Bitcoin Forum

http://www.butterflylabs.com/products/

http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator

do the math

you'll get back double what you paid in a month for that jalapeno and triple if you buy that rig

Difficulty will increase rapidly as ASIC units are deployed. It's a gamble as to whether these things will even pay for themselves let alone profit.

They claim to be able to make 900 a day, I'll wait 2 weeks to get mine so I can see the difficulty, and profitability.

yea but in one month, it will have made you back 90k from your initial 30k investment, even if you only get half that with the increase in difficulty and power costs and what not, that's still 15k in your pocket easy after only a month

Once (if) ASICs start shipping in a significant quantity, difficulty's going to increase a LOT more than just 100% within a month. You also have to keep in mind that you basically can't order now and expect a profit, given all the ASIC manufacturers have long queues of people waiting for shipment who placed orders earlier. Those who placed very early orders have a good shot at a big profit margin IF the company they ordered from is first out the gates in delivering product and the product's up to specs. If you're backlogged order #154 from a company which doesn't ship until a month after some other company starts shipping out significant quantities, you're probably screwed. What I think's most fascinating about all this, is that ASICs will depreciate something like 80-90% of value (based on potential revenue) within the first few months of ownership. Once the first ASICs are out, while there's no incentive to stop them from operating due to negligible electricity costs, there's also practically no incentive to buy new ones. It seems like mining will be made up of <500 people for a long time once the ASICs are pushed out. -- Now, keep in mind that assumes the ASICs can't be repurposed, but I don't believe I've heard of anyone talking about what to do with ASICs once their revenue generation bottoms out.

It's concerning how little difficulty is increasing. Unless the manufacturers are testing with unproductive software, their units should have caused a dramatic spike in difficulty. The company should then claim responsibility and *poof* they immediately and dramatically increase their credibility. IIRC, there is one company which decided to label their first batch of ASIC units something like a "test run," then mined on them while creating a new "production run" to ship out to customers, but I don't recall hearing about any network hash rate spike as a result of it. Maybe they were stealthy and started operating ASICs when the reward halved, so miners dropping out would mask ASIC units turning on?

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-small.png


(I've largely kept out of ASIC discussion, so might have a few glaring inaccuracies I'd appreciate being corrected on)

damn, so if i order one now, id most likely have to wait months just to get it?

also im in college and was wondering how much exactly does the power bill cut into costs? basically i'm paying for an unlimited supply of power anyway with my room and board and would be able to run a rig 24/7 for "free", does this give me a huge advantage over others?

Every ASIC vendor is reporting that they don't have their chips yet. Right now, it seems the closest is ASICMINER, who is supposed to have theirs finished next week. Because of their business model, you can expect their testing to have an effect on difficulty.

After community outcry, BFL has said that they will only do testing on their own testnet. I'm not really sure about bASIC and Avalon.

Here we go again...

check out the german --> off topic forums.   Seriously all the BFL topics have been moved there. 

Following this thread will keep one abreast of that:


Then following that:




Also don't count out some FPGA monster either.  Such as what yohan says they've got.  From another thread:

It will help you very short-term while GPU mining is still viable, and it would've helped you even more when CPU mining was viable. FPGAs and "true" ASICs, however, sip power. If you had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ASICs, though, it'd be noticeable.

Maybe we could call it a scam if they'd ever deliver them.

How does any one even break even  :-\.  Would you not just get infinitely closer to breaking even.  As difficulty rose you would mine less and less.

hopefully they all dont dump bitcoins out for cheap

Sadly i can see this happening, the way i figure if your the first person to recieve an asci and start churning out bitcoin like theres no tomorrow; then if you want to make profit you're best dumping them all on the market before the next person does.

That said if asci's ever do ship, as has been stated, lots of people will have them also, so you wont be making as much as you'd have hoped.

personally i think its all too good to be true, but i've been wrong in the past. The idea that someones invented a machine that will mean you never have to work again is kind of a little far fetched for my liking, but the idea is a good one.

p.s Hi everyone this is my first post :)

I dont believe why they released ASIC to public. they should run their machine for private investor if it really can get that HASH

Once the first huge ASIC rigs are brought online, block generation will only be faster than normal for 2016 blocks when difficulty will adjust and bring generation back to 6 blocks per hour. People may have a larger incentive to sell coins to repay their investment, but we won't see an OMG CRASH or anything.



Centralization of large portions of hashing power is bad and is one of the reasons I do not like Enterpoint's Goliath proposal. Having high speed hasing devices in the hands of many people increases the security of the network.

This would be fine if they were the only ones, but it's a bad business decision considering the competitive environment, as well as the future currency risk. If they pinned their whole business plan on this, then they could end up competing for a very small piece of the pie. The delays that they have had are already putting their business at risk, if they had gone this route then it's possible that they would never get their investment back.

On top of that, BFL wants to show their capabilities in designing a high power low energy custom chip so that they can get clients outside of the world of bitcoin. They are looking for 1% of a 100 billion dollar/year industry, not 50% or less of a 20 million dollar industry.

All that said, one ASIC vendor did take your route, and it appears they will deliver first. I actually feel that this is directly tied to the profit motivation. While BFL's 65nm design is (probably) an excellent display of the company's capabilities and will certainly help miners in a year or so when power costs will be an important function of profitability, if they had gone with a simpler chip process then their customers would have been better served as they would have had their miners while the block reward was still 50.

This has me dying laughing. If you order one today, you will wait longer than those who ordered in July. That's if you ever get one of course. But you're a long way down the line and the easy coins for the first people deploying will be long gone. Just use the money you were thinking about an ASIC and buy some coins.

even if you spend 1,200USD on coins, by the time these devices are deployed, 1,200USD in coins will be worth like $12. There's nothing to win by this upcoming deployment and everything to lose.  :-\

@ Kluge ::

Thanks so much for posting that chart!

As a technical analyst, however, I'm inclined to take up a bearish sentiment on mining difficulty based on your chart. It looks like we hit a high and have fallen through longer-term moving averages, indicating that a lot of miners are calling it quits based on present difficulty (it's getting hard for most hobbyists to profit, I hear). But since I can't load those charts in a real trading platform and perform real back-testing and analysis on it, I won't swear by it...I could be wrong.

Regards,

--ATC--

Your analysis is correct, but it ignores that cheap hashing power by a factor of 60x is about to be released in the next few months.

ASIC's is going to make 90% bitcoin users to quit bitcoining ...

smells like a total scam...

I doubt 10% of bitcoin users mine, and those that quit bitcoin because they aren't getting "free money" anymore aren't welcome. Miners live on the transactions of others. The reward is fair because it is needed to keep the network going, but it doesn't add any stability to the currency.

Just a thought: What's stopping BFL from mining themselves?

Who said they weren't? :-)