Bitcoin Forum

So I bought my blades for $230 and $300, picked up a backplane for $114 and the plan was I could expand this setup. Now seeing the shortage and pricing on ASIC blades it's clearly not a cost-efficient plan to expand unless there is a surpluss and depression in pricing. Anyone know if these Blades are still in production? The demand is there but it seems like there's a shortage.

In a way it makes sense for post-release equipment pricing to follow BTC, but with the rising difficulty it's a bit unreasonable where these blades are at right now.

They will be soon EOL, grab them wile you can.

Ummm... I'm not desperate. Simply said, I know ignoring sunk costs is sometimes a good practice but there's no way I can pay $450+ for the same blade I bought for $230 a few weeks ago, not with better stuff around the corner. EOL should drive the pricing down, the lack of sophistication in the secondary equipment market is demonstrated by the bidding up of these components, will just need to wait until the weak hands shake out. 

They are near EOL, but they aren't near end of useful-ness. I bought a mess of blades for 180 on amazon before the newest price increase.

You are seeing BTC increase in value, making a blade more valuable. New and around the corner is exactly that, you'll see that in BTC land soon!

And it's all somewhat of a chicken/egg scenario... The small miners being pushed out by ASIC and increasing difficultly is what created the shortage of BTC, resulting in traders bidding it up, and now because the output has been bid-up the cost of inputs increases further. Man, this shit is crazy.

they are already EOL.... from what i understand they are no longer being produced.... 

I cracked and ordered one more blade, the empty slots on my backplane needed it, in fact they were begging for it. Big Saturday night, what can I say? My avg cost basis on blades is still acceptable, justifying like any good miner would... We are born every minute, right?!

It is my understanding they are discontinued.  The distributor I purchased mine from said(last week) he got another load of 300 and that was the last.  He did say they(bitfountian) have a new product they are going to be selling, and he should see them on the next order.  I would imagine it will be a 50-something-nm product.

I think the price of the blades will remain high as long as roi stays as good as it is.  Once they are no longer profitable then the price will go down, but they will have little useability.  I would guess the blades will be the first to go. Of all the asic products the blades use the largest nm process die.

What are the odds the new product will be compatible with the backplane from the v2 blades?

I am not sure. I don't recall him saying specifically what the new product would be like, and that is not a question I thought to ask.  I was more concerned with speed and cost. He said the cost would be close to the same but would be almost 1.5x hash power. Maybe they are just going to overclock the existing chips.  Until someone has one, no one can know for sure.

I'm assuming the new cube is the replacement. Seems to be ~40gh for 1 btc. Pretty good, if blades are still $300 or more.

Cube is better deal than blades anyway.

cube is just blades in a square box with a back plane for the power and Ethernet. I haven't seen any cubes available lately.

Yes, but there is not one blade in cube, and its cheaper per gh/s. In group buy section there is cube group buys too.

http://thegenesisblock.com/asicminer-gen3-hardware-announcement-sees-muted-market-reaction/

Their next gen chips are seemingly on the way, V2 blades are likely discontinued as they ramp up to roll out V3 Blades. I assume a V2 Cube will come about as well.

It would only make sense for them to stick with blades as their immersion cooling mine is already set up to pop in denser boards.

Hopefully new any new Cube blades will be made available to upgrade existing units which are really just a small version of the bigger blade setups. Curious to see what they end up with.

I am looking forward to what they can bring to market. Seems we have a few big waves of hardware hitting the network in the comming months.

how do you figure the cube is a better deal?    you have to buy power supplies for them....  when if you have open slots on the backplane  just pop 10.7ghs in and go!

Confused? Blades don't need a power supply?

If'n you were sophisticated you could steal the 12V from the empty backplane, but 12V is pretty cheap at these wattages isn't it?

Standard ASIC chips are becoming a thing of the past. all the big fish are playing with single cell chips producing 400GH/s or more per chip. The good news is, with a steady hand, a microscope, a laser solider tool, and some patience the old "blade" style miners are easy to fix. More often than now when a blade dies, its the result of a few fried chips. i have fixed several not with ease by replacing chips. I use to offer a service on e-bay to mount chips for people but in less than 3 days had to shut it down because i would have needed 10 of me and a year to get all the boards done that people wanted in the first 72 hours. If you are serious about scaling on your blade setup, just start buying burnt blades for cheap from people. on bitcoinforum i offered $10 for fried blades and managed to get up to 750 GH/s worth of them working for less than $ 1,000. Just pulling good chips from bad boards and putting them on good boards that broke because of bad chips.

My no means am i offering to do this for everyone, but since you were the OP and seemed serious about your plan. if you find fried boards you can get from people at a good price message me and i can get a few of them fixed for you so you can continue to scale away.

One thing I will say... the HP power supply for the backplane is $30 and it's rock-solid. Funny thing is people are paying over $100 for them on Ebay, meanwhile Amazon has a ton available for $30. Ebay seems like it is full of people praying on newbies though. Anyways, my average blade cost is $300 across 5 total, which at these levels I'm okay with; just wish I could get a few more for the empty backplane slots.

love those hp psu's that plug into backplane!   makes it so easy!

Once the Bitcoin_price/difficulty ratio gets down to $0.0000005 I think you will see the price of hardware come down considerably.

This will allow you to scoop up some hardware for a good price and when Bitcoin goes back up your mining will be worth it again.

Yes, it's a very cool thing if you can get a backplane for a good price too :)

I really hope their next product, or some future product, uses the same slots for powering. Ideally, it would be a great feature to use the same backplane for stepping into a newer line of blades, and it could keep their manufacturing costs down + build loyalty for those with backplanes.



Well, I also think at some point the current demand will be met and the prices may correct sooner. Right now the blades are proportionately more expensive than they have ever been (in my short career as a miner at least). I'm hopefully waiting for people to order these and get in over their heads with the setup and cooling, then possibly re-sell out of frustration. I guess when I look at a BFL unit or USB-based ASICs a premium on pricing makes sense because the setup is much easier, and of course everything will be high due to the recent BTC appreciation.

With these blades it seems like the prior discount in pricing associated with the pain-in-the ass factor or rigging them up and cooling is no longer being priced in the way it was before. Don't get me wrong, once they are running and you know the ropes it's just repetition to add more blades, but that first time around the block never seems easy with these things. Just a cursory glance through the setup thread on these forums and it's pretty clear new users have more difficulty with these than anything else out there (correct me if I'm wrong on that). While I do see a lot of "buy it now" prices way up on Ebay that doesn't necessarily mean people are buying them at those levels. I was just a bit surprised when I saw Jones Gear above $400, didn't think they would go that high on them there. The fact many people need to get creative setting these up leaves some level of hope that buyers might end up throwing in the towel.