Live data basis · 7 September 2026

Every number in this article was pulled live on 7 September 2026 and cross-checked against a second source before publication. Bitcoin sits at $79,392 with network hashrate at 937.8 EH/s and difficulty at 127.45 T, which puts subsidy-only hashprice at $38.09 per PH/s per day (450 BTC/day × spot ÷ network PH/s). Zcash trades at $1,198.30 after breaking four figures, Dash at $68.03, and Kaspa at $0.0353 following a 16% single-day move. Network figures come from mempool.space, Blockchair and the Kaspa REST API; per-block miner allocations were read directly off live coinbase outputs rather than taken from a calculator. Hardware prices and wattages are the live OneMiners catalogue on the same date.

First, the stakes: buying at peak euphoria is where retail margin goes to fail

The most expensive mistake in altcoin mining is not picking the wrong coin. It is picking the right coin six months late. By the time a public profitability calculator shows triple-digit annualised returns, two things have already happened: manufacturers have repriced the hardware, and the secondary market has repriced it again on top.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Take the Antminer Z15 PRO at today's live economics — $51.15 net per day on hosted power. Bought at our current spot price of $10,599, that is a 6.8-month payback. Bought at a 40% euphoria premium of $14,839, the same machine, earning the same revenue, needs 9.5 months. You paid $4,240 for the privilege of waiting an extra 82 days, and you carry that penalty for the entire life of the unit.

Now invert it. That same machine on our March 2027 batch costs $3,580. At the same daily net, payback collapses to 2.3 months. Identical hardware, identical algorithm, identical hosting contract. The only variable that moved was when you signed.

Method. Every payback figure in this article is capital ÷ net daily revenue, where net = gross mining revenue minus electricity at $0.048/kWh (the OneMiners Nigeria premium tier, the lowest of our 16 live sites). It excludes difficulty drift, price movement and pool fees. It is a snapshot of today's economics, not a forecast. Full rate card: all 16 OneMiners hosting sites.

The Antminer Z15 lesson, measured in our own price book

The Z15 series is the cleanest case study in mining because the hardware price reaction is still visible in the forward curve. When Zcash was quiet, Equihash hardware traded at unremarkable prices. Then ZEC ran — through the November 2024 halving that cut inflation from roughly 4% to 2%, through a shielded pool that grew from about 8% of supply to roughly 30%, through the SEC closing its Zcash Foundation investigation in January 2026, through the first US spot Zcash ETF in August 2026, and past $1,200 in early September. Daily yields on Equihash hardware followed, and so did the hardware price.

Here is what that looks like inside our own catalogue right now. This is not a historical chart — it is nine live delivery batches of the identical Antminer Z15 PRO 840 KH/s, quoted today:

Read that curve carefully, because it contains the whole argument of this article. The market will sell you an Equihash machine today at $10,599 or in six months at $3,580. That 66% spread is not a discount for loyalty. It is an honest quote on the risk that by March 2027 the Zcash network has grown, difficulty has climbed, and the daily yield behind that $51.15 has compressed. Nobody knows which side of that trade wins. What we can say precisely is what each option costs and what each one earns today.

How we ranked

No calculator was trusted. Each machine was modelled from first principles, and every input is stated so you can reproduce it:

• ▸Daily emission to miners was read off live coinbase outputs, not documentation. Zcash pays 1.25 ZEC per block to the miner address (80% of the 1.5625 ZEC subsidy; 8% to the Community Grants committee, 12% to the protocol lockbox) across 1,152 blocks/day = 1,440 ZEC/day. Dash pays 0.41077 DASH per block to the miner (20% of subsidy; 60% masternodes, 20% treasury) across a measured 545 blocks/day = 223.9 DASH/day. Kaspa pays 2.1827 KAS per block at 10 blocks per second = 1,885,832 KAS/day.
• ▸Per-unit revenue = that daily pool in dollars × (unit hashrate ÷ live network hashrate). No pool bonus, no merge-mining credit, no uptime assumption above 100%.
• ▸Network hashrate was cross-checked. Zcash from Blockchair reads 26.67 GSol/s; the independent difficulty derivation (difficulty × 8192 ÷ 75) gives 26.58 GSol/s — a 0.3% agreement.
• ▸Hardware specs came from the live catalogue, where wattage is encoded per SKU, not from launch-day marketing sheets. This matters: the Z15 PRO 840 KH/s draws 2,780 W, not the 2,650 W widely quoted (2,651 W is the 800 KH/s variant).
• ▸Electricity at $0.048/kWh, the OneMiners Nigeria premium tier. Every machine is then re-run at retail rates so you can see exactly where each one fails.
• ▸Sanity-checked against independent calculators. Our Z15 PRO figure of $54.35/day gross lands within 1.2% of ASIC Miner Value's $55.03 for 6 September. Our KS5 PRO figure of $0.67/day net at $0.048/kWh matches the $0.14 an independent tracker published at the same rate in August, before Kaspa's recent move.

The ranked table: every altcoin ASIC we sell, priced against live networks

Ranked by payback on hosted power at $0.048/kWh. Gross revenue is subsidy-only.

#	Bitcoin miner / model	Coin	Price	Gross/day	Net/day	Energy margin	Payback
1	Antminer D91.77 TH/s · X11 · 2,839 W	DASH	$1,179	$11.72	$8.45	72.1%	4.6 mo
2	Antminer Z15 K525 KH/s · Equihash · 2,483 W	ZEC	$4,669	$33.97	$31.11	91.6%	4.9 mo
3	Antminer Z15 PRO840 KH/s · Equihash · 2,780 W	ZEC	$10,599	$54.35	$51.15	94.1%	6.8 mo
4	Antminer Z15420 KH/s · Equihash · 1,510 W	ZEC	$5,499	$27.18	$25.44	93.6%	7.1 mo
5	Iceriver KS730 TH/s · kHeavyHash · 3,500 W	KAS	$1,179	$6.14	$2.11	34.4%	18.3 mo
6	Antminer S23 Hyd 3U1.16 PH/s · SHA-256 · 11,020 W	BTC	$28,399	$44.19	$31.49	71.3%	29.6 mo
7	Antminer KS520 TH/s · kHeavyHash · 3,000 W	KAS	$609	$4.10	$0.64	15.6%	31.2 mo
8	Antminer KS5 PRO21 TH/s · kHeavyHash · 3,150 W	KAS	$1,199	$4.30	$0.67	15.6%	58.6 mo

Net/day = gross mining revenue minus electricity at $0.048/kWh. Payback = catalogue price ÷ net daily. The Antminer S23 Hyd 3U is included as the SHA-256 benchmark, not as an altcoin play. Prices and specs: live oneminers.com catalogue, 7 September 2026.

1. Equihash / Zcash — the highest-margin algorithm in mining

Verdict: Buy this for margin, not for entry price. The Antminer Z15 PRO converts 94.1% of its gross revenue into profit and would still be profitable at $0.81/kWh — seventeen times our hosting rate. No other machine in this article has anywhere near that much protection against an energy shock or a price drawdown.

Zcash is where the leverage actually is. The Z15 PRO takes 31.5 parts-per-million of a 26.67 GSol/s network, which against a $1.73 million daily miner emission is $54.35/day gross. It burns 66.7 kWh to do it — $3.20 at our Nigeria premium rate. That leaves $51.15/day net.

Sit with that ratio for a second, because it is the most important number in this article. Power is 5.9% of revenue. On a Bitcoin flagship it is 29%. On a Kaspa KS5 PRO it is 84%. Energy breakeven for the Z15 PRO is $0.81/kWh, which means the machine survives a 93% collapse in ZEC before electricity alone stops it. That is not a mining margin. That is a moat.

Which Equihash unit, and why it is probably not the flagship

The Z15 PRO has the best margin. The Antminer Z15 K has the best payback. At $4,669 for 525 KH/s it earns $31.11/day net and returns capital in 4.9 months against the PRO's 6.8 — because you are paying $8.89 per KH/s instead of $12.62. The Z15 K is the less efficient machine (4.73 J/KSol against 3.31), and at a hosting rate that penalty is worth about $0.34/day. You are trading a rounding error in power for two months of payback.

The original Antminer Z15 at 420 KH/s is the interesting outlier: at 3.60 J/KSol it is more efficient than the newer Z15 K, and it draws only 1,510 W. But at $5,499 for half the PRO's hashrate it is the worst value per KH/s in the Equihash line at $13.09. Buy it for a power-constrained rack, not for economics.

The Equihash forward batches

Bitcoin miner / batch	Hashrate	Price	Net/day	Payback
Antminer Z15 PROIn stock, ships now	840 KH/s	$10,599	$51.15	6.8 mo
Antminer Z15 PROBatch December 2026	840 KH/s	$6,899	$51.15	4.5 mo
Antminer Z15 PROBatch March 2027	840 KH/s	$3,580	$51.15	2.3 mo
Antminer Z15 KIn stock, ships now	525 KH/s	$4,669	$31.11	4.9 mo
Antminer Z15 KBatch March 2027	525 KH/s	$2,599	$31.11	2.7 mo

Forward-batch payback holds today's revenue constant, which is the optimistic case — a March 2027 unit earns March 2027 economics, not today's. Treat the forward discount as the market's own risk premium, and the payback column as an upper bound.

2. X11 / Dash — the cheapest way onto a mature network

Verdict: The fastest payback we sell, at the lowest entry cost. The Antminer D9 at $1,179 returns capital in 4.6 months. The catch is concentration risk, not economics: X11 is a small network and a single D9 is 769 ppm of it.

Dash does not need a narrative. It needs arithmetic. The X11 network runs at 2,300 TH/s and pays miners 223.9 DASH/day — only 20% of the block subsidy, since Dash routes 60% to masternodes and 20% to its treasury. That is a modest $15,230/day pool. But the Antminer D9 takes a large bite of it: 1.77 TH/s is 769 ppm, worth $11.72/day gross and $8.45/day net.

Against a $1,179 purchase, that is 4.6 months — the shortest horizon in this entire article, and roughly a sixth of what a $28,399 Bitcoin flagship needs. The reason is not that Dash is a better network. It is that X11 hardware is cheap and X11 difficulty adjusts without the pressure of institutional fleets landing every month. There are no public miners deploying 50 MW of X11.

The 1.86 TH/s D9 at $1,259.63 earns $8.88/day net for a 4.7-month payback — effectively identical. Both units run at 1.60 J/GH. Pick whichever is in stock.

On the calculator spread. Independent calculators disagree sharply on Dash, quoting anywhere from $8.68 to $14.12/day gross for the D9, largely because they differ on block count and reward split. Our $11.72 is derived from the actual miner output in live Dash coinbase transactions (0.41100307 DASH, of which 0.00023185 was fees) at a measured 545 blocks/day. We show the derivation so you can check it rather than trust it.

3. kHeavyHash / Kaspa — where the retail consensus is simply wrong

Verdict: Do not buy a KS5 PRO on a payback thesis. At live numbers it returns capital in 58.6 months, not the 6 to 10 months circulating in buyer forums. The Iceriver KS7 is the only kHeavyHash unit we can defend, and only on hosted power.

This is the section where our own research contradicted the brief we started from, so we are stating it plainly. Kaspa is a genuinely impressive network — a BlockDAG running 10 blocks per second, up 16% on the day we pulled these figures. None of that is the problem. The problem is that 324,642 TH/s of hardware is competing for a $66,492/day emission, and that arithmetic does not care about architecture.

The Antminer KS5 PRO at 21 TH/s takes 64.7 ppm of that network, which is $4.30/day gross. It burns 75.6 kWh doing it. Even at our lowest hosting rate that is $3.63/day of power against $4.30 of revenue — an energy margin of 15.6% and a net of $0.67/day. On $1,199 of hardware, that is 58.6 months.

The reason is efficiency, and it is not close. The KS5 PRO runs at 150 J/TH. Its energy breakeven is $0.0569/kWh — meaning it needs power cheaper than 5.7 cents just to avoid failing, and only three of our sixteen sites are under that line. At a US retail rate of $0.12/kWh it loses $4.77 every day. Run the numbers yourself on the OneMiners Kaspa mining calculator.

If you want kHeavyHash exposure, buy the efficient unit

The Iceriver KS7 is the same price as a KS5 PRO — $1,179 against $1,199 — and it is a materially better machine. 30 TH/s at 3,500 W is 116.7 J/TH, a 22% efficiency advantage. That turns $6.14/day gross into $2.11/day net, a 34.4% energy margin, and a 18.3-month payback. Still not fast. But it is three times better than the flagship, for the same price. See the full Kaspa miner range.

And the KS7 has real upside if Kaspa continues to move. Because its margin is thin, it is leveraged: a 50% rise in KAS lifts the KS5 PRO from $0.67 to $2.82/day, but lifts the KS7 from $2.11 to $5.18. That is the honest bull case for kHeavyHash — not a 6-month payback, but asymmetric exposure on a machine that does not fail while you wait.

On the KS3. The Antminer KS3 named in some buyer guides is not in the OneMiners catalogue and we will not model a machine we cannot ship or verify. The kHeavyHash units we actually stock are the Iceriver KS7, KS7 Lite, KS2 Lite and KS0 Ultra, and the Antminer KS5 and KS5 PRO. All of them are listed on the Kaspa miners page.

What happens when the coin moves

Payback tables are snapshots. The question that matters is what each machine does when the price you bought it for stops being the price. Here is net daily revenue at hosted power across a range of coin prices, holding network hashrate constant:

Bitcoin miner	Coin	−50%	−25%	Today	+50%	+100%
Antminer Z15 PRO840 KH/s Equihash	ZEC	$23.97	$37.56	$51.15	$78.33	$105.50
Antminer Z15 K525 KH/s Equihash	ZEC	$14.12	$22.62	$31.11	$48.10	$65.08
Antminer Z15420 KH/s Equihash	ZEC	$11.85	$18.64	$25.44	$39.03	$52.61
Antminer D91.77 TH/s X11	DASH	$2.59	$5.52	$8.45	$14.31	$20.16
Iceriver KS730 TH/s kHeavyHash	KAS	−$0.96	$0.58	$2.11	$5.18	$8.26
Antminer KS5 PRO21 TH/s kHeavyHash	KAS	−$1.48	−$0.40	$0.67	$2.82	$4.97

Net $/day at $0.048/kWh, network hashrate held constant. In practice a sustained price rise pulls hashrate in and compresses these gains — see the dilution section below.

The pattern is clear. The Equihash machines are robust: a Z15 PRO still nets $23.97/day if Zcash halves. The Kaspa machines are leveraged: a KS5 PRO fails outright on a 25% drop and a KS7 fails on a 50% drop. Neither is wrong as a position. But they are opposite kinds of bet, and buyers routinely confuse them.

The risk nobody prices: dilution sensitivity

Here is the counterweight to everything above, and it is the reason we do not tell customers to put a whole budget into one altcoin. Your revenue is a share of a fixed daily emission. When the network doubles, your revenue halves. So the real risk measure is not volatility — it is how easily your network can double.

Bitcoin miner	Coin	Share of its own network	Units needed to double the network
Antminer D91.77 TH/s X11	DASH	769.4 ppm	1,300
Iceriver KS730 TH/s kHeavyHash	KAS	92.4 ppm	10,821
Antminer KS5 PRO21 TH/s kHeavyHash	KAS	64.7 ppm	15,459
Antminer Z15 PRO840 KH/s Equihash	ZEC	31.5 ppm	31,747
Antminer S23 Hyd 3U1.16 PH/s SHA-256	BTC	1.24 ppm	808,474

Share of network = unit hashrate ÷ live network hashrate, in parts per million, 7 September 2026.

One D9 is 622 times more dilutive than one Bitcoin flagship. It takes 808,474 S23 Hyd 3U units to double the Bitcoin network — a physical impossibility on any near horizon. It takes 1,300 D9s to double X11. That is one buyer with a container and a conviction.

This is why the altcoin premium exists, and it is why the correct response to this article is not to move a whole budget onto one algorithm. It is to hold a fast-payback altcoin position alongside Bitcoin hashrate, sized so that a difficulty shock on the small network is an annoyance rather than a failure. Buy one, not five. Then pair it with SHA-256.

The Bitcoin benchmark, for honest comparison

The Antminer S23 Hyd 3U is the best SHA-256 machine we sell: 1.16 PH/s at 11,020 W, or 9.50 J/TH. At a hashprice of $38.09/PH/s/day it earns $44.19/day gross, burns 264.5 kWh for $12.70, and nets $31.49/day. At $28,399 that is a 29.6-month payback.

That is not a criticism of the machine. It is the most robust asset on this page: 1.24 ppm of its network, an energy breakeven of $0.167/kWh, and a settlement layer with an ETF complex and a sovereign bid behind it. A Bitcoin flagship is the position you hold through a cycle. An altcoin ASIC is the position you hold through a move. Model either on the OneMiners Bitcoin mining calculator.

Why every number above depends on where the machine is plugged in

Read this table before you read anything else in this article a second time. It is the same eight machines, at five electricity rates. Nothing else changes — not the coin, not the hardware, not the difficulty.

Bitcoin miner	$0.048 OneMiners	$0.08	$0.10	$0.12 US retail	$0.15
Antminer Z15 PRO840 KH/s ZEC	$51.15	$49.02	$47.68	$46.35	$44.35
Antminer Z15 K525 KH/s ZEC	$31.11	$29.20	$28.01	$26.82	$25.03
Antminer S23 Hyd 3U1.16 PH/s BTC	$31.49	$23.03	$17.74	$12.45	$4.52
Antminer D91.77 TH/s DASH	$8.45	$6.27	$4.90	$3.54	$1.50
Iceriver KS730 TH/s KAS	$2.11	−$0.58	−$2.26	−$3.94	−$6.46
Antminer KS5 PRO21 TH/s KAS	$0.67	−$1.75	−$3.26	−$4.77	−$7.04

Net $/day. Negative figures are daily losses. Every kHeavyHash unit fails above roughly 7 cents per kWh.

Every Kaspa machine on this list fails at 8 cents. The Bitcoin flagship loses 86% of its margin between our rate and US retail. Only the Equihash units are genuinely rate-insensitive, and that is a property of the algorithm, not of anyone's hosting contract.

OneMiners runs 16 live hosting sites and 1,964 MW of contracted capacity, from $0.048/kWh in Nigeria through Ethiopia at $0.053 and Dubai at $0.057. Every machine in this article is a machine we sell and a machine we host, on 7-year fixed electricity contracts with a 7-year hosted hardware warranty, 0% management fees at most sites, 98%+ average uptime against a 95% guaranteed floor with compensation, and payouts you watch from the app. That is the whole reason a 15.6%-margin machine is even a conversation.

• ▸Nigeria — $0.048/kWh, 33 MW live (150 MW under construction). The lowest rate on the network and the only tier at which a kHeavyHash unit clears comfortably.
• ▸Ethiopia — $0.053/kWh, 40 MW. Hydro powered.
• ▸Dubai — $0.057/kWh, 34 MW. Air and hydro cooling in a 0% tax jurisdiction.
• ▸Norway Arctic — $0.060/kWh, 36 MW. Natural arctic cooling, 100% renewable hydro.
• ▸Houston and Georgia, USA — $0.060/kWh. On-site office, repair centre, import duty optimised from 21% to 1% in Georgia.
• ▸Buy Now, Pay Later. 25% up front and the balance across three monthly instalments, so a forward batch does not have to be a single cash outlay.

Red flags that should stop a deployment

• ▸A payback figure with no electricity rate attached. The KS5 PRO is a 58.6-month machine at 4.8 cents and a failing machine at 12. A payback number without a $/kWh beside it is not information.
• ▸A calculator figure taken at face value. Independent trackers quote the D9 anywhere from $8.68 to $14.12/day. Derive the emission and the network share yourself, or at minimum reconcile two sources.
• ▸Launch-sheet wattage. The Z15 PRO is widely quoted at 2,650 W; the 840 KH/s SKU draws 2,780 W. A 5% wattage error becomes a much larger error in a thin-margin machine.
• ▸Concentration in a small network. If your position is large enough that 1,300 similar units would halve your revenue, you are not mining — you are underwriting someone else's expansion.
• ▸Hosting quoted without a fee schedule. A 10–25% performance fee on gross revenue is worth more than a 2-cent difference in the power rate on any high-margin machine. Ask for the all-in number.
• ▸Forward batches with no delivery terms. A 66% discount for a March 2027 slot is only a good trade if the slot is contractual.

Final thoughts

The retail market is still doing its arithmetic in the SHA-256 frame, and that leaves real yield on the table elsewhere. But the opportunity is not where the consensus says it is. Zcash offers the widest margin in mining — 94% of revenue survives the power bill, and the machine tolerates $0.81/kWh. Dash offers the fastest payback we sell, at 4.6 months on an $1,179 unit. Kaspa, at today's network and today's efficiency, offers neither — only leveraged exposure on the one unit efficient enough to survive the wait.

A balanced altcoin position looks like this: a D9 for payback speed, a Z15 K or Z15 PRO for margin and drawdown protection, an Iceriver KS7 if you want kHeavyHash beta, and Bitcoin hashrate underneath all of it to absorb the dilution risk that comes with small networks. Sized so no single retarget can hurt you.

And all of it plugged in at a rate that makes the arithmetic work. Revenue is weather. Difficulty is a crowd. Electricity is physics.

Frequently asked

Data sources

Network and price data, 7 September 2026: mempool.space (Bitcoin hashrate and difficulty) · CoinGecko (spot prices) · Blockchair (Zcash and Dash hashrate, difficulty and live coinbase outputs) · api.kaspa.org (Kaspa hashrate and block reward). Cross-checks: ASIC Miner Value (Z15 PRO gross revenue, 6 September 2026) · minerstat (Dash network hashrate and difficulty) · Electric Coin Company (Zcash NU6 dev-fund split) · Dash Core documentation (block reward allocation). Hardware: live oneminers.com catalogue. Independent profitability tooling: asicprofit.com.