The bitcoin miner I imported in 2016 — and the mining farm that never happened

TL;DR

• What: in 2016 I imported an Antminer S9 from Bitmain, planning to grow it into a small mining farm.
• What happened: demonetisation hit in November 2016 and the investors backed out. The single miner ran on Slush Pool instead.
• Outcome: when bitcoin peaked I withdrew about ₹10,000. The rest was scattered in amounts too small to take out. The miner is now asleep in a friend's room. I no longer remember whose.

After Fromahome

Toward the end of 2016 I was wrapping up my time at Fromahome, building the backend for a marketplace that connected home cooks with customers. Bitcoin had been on my radar for a while. What caught my interest wasn't the price. It was the mechanism: a network that pays anyone, anywhere, for turning electricity into security.

The idea was simple. Buy one serious machine, learn how it really behaves (power, heat, noise, uptime, payouts), then use those numbers to pitch a small mining farm to investors.

Ordering an Antminer from Bitmain

In September 2016 I ordered an Antminer S9 directly from Bitmain. It was their newest machine at the time, rated at roughly 13 TH/s, and came with Bitmain's matching APW3 power supply. It shipped by DHL from Hong Kong.

BITMAIN Order detail · Sep 2016

Order

•••• •••• •••• ••••

Payment

Wire transfer

• Antminer S9 · 12.93 TH/s× 1
• APW3 power supply× 1
• Shipping · DHL

Order total

Paying for it from India was a small project of its own. International payments for crypto hardware weren't simple for an individual. I used Unocoin, one of the few Indian exchanges at the time, to convert rupees into bitcoin and route the payment for the import. Looking back, there's a neat loop in that: buying bitcoin to buy a machine that makes bitcoin.

The farm plan, and demonetisation

With the machine on its way, the plan was to scale up: more units, a space with cheap and reliable power, and a few people willing to invest. Conversations were going well.

Then, on 8 November 2016, India withdrew its ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes overnight. Cash dried up, every business re-planned, and a speculative bet on bitcoin hardware was the first thing to go. The investors backed out, and the farm stayed a spreadsheet.

A good plan can still die of timing. Demonetisation had nothing to do with bitcoin, but it decided what happened to this project.

Mining on Slush Pool

One S9 on its own will almost never find a block, so I pointed it at Slush Pool (now Braiins Pool). It was the first bitcoin mining pool. A pool combines hashrate from thousands of miners and shares the rewards according to the work each one contributes. In practice, that means a steady trickle of very small payments instead of a lottery ticket.

Running an S9 at home teaches you quickly:

• Power is the business. An S9 draws around 1.3 kW, all day, every day. At residential tariffs, electricity takes most of what the machine earns.
• Heat and noise are real. It sounds like a hair dryer that never switches off. It isn't something you keep in a bedroom.
• Uptime matters more than peak hashrate. Power cuts and restarts cost real money in a game won on small margins.

The peak, and the money I couldn't take out

Bitcoin went mainstream in late 2017 and climbed toward $20,000. Suddenly the coins I had mined were worth something. I managed to withdraw about ₹10,000.

The rest was the frustrating part. The earnings had arrived as tiny splits and were sitting in small balances, each below the minimum you could withdraw or too small to be worth the network fee. Added up, they were worth something. Individually, they couldn't be moved, even when prices were at their peak.

Lesson from a small miner: a balance you can't withdraw isn't really yours yet. Payout thresholds and fees matter as much as hashrate.

Where the miner is now

The S9 eventually went quiet. It's sitting switched off in one of my friends' rooms. Honestly, I no longer remember which friend. Somewhere in Hyderabad, a 2016 Antminer is waiting for a reunion.

Then and now: turning surplus power into bitcoin

My single machine failed on the economics of household electricity. Countries have tried the same idea at a much larger scale, and the Himalayas are where it has been tested hardest.

Bhutan actually did it

Bhutan's state investment arm, Druk Holding and Investments, began mining bitcoin around 2019 using surplus hydropower from its high-flow summer months. It later partnered with Bitdeer to build large mining sites. At its peak in late 2024, Bhutan was reported to hold roughly 13,000 BTC, an enormous reserve for an economy its size. Some of the proceeds have funded government salaries. It has since sold much of that reserve to fund development projects.

Nepal is still debating it

Nepal has a similar setup. In the monsoon it produces more hydropower than it uses and has struggled to export the surplus. Commentators there argue for turning that spare power into bitcoin, often through a small, state-run pilot with coins held in a public reserve. But crypto transactions, including mining, remain illegal under Nepal's Foreign Exchange (Regulation) Act. A widely shared 2025 story claiming that Nepal had approved commercial bitcoin mining turned out to be an April Fools' piece.

The idea is the one I started with in 2016: bitcoin mining is a way to sell electricity to the whole world without building a single transmission line. What changes with scale is everything else: the cost of power, access to hardware, and whether the law lets you do it at all.

What I took away from it

• Model the boring costs first. Electricity, cooling, downtime and fees decided the outcome, not the hashrate on the box.
• Plan for things outside your control. Demonetisation had nothing to do with mining, and it still ended the farm.
• Small balances aren't liquid. Thresholds and fees can lock up value you have technically earned.
• Hands-on beats reading. One machine at home taught me more about how bitcoin really works than any whitepaper could.