TL;DR: Sazmining is offering individual Proto immersion hashboards at $4,187 each, with financing and managed hosting. The arrangement lowers the upfront hardware purchase but does not remove Bitcoin mining‘s ongoing costs or profitability risk.

Buying into industrial Bitcoin mining usually means dealing with noisy equipment, electricity contracts and cooling infrastructure. A new offering built around Block’s Proto hardware takes a different approach: purchase a single hashboard and leave the hosting to someone else.

Sazmining lists Proto immersion hashboards configured for approximately 204 terahashes per second, with efficiency of roughly 15 joules per terahash. Three boards make up a full Proto Immersion Module, but customers can start with one.

The advertised hardware price is $4,187. Its financing option requires $1,397 upfront followed by 18 monthly payments of $155, at a stated 0% interest rate. A separate hosting and maintenance fee of $153 a month applies, covering power at the quoted service rate and operational support.

Those recurring charges are central to the economics. A lower entry price does not mean free mining, and the Bitcoin received depends on network difficulty, rewards, uptime, fees and the market price of BTC. A hashboard can be technically efficient and still produce disappointing returns for its owner.

For Block, the offer broadens the potential audience for its Proto equipment. For Sazmining, it packages industrial hardware into a managed service that customers can purchase in smaller units.

The appeal is convenience and modularity. The question for buyers is whether the projected mining revenue comfortably covers all the costs that continue after the hardware purchase.

Bitcoin Magazine

Sazmining Now Sells Jack Dorsey’s Proto Immersion Hashboards 

Bitcoin mining just got a lower barrier to entry. 

Sazmining announced Thursday that it is now selling Proto’s immersion hashboards directly to individual and institutional buyers through its mining-as-a-service platform. Previously, the hardware was mostly in the hands of large-scale operators.

Each hashboard delivers roughly 200 TH at around 15 J/TH, and buyers own them outright while Sazmining handles deployment, monitoring and maintenance at a US facility. Mining rewards go straight to the owner’s wallet.

The move follows a multi-megawatt supply deal between Sazmining and Proto — the bitcoin mining arm of Jack Dorsey’s Block (NYSE: XYZ) — which both companies expect to expand as demand grows.

“Because of our aligned-incentive model, Sazmining only earns when we produce bitcoin for our clients,” said Kent Halliburton, CEO and co-founder of Sazmining. 

He also pitched mining as a form of bitcoin acquisition diversification: rather than paying the market price on the day of purchase, a miner’s costs are spread across the machine’s working life.

Wyoming-based Sazmining, founded in 2018, operates renewable-powered facilities across the US, Paraguay, and Norway. It says its fleet runs more than 20 percentage points ahead of the Bitcoin network’s carbon-free share.

Proto is Jack Dorsey’s Block’s bitcoin mining play. The Twitter founder has spent years arguing bitcoin is the foundation of “a more open financial system,” funding everything from Cash App’s buy-and-send rails to the Bitkey self-custody wallet, and he framed mining as the obvious missing piece back in 2021: “Bitcoin mining should be as easy as plugging a rig into a power source.” 

Block formally announced it was building an open bitcoin mining system in January 2022, with the stated aim of making mining “more distributed and efficient.”

This post Sazmining Now Sells Jack Dorsey’s Proto Immersion Hashboards  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.