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Field report · Sep 21, 2026 · 6 min read
The S19 XP Hyd made the cheapest coin of its whole generation
0.1898 BTC at $27,730 of electricity a coin — cheaper than anything else from its era we have measured. Three years of a hydro machine that nobody was watching.
Bitmain Antminer S19 XP Hyd (257 TH/s)
The number nobody expected
A 257 TH/s S19 XP Hyd, bought at $5,374 once its price settled and run at our Argentina site from October 2023. Three years on it is one of the most productive machines we have ever put in a rack, and almost nobody was paying attention to it at the time.
The same machine, bought at $5,374 once the price settled and run at our Argentina site from October 2023, has mined and kept 0.1898 BTC, worth about $15,424 today. It burned $5,263 of electricity getting them — $27,730 a coin, the cheapest bitcoin of any machine from its generation we have measured.
Cashflow of $10,161 against a landed cost of $8,555. It covered its own hardware and is still mining, heading for about 1.7× by the 2028 halving.
$37,546 a coin. Nothing else from its generation got near that.
Why the hydro version aged better than the air one
At 20.8 J/TH the S19 XP Hyd is not an efficient machine by 2026 standards. What it had was scale: 257 TH/s in a single box, at a time when the air-cooled machines around it were doing 110 to 140. The fixed costs of owning a machine — freight, import duty, customs, rack space, the setup labour — are broadly the same whether the box does 120 TH or 257, so spreading them over twice the hashrate halves them per terahash.
That is the whole reason it beat its air-cooled contemporaries on cost per coin despite being no more efficient per terahash. It is also the reason we keep recommending people look at total output per unit and not only at J/TH.
The move that extended it
It ran in Argentina for 223 days. On 22 May 2024 we moved it to Nigeria, where it has run ever since — 852 days and counting. We did not wait for it to stop clearing at 6¢; we moved it the month Nigeria started paying better, which is a different and much earlier date.
That relocation is most of why the number above reads 1.19×. Nigeria mines fewer coins than Argentina because its uptime is lower, but it mines them for a third less — and once hashprice fell far enough, that trade flipped in Nigeria’s favour. It has another 0.053 BTC and about $4,241 in it before the 2028 halving.
What it says about the 2022 generation
The S19 XP family cost more than its contemporaries and people complained about that at the time. Four years on it is the machine from that era that covered its hardware, ran straight through a halving, and still has earning left in it.
The lesson is not complicated and it keeps repeating: the machine that looks expensive on the day tends to be the one still working when the cheap one has been retired. That is the argument for buying efficiency, and this is what it looks like when it plays out over a full lifecycle.
- Bitmain Antminer S23 Hyd (563 TH/s) — 9.5 J/TH, In stock, $31,026 of electricity per bitcoin, 28% year one
- Bitmain Antminer S21j XP Hyd (495 TH/s) — 12 J/TH, In stock, $39,047 of electricity per bitcoin, 42% year one
- Bitdeer SealMiner A3 Pro Hyd (666 TH/s) — 12.5 J/TH, In stock, $40,294 of electricity per bitcoin, 34% year one
Which machines this covers
Disclosure
Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.