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Hmmm. Why would this cost more per unit than other group buys?

probably because of his time value of money/reward/cost.  the shipping variance might be due to shipping weight (dunno about Canadian shipping).
I've had many PMs from Canada looking for 1-2 units, so this group buy should go through.
Good luck!

Well count me out, other group buys are/have been cheaper and it's shipped from the states.

I'll go in for 1!

CMMPro ; 1 ; 2.03 ; 1LAccv9GruMenq5JfNtPse6BLjP144Vjdf

(local pickup Mississauga please)

Whoa nice...1/3 of the way there!

I'm watching closely :)    However, with about a 7month breakeven i hope we see these for 1-1.5BTC soon!

You may see a price drop if someone else steps up to compete.

The little Klondike is a good contended to compete but with no chips shipping from Avalon yet no one knows when they would be ready to mine.

I'd bet Avalon doesn't ship chips until after they ship their batch 2/3 large miners.

If they let out a few hundred thousand chips they will dilute the value of the existing orders greatly and their customers will revolt.
(Like what is happening with BFL.)

The way I calculate it, it's a 6-7 month breakeven point at current diff and we all know what is very likely to happen to diff in the next 2-3 months.  I wish I could see how these units make me money because I would love to buy a couple dozen.  For me ASICMINER priced the unit too high.

Good luck with the group buy guys, being a GTA born and bread boy myself I wish I could support you a little but doesn't really make sense to me at this point!

I will order 10 units as soon as I figure out how to change cash to BTC.
My friend just configured 10 units, it makes 3.3GH/s !!!

You can go to LibertyBit to exchange cash to BTC.

What I do not get it, though, is why these items are still profitable.

With 0.35 GH/s, one can make (optimistic estimate) 0.4 BTC per month, and it is going to exponentially decrease due to the increase of the hash rates. So, it takes more than 5 months to simply recover the purchase price, even if difficulty remained constant.

Even 1 BTC would be a risky price to pay for these items. Think before your buy!

http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

I am not a businessman, I do it for fun!
I built 2 computers as mining rigs and bitcoins are the excuse to spend money on computer hardware and have fun (I just finished and all setup costed me $5000 - but fun is priceless)

Good for you! You are lucky to belong that minority of human kind who can spend $5,000 on fun.

But most people here at least want to break even, if not to make some profit. The problem with the devices offered for sale here is that the odds of breaking even are quite low with the current pricing.

I further note that if they were so profitable, they would not be sold, but those who already have them would use it themselves.

You are quite right about both observations. The question is whether it is profitable to buy these devices today. This is what I very highly doubt, and I am trying my best to caution others from being carried away by the prospects of revenue without adequately considering the costs and return.

You see, what you sell has quite a bit of potential to break even or bring only very small profits after it breaks even, because the difficulty rate increases exponentially, and with more ASIC, there is no reason to assume that its growth will change.

I don't drink beer and I don't smoke - here comes $5000 easily. Anybody can do it.

I find it very sad how insensitive you are toward poverty and those who are less fortunate than you are. While you may not have had the experience of not having money to buy food, others did, and there are many people who starve not because they are lazy or alcoholic or smoke.

So, you are promoting a product at a price that is not economic, and that those who buy it have a fair chance to lose money on.

Why are you doing it?

in the early days of iphone apps, there was an app called "i'm rich" or something like that. it did nothing but display a picture of a gem, and it was something like $1000 to buy. the guy managed a few sales before apple yanked it.

what's being promoted is a piece of electronic equipment. whether the price is economic, or whether those who buy it "lose money" (or, more accurately, fail to make money) is irrelevant.

is the sale of a cd-rw drive irresponsible if the purchaser will never sell enough copied discs to get his money back? to double his money?

you're assuming that the end users are only in it for the money, and that the group buy organizers are preying on the gullible. the organizers assume nothing about the end users' intentions, and are simply helping people who want to buy these devices get their hands on them.

are some people buying these in the hopes of getting rich? perhaps, but isn't it their responsibility to check?

Most people do not  by CD-RW for selling pirated CDs, but rather to back up their own data. Moreover, the cost of a CD-RW is not comparable to the price for these devices.

I do not question the right of people to waste hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own money if they choose to do so. However, I am doing my duty as a citizen to caution them that if their hope is to make money/profit, then this is not the right device for them.

While CD-RW has many uses, ASIC devices have only a single use -- bitcoin mining.

Help others make an investment that will have negative returns?


I fully agree with that. My point has been and is that for the price Eruptors are sold, they are not economic.

you obviously didn't go to high school in the late 90s. cd-rw drives were $500, and selling pirated CDs for $5 is why half the kids in my school got them.


a cursory glance of the forums -- indeed, the same forums on which these group buys are being organized -- will give potential buyers all the warning they'll ever need. i dare you to find an erupter thread where nobody mentions ROI.


cd-rw only has one use, burning cds.  asic devices only have one use, calculating SHA-256. toothpicks only have one use, picking your teeth.

everybody understands that you don't want people to buy these things. POINT TAKEN. jeez...

I am placing order for 6 Erupters.
Payment: 1FK7nMBRPrfxovK4dAwrmtni7eX3Fxwwqn
pickup: Scarborough

The difference is that picking your tooth or burning cds have intrinsic values. Calculating SHA-256 does not have an intrinsic value.

GPUs and Ztex boards have other uses than bitcoin mining.

If BTC mining becomes unprofitable, they can be sold, and thus part of the investment can be recovered.

This is not the case with ASIC devices.

If you are bullish bitcoin, long-term these USB could be profitable. If you buy 1 for 2btc then just replace those by buying 2 coins from gox then you have paid $250 for the USB. If coins go up crazy to $500, then, even if you only mine half a coin you have broken even. If bitcoin is around in 10 years...even fractions of a coin will have been worth mining. So for those confident in bitcoin, buying one of these things is not crazy. I bought coins at $3 and $9. I took 2 of my coins and bought one of these to help will the network and give mining a try. 

Even if you expect bitcoin prices to go up to $500, it is not clear that this is going to pay back.

The fact that you bought bitcoins for $3 or $9 does not alter that. Instead of buying these devices, you could wait until bitcoin goes up (as you predict) to $500, and then sell them for that price for a profit of more than $490 per coin.

Dr Lucas, with all respect to your poor financial situation, you are posting to the wrong thread.
Read the forum name : HARDWARE
we are not discussing here food stamp or welfare checks.
Tell us what you are mining with?

Instead of buying anything, ever, we could all just hoard our money until it's worth millions

This group picks up speed.
Please add 4 more units to my order.
Transaction ID: 2ae97c9c80d66a573780585643a0a238c103af027fc28f6b1e8d8939f4069839

We were not discussing my financial situation either. Just because I have enough to eat, and you have enough to eat, we should not forget that others do not have anything to do eat. If you have some spare cash, I suggest that you donate it to charity. However, for those who want to mine for profit -- this is not the right device in my respectful opinion.


Indeed. And part of a legitimate discussion about hardware is ROI.

I understand that you would prefer to silence me and my opinions, but I do not appreciate the methods you have chosen to pursue this goal.

Wow...you are such a misdirected and self righteous dick...you are going to have the honor to be the first person on this forum I have added to my ignore list.

Thank you Dr Lukas for your last remark, let’s put poverty issues aside and focus on your point.
You must have an accounting or banking background.
I had to lookup what ROI means in Wikipedia. Thanks to you,  I got educated and made some calculations:

1 Eruptor for 2.03BTC will generate  0.338378 BTC a month according to online calculators
The cost will be recovered in 6 month = 2.03/0.338378
Taking for account that difficulty will increase, I will give it 7 months

Remaining  5 months is  5*0.338378 =   1.69 BTC profit
(take away allowance for difficulty increase) profit  1.5BTC

I do not count electricity cost because it is negligible: 2.5W x 8760h = 21.9kWh/year

And here is Wikipedia:
return on investment (%) = Net profit / Investment × 100

1.5 / 2.03 x 100 = 73.89%

I cannot see any investment on any stock, bond or mutual fund giving such a yield.

As my newly acquired friend, could you please check my calculations and if possible dampen my enthusiasm because I am eager to buy more of those babies.

In any normal investment a 15% ROI is already outstanding...and to get 15% you are already outside of normal "safe" investments.

you may want to change that 7 for a higher number. :)

how much higher depends on avalon, bfl, etc

Neither companies are delivering significant products....Avalon seems to be becoming as sketchy as BFL...possibly worse, at least BFL is shipping Jalapeno's at this point. Avalon has dried up.  

(Some of these ASIC's may be delivered at some point but until we see them shipping much of anything I'm not concerned about them.)

I appreciate that Canary has upped his Canadian order restriction to 15+ units for his group buys. I'm hoping that will encourage more Canadians, especially in the GTA, to buy here. I want my stick!

I am glad that we are back to talking about ROI and not about personal attacks.


Here is the source of your error.

You assume that the difficulty level is going to remain constant over the course of the next 6 months. This assumption, however, is incorrect. As we have seen in the last little while, difficulty level has been increasing exponentially. They will continue to do so due to the number of ASICs that are going to be released.

What you are going to get is a geometric sum with ratio < 1, and only the first term will be 0.338378 / 2 =  0.169189 (first two weeks). All other terms are going to be exponentially decreasing. As you know, the sum of a geometric series with ratio q is 1/(1-q).

So, if you run 1 Eruptor infinitely long, then your total revenue is:   0.169189/(1-q).

In order for buyers to be able to ever recover 2.03 BTC, one needs

0.169189/(1-q) > 2.03

Thus,

0.083344335 = 0.169189/(2.03) > 1-q

In other words,

q > 0.91665567 and 1/q < 1.0909222.

This means that the difficulty does not increase by more than 9.09% at each retarget.

Can you remind me by how many percents the difficulty increased in the last few retargets?

This should conclude # of outstanding units. https://blockchain.info/tx/0c1c0bf64c9e1fc2c07c4d7ef110397c2a8063f132fe525e8612a806dc638839 (https://blockchain.info/tx/0c1c0bf64c9e1fc2c07c4d7ef110397c2a8063f132fe525e8612a806dc638839)

In that case additional four
https://blockchain.info/tx/f5c97d21db735798c0ea2cb64066d2f2bc0165c1c7188ed71014eb740b3f3e91 (https://blockchain.info/tx/f5c97d21db735798c0ea2cb64066d2f2bc0165c1c7188ed71014eb740b3f3e91)

Hopefully I'm not too late, here's the details:

name: melmo
No. Units: 10
Payment sent: 20.3 BTC
Payment address: 13qt66nn1ZdcHNuvC2edhnLD7emwiE3b8g
Pickup: Scarborough

Did you get my PM?  I see 5 confirmations... hopefully that last one doesn't take too long :)

Hopefully I'm not too late:

name: JakeTri
No. Units: 8
Payment sent: 16.24 BTC
Payment address: 195PjivKhFrYw3h1eCuWCnZTLr45YVYu1Y
Pickup: Scarborough

I'll send you a PM with hash for my signature using 195PjivKhFrYw3h1eCuWCnZTLr45YVYu1Y address.

Argh, I so wish I could get in on this.

Any more GB's in the near future?

I'll buy 4 @ .90, for local pick up or delivered to southern, ontario.

HT xD

Hello???  This GB open or not?