Bitcoin Forum

Since the reward for mining is constant, the value of GH/s decreases as more hashing power is added to the network.  ASIC prices will have to go down to stay competitive.  I guess that is why the companies that have ASICs are trying to sell them as fast as they can.

We're in a Gold Rush. Too many people buying ASIC pre-orders without doing the math on the ROI. Most of them will get burned as they will never recover their investment (regardless of how much BTC appreciates agains the $). If you spend 2.0BTCon a block eruptor and it mines you only 1.0BTC over its entire life, you still lost 1.0BTC (and its even worse if that BTC is now worth $10000, you should have kept your 2.0BTC in your wallet instead).

In a Gold Rush only the guys selling the shovels make money. The ASIC manufacturers are laughing all the way to the bank as most of their cost is already spent in FOAK investment. But they'll only drop the price when the punters stop ordering, so do your math on the ROI carefully, and don't feed the bubble.

As fast as the BTC value (so not any time soon probably)

By the end of this year (2013) the network hash capacity will be 400 - 500 THash/sec.
The "first generation" ASIC miners will become pactically useless.
But even then the nooks, who can't (and won't) make their arithmetic lesson, will keep the price high.

The big processor manufacturers should integrate the hashing Asic into their processor design.

Intel's newest processors do include dedicated crypto cores. But they are designed for general crypto work, not the highly optimised bitcoin double hash that our ASIC-CO's are churning out, so not competitive.

I don't think it's likely to happen any time soon, but it'd definitely help to ensure decentralization of the system

I bought my Asic in USD rather than BTC. That way i figure, barring a crash in the value of BTC, it shouldn't be too hard to get my $200 investment back. Now all i need to do is receive my ASIC

Right now id pass on ASICS and wait for the next big thing to come along.

I think their price will be on the same range that high end GPUs are now.  The difference will be on the big rigs, as they will have 100x or 1000x performance than the cheap ones...

I bet price will drop 50% by end of this year.

Not fast enough I am afraid.  :-\

Interesting logic, but did you check the ROI on purchase in BTC? Perhaps you should hedge your bet by buying some BTC on an exchange too?

Which is?

A year, to a year and a half id imagine

The ASIC miners are a great thing to the network, making it much much harder to perform a 51% attack as long as the manufacturers pump out just as fast as they make them and don't keep them all for themselves.

Which is why I think they SHOULD drop in price and people SHOULD buy them and run them if they can purely to strengthen the network and do their part in the same way that people SHOULD run Tor nodes to help strengthen that network too.

Prices are falling as we speak

ASIC prices won't fall until there's more supply than demand.

once china starts mass producing them prices will drop through the roof.

I do hope china adopts bitcoin at a constant rate and doesn't just abandon it like so many early adopters would have.. They must realize they are on to something surely!

I did do some quick ROI calculations before i paid for the ASIC.
I don't see my ASIC making me a huge fortune (between it's comparatively low hashing power and BFL's "relaxed" shipping policies) , but it makes for an interesting project and even if i don't break even, worst case, i've lost $200, it's not the end of the world (I never invest more than i can afford to lose).
I've hedged my investment buy buying ASICMiner stock. I bought it when it was like 0.8 BTC a share. I've easily covered the money I've spent on the ASIC and then some.

I also think it's difficult to calculate ROI when you don't know when the ASIC is going to arrive and the other factor is the difficulty which will be influenced by any significant increase in hashing power.  At the end of the day we are all competing for a limited number of coins with faster and faster hardware.  As new faster ASICs are produced and sold the old ones will fall in price, the speed at which the price of the old ones falls will depend on how quickly the new ASICs are produced, sold and come online.  The only constant is change.   I think it's really unfair that companies are not delivering goods in a timely fashion as a few months can make the difference between profit and loss.

Good to hear it, as long as you did your math right and are happy with the result its cool. Early investors in ASICMiner are making a killing (partly at the expense of the gung-ho punters buying the overpriced Block Erupters). Good for you!

I was being a little naughty with my "hedge your bet" comment. You're actually doubling-down in the hope that BTC gains value.  ;D

Yeah I'm not sure how some of the Block Eruptor buyers expect to make any money. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're buying them for such high prices (0.038 BTC per share per week is an awesome div), but even at the difficulty levels as they were when they first went on sale, people were looking at like 200 to 1 year to return their investment (assuming that difficulty didn't change too much). Admitted the block Eruptor is more powerful than the ASIC i'm waiting on, but my ASIC is a fraction of the price.

So you are counting on the value of BTC to rise to cover your investment.  Why not just buy BTC instead?  At least you wouldn't have to worry about when/if you are going to receive it  :)

I've been pointing the newbies at this calculator http://coinish.com/calc ... its a great way to predict ROI. Just be sure to use Expert mode to see the effect of difficulty increasing. Of course being as it uses a crude exponential model, the result will be more and more inaccurate as the payback time increases (who can predict difficulty that far in advance?) but its a useful wakeup to over-enthusiastic newbies wanting to buy-in to the latest big thing.

In a Gold Rush, nobody knew how much gold was available, so ROI couldn't be calculated.  With BTC, we know there are on average 3600 coins per day to be had.

I have bought BTC, i used my bitcoins to buy Stock in ASICMiner, which pays me a nice dividend each week.


Buying an ASIC is more for curiosity than to make huge piles of cash. That said, I've done a quick calculation using a difficulty of 10x the current difficulty and my break even period is 100 days ish

True, but the tricky part is knowing how many other Gold Miners are going to join you in the panning fields. The huge demand (and  consequent high price) for ASIC's is proof that its going to get pretty crowded. The only question is how fast they will deliver the backlog and how high the consequent increase in difficulty will go. Where will it be when you get your hands on yours. Got a crystal ball?

They will just make another coin that uses ASIC

They will drop faster then the crash from 250$ to 60$

I think you mean drop through the floor.

So true, I dont see it happens this year, but next year, who knows  ;)

As fast as the BTC value