here is how that life cycle works, with real numbers.

By Michal Beno, CEO, OneMiners29 October 2026

A Bitcoin miner is a single-purpose computer, called an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit). It does one job: run the SHA-256 hash function trillions of times per second, looking for a valid block. Its output is measured in TH/s (terahashes per second), and its efficiency in J/TH, the joules of electricity it burns for every terahash. Lower J/TH is better.

The machine itself can run for years. What changes is the world around it. Every two weeks, Bitcoin adjusts its difficulty so blocks keep arriving about every 10 minutes. When newer, more efficient machines join, difficulty rises, and each terahash earns a little less bitcoin. That daily earning per unit of hashrate is called hashprice. Today it is about $39.8 per PH per day, or $0.0398 per TH per day, from the block subsidy alone.

Why 24 x J/TH / 1,000? It turns J/TH into kWh per TH per day. For the S9, one TH/s for a day uses about 2.35 kWh, and earns about $0.0398. Divide one by the other and you get the S9's break-even: about 1.7 cents per kWh. Pay more than that, and it loses money every day.

Break-even power price by generation, today

Bitcoin miner	J/TH	Break-even per kWh	Net per day at $0.048
S9, 13.5 TH/s	98.0	$0.017	minus $0.99
S17 Pro, 53 TH/s	39.5	$0.042	minus $0.30
S19, 95 TH/s	34.2	$0.048	$0.04
S19j Pro, 104 TH/s	29.5	$0.056	$0.60
S19 XP, 140 TH/s	21.5	$0.077	$2.10
Antminer S21 200T	17.6	$0.094	$3.90
Antminer S21 Pro 245T	15.0	$0.111	$5.52
Antminer S23 318T	11.0	$0.151	$8.63
Antminer S23 Hyd 580T	9.5	$0.175	$16.74

OneMiners calculation, subsidy-only hashprice of $0.0398 per TH per day, 5 October 2026. Power only: hardware, pool fees and transaction fees not included. Legacy specs: manufacturer ratings via Hashrate Index and D-Central rig pages; current units: OneMiners catalogue, 6 October 2026.

The S9 needs power almost for free, the S19 sits right on the line at $0.048 per kWh, and anything from the S19 XP onward has room to spare.

The first move for an ageing miner is to take it to cheaper electricity. The S19j Pro is a good example: at $0.048 it still clears about $0.60 a day on power alone, a thin but positive margin.

Large mining companies do exactly this at scale. In January 2025, CoinDesk reported that BIT Mining planned to run newer machines in Ohio and move older rigs to Ethiopia, where power was far cheaper. Its chief economist said older rigs tend to become uneconomic in the United States after roughly two to two and a half years, and that moving them to Ethiopia could add at least two more years of work.

The map of mining reflects this. In July 2026, Hashrate Index estimated Paraguay at about 4.7% and Ethiopia at about 2.4% of global hashrate, and noted that the least efficient machines switch off first while hashrate keeps moving toward the cheapest power.

Because cheaper power exists somewhere, there is nearly always a buyer for a working machine. Prices fall as newer generations arrive, but rarely to zero while a model can still break even somewhere. D-Central, a Canadian retailer, tracks used prices.

Two lessons follow. First, the range inside one model is huge, because hashboards, fans and power supplies age differently. A buyer is really paying for working hashrate, so ask for a test report. Second, a used machine is cheap to buy but expensive to run. A new Antminer S21 costs $907 in the OneMiners catalogue today and breaks even at about $0.094 per kWh, far more headroom than any S19. The cheapest machine is not always the cheapest bitcoin.

Every watt a Bitcoin miner uses ends up as heat. An S9 draws about 1,323 W, close to a typical electric space heater. In a home that would pay for electric heat anyway, the same electricity becomes warmth plus a little bitcoin. D-Central sells quiet S9 and S17 heater cases for this.

A worked example: on a household tariff of $0.15 per kWh, an S9 uses about 31.8 kWh a day, a heat bill of about $4.76. It earns about $0.54 of bitcoin at today's numbers. As a pure miner it loses money. As a heater it gives back roughly 11% of the heat cost. Small, but better than a heater that returns nothing. More on this in Bitcoin mining heat reuse.

What about mining a different coin? An ASIC is built for one algorithm. A SHA-256 Bitcoin miner can only mine other SHA-256 coins, such as Bitcoin Cash, which face the same difficulty economics, so this is rarely a rescue. The 2026 BLAKE2b fork, BTCB2, is a clear case: SHA-256 machines cannot mine it at all.

Most miner faults are in a few parts: hashboards (the boards that hold the chips), fans, power supplies and control boards. Fans and power supplies are cheap fixes, and many hashboards can be repaired chip by chip, which is why OneMiners covers it in ASIC repairs that extend the life of a miner.

When a whole unit is past saving, its working fans, power supplies and boards still rebuild other machines of the same family.

Eventually every machine reaches the end of its useful life. The best-known estimate of mining e-waste comes from Alex de Vries and Christian Stoll, published in the journal Resources, Conservation and Recycling in 2021. They estimated about 30.7 thousand tonnes of e-waste a year as of May 2021, similar to the small IT equipment waste of the Netherlands, and suggested it could exceed 64.4 thousand tonnes at early-2021 peak prices.

That estimate rests on a key assumption: an average working life of about 1.29 years per machine. Critics argue this is too short, because the used market and cheap-power sites keep many machines working much longer. The BIT Mining example points the same way: about two years in the United States, then at least two more on cheaper power. The S9, launched in 2016, is still sold in 2026 as a heater.

Both sides have a point. ASICs are single-purpose hardware that cannot be reused for general computing. But every extra year in service means less waste per unit of work, and cheap power is what makes that possible. When the end does come, ASICs should go to a certified e-waste recycler, not a landfill. In the European Union, the WEEE Directive requires electrical equipment to be collected separately for recycling.

A defect is a hardware fault, such as a hashboard that fails early. Normal wear is the expected ageing of fans and parts. Economic ageing, the subject of this article, is not a fault at all.

Antminer S21 200T$907Hashrate200 TH/sEfficiency17.60 J/THPower draw3,520 WBreak-even power$0.094/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$3.90View on OneMiners

Antminer S21 XP Hyd 473T$6,199Hashrate473 TH/sEfficiency12.00 J/THPower draw5,676 WBreak-even power$0.138/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$12.29View on OneMiners

Antminer S23 Hyd 580T$12,299Hashrate580 TH/sEfficiency9.50 J/THPower draw5,510 WBreak-even power$0.175/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$16.74View on OneMiners

Three Bitcoin miners with long break-even headroom. Live OneMiners prices, 6 October 2026; net per day at $0.048 per kWh, at today's numbers, before pool fees.

Frequently asked questions

Michal Beno

CEO of OneMiners, the global Bitcoin mining hosting and hardware platform with 15 published hosting locations, 7-year fixed electricity contracts and a 7-year hardware warranty. He writes about the economics of industrial Bitcoin mining.

Informational only, not financial advice. Figures are a snapshot from public market data and news reports as of 5 October 2026 and can change quickly. Crypto prices can fall as well as rise. No return is offered or implied. Do your own research.