A new Bitcoin miner, the Numiner NM 440, is drawing attention after its product announcement Thursday. According to the manufacturer, the machine can generate four times as high revenues at higher efficiency levels than the next leading machine, the Antminer S19j Pro.

Quickly dubbed the “Mountain Dew” miner due to its resemblance to the beverage brand, the machine drew criticism as the Bitcoin mining community tried to figure out what it was all about.

Source: Numiner

The machine’s sticker claims are head turning, to say the least:

  • 440 TH/s
  • 75% reduction in energy consumption over the “average miner.”
  • 20.2 J/TH

Skepticism fomented online, with some questioning the machine's specifications, not to mention its image. At the very least, Numiner’s efficiency and profitability claims set expectations high.

Interestingly, Numiner listed chip and computer part manufacturers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Foxconn and Xilinx as production “coordination” partners on its website.

After publication of this story, Cerebras Systems told Compass the Numiner image was a misappropriated rendering of a current Cerebras product offering:

"We are aware of a startup crypto mining company using a misappropriated, altered image of the Cerebras CS-2 product for their own business purposes. This image improperly passes off our CS-2 as their own product, as you can see by the Cerebras logo still visible at the bottom of the image. We are not working, or otherwise affiliated, with this company. We are taking steps to address the situation."

Sphere3D

Sphere3D, an IT company out of Toronto, further added to the curiosity with a 60,000 machine purchase order, beginning in September 2022. Notably, final evaluation of these miners ends in June 2022, meaning the production specifications of the machine remain unknown.

Sphere 3D is also adding 60,000 Antminer S19j Pro’s to its fleet for a total of 32.4 EH/s by end of deployment. That would give Sphere3D 15% of Bitcoin’s total hashrate, as of the time of writing.

Sphere3D stock price was up 25% after hours following the announcement Thursday. Gryphon had previously announced a reverse merger via SPAC with Sphere 3D, a data management company, but delayed the merge in Q4.

It's hard to say what will happen with these miners, but the industry is initially skeptical of things that seem too good to be true. With the mantra “Don’t trust, verify,” bitcoiners definitely live up to their name.