You Can Buy This Shipping Container Filled With Bitcoin Miners for $1 Million

If you have a million dollars burning a hole in your pocket, might I suggest buying a shipping container modified to be a Bitcoin mining datacenter?

I’m only half-joking. The BlockBox AC is the latest offering from Bitfury, a hardware company that runs one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools in the world, but says it’s “ not a Bitcoin mining company.”

The BlockBox’s main selling point is that its a portable datacenter, although the reasons why anyone would want to move this much computer equipment on the fly is unclear. Perhaps its so Bitcoin miners can stay one step ahead of the regulatory crackdowns on cryptocurrency mining and relocate on a whim, if say, the city where they were mining bans it.

Bitfury is selling its BlockBox on a profit-sharing model with two options. One option is to buy the box for $1 million and once your initial million dollar investment is paid off through mining you split future profits with Bitfury 50/50. The other option is to have Bitfury host the box on its premises for $70,000 a month.

But is it worth it?

Each BlockBox comes with 176 Bitcoin miners able to burn through about 8 quadrillion hashes per second. According to Bitfury, this requires about 1.2 megawatts of power, which is roughly enough to power about 500 average homes.

If you can find decently priced electricity (around 5 cents per kilowatt-hour), you’d be able to net about $5,000 per month in profit if you rented one of these bad boys. If you bought it outright for $1 million, you could pay it off in about 13 months at current Bitcoin prices and then make about $35,000 per month thereafter.

And hey, if Bitcoin crashes, the shipping container can be retooled as a cheap apartment. Nice!