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Title: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: kiwiasian on September 02, 2011, 03:54:58 AM We started at $32.
We saw a seemingly stable 17. It went down. We had a seemingly stable 13. It went down. Stable 10. Guess? Ah, you're right, it went down. Now we're at 8. Guess what will happen? Honestly, anyone who thinks it will go up is too optimistic. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: NothinG on September 02, 2011, 03:57:11 AM I think it will go up, sue me.
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Bitcoin Swami on September 02, 2011, 04:46:41 AM We started at $32. We saw a seemingly stable 17. It went down. We had a seemingly stable 13. It went down. Stable 10. Guess? Ah, you're right, it went down. Now we're at 8. Guess what will happen? Honestly, anyone who thinks it will go up is too optimistic. were we at a stable 32? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: GoWest on September 02, 2011, 05:27:53 AM Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Nagle on September 02, 2011, 05:33:43 AM http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=720&m=mtgoxUSD&k=&r=180&i=&c=0&s=&e=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=0&p=0&t=S&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=SMA&m2=30&x=0
Bitcoin, the last six months. (Purple line is the 30 day trailing moving average) That chart pretty much says it all: a speculative bubble, followed by a long, slow slide. For the last two months, the price has dropped about $4 per month. That's Bitcoin. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: hugolp on September 02, 2011, 05:55:26 AM http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?width=720&m=mtgoxUSD&k=&r=180&i=&c=0&s=&e=&v=0&cv=0&ps=0&l=0&p=0&t=S&b=&a1=&m1=10&a2=SMA&m2=30&x=0 Bitcoin, the last six months. (Purple line is the 30 day trailing moving average) That chart pretty much says it all: a speculative bubble, followed by a long, slow slide. For the last two months, the price has dropped about $4 per month. That's Bitcoin. Sorry but speculative bubbles go the other way arround, the have a more or less continued increase in price and then they collapse quickly. Exactly the opposite of Bitcoin. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ThomasV on September 02, 2011, 05:57:12 AM you bought high? don't miss this opportunity, sell while it is low
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 08:47:15 AM http://static.twoday.net/mahalanobis/images/real_gold_price.gif That chart pretty much says it all: a speculative bubble, followed by a long, slow slide. For the last twenty years, the price has dropped about $8 per month. That's gold. Are you saying the historical chart has predictive power? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: NothinG on September 02, 2011, 09:02:13 AM http://static.twoday.net/mahalanobis/images/real_gold_price.gif That chart pretty much says it all: a speculative bubble, followed by a long, slow slide. For the last twenty years, the price has dropped about $8 per month. That's gold. Are you saying the historical chart has predictive power? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: hugolp on September 02, 2011, 11:42:13 AM http://static.twoday.net/mahalanobis/images/real_gold_price.gif That chart pretty much says it all: a speculative bubble, followed by a long, slow slide. For the last twenty years, the price has dropped about $8 per month. That's gold. Are you saying the historical chart has predictive power? Yes, I think he means we are in 1975. :D Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Mageant on September 02, 2011, 12:49:32 PM My guess is that Bitcoin is not attracting any new people at the moment that's why the slow slide (because of new Bitcoins being constantly generated).
That will probably only change once Bitcoin becomes more useful, i.e. more tools and programs have been developed, which might take a few months. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Jixtreme on September 02, 2011, 02:17:41 PM Honestly, anyone who thinks it will go up is too optimistic. Eventually, Bitcoin will go back up. Its fundamentals are too strong not to. The question is when. -Jix Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ElectricMucus on September 02, 2011, 02:24:30 PM Honestly, anyone who thinks it will go up is too optimistic. Eventually, Bitcoin will go back up. Its fundamentals are too strong not to. The question is when. -Jix When the hashing power has decreased and rigs were sold. But yeah people are in denial, that's what gives Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 02:25:24 PM My guess is that Bitcoin is not attracting any new people at the moment that's why the slow slide (because of new Bitcoins being constantly generated). That will probably only change once Bitcoin becomes more useful, i.e. more tools and programs have been developed, which might take a few months. Honestly, anyone who thinks it will go up is too optimistic. Eventually, Bitcoin will go back up. Its fundamentals are too strong not to. The question is when. -Jix Bitcoin is flawed. Bitcoin is actually extremely flawed... Though the lay man might not understand the finer technical details enough to comprehend the flaws in the Bitcoin system, the entire mystique surrounding the scam is just foul enough to impart the wisdom to stay away. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Gerken on September 02, 2011, 02:30:43 PM Honestly, anyone who thinks it will go up is too optimistic. Eventually, Bitcoin will go back up. Its fundamentals are too strong not to. The question is when. -Jix I see this posted a lot. Could you clarify exactly what you mean by "fundamentals are too strong"? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: grod on September 02, 2011, 02:34:14 PM When the hashing power has decreased and rigs were sold. But yeah people are in denial, that's what gives Deepbit disagrees with you. Over the past month the hash rate there (measured, not estimated) has gone from 5 terahash to 5.5 terahash. It was going up 50 gigahash a day as the price went below $10, and has since flatlined -- but it has not decreased in any measurable way. *MY* remaining mining hardware is on craigslist, I don't deny it. Already sold two 5830s for $120 each, hoping for a difficulty drop or price pop to sell the last 2. But that won't be the general case until FPGA and ASIC miners make video cards as obsolete as CPUs. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 02:39:00 PM When the hashing power has decreased and rigs were sold. But yeah people are in denial, that's what gives Deepbit disagrees with you. Over the past month the hash rate there (measured, not estimated) has gone from 5 terahash to 5.5 terahash. It was going up 50 gigahash a day as the price went below $10, and has since flatlined -- but it has not decreased in any measurable way. *MY* remaining mining hardware is on craigslist, I don't deny it. Already sold two 5830s for $120 each, hoping for a difficulty drop or price pop to sell the last 2. But that won't be the general case until FPGA and ASIC miners make video cards as obsolete as CPUs. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ElectricMucus on September 02, 2011, 02:44:10 PM When the hashing power has decreased and rigs were sold. But yeah people are in denial, that's what gives Deepbit disagrees with you. Over the past month the hash rate there (measured, not estimated) has gone from 5 terahash to 5.5 terahash. It was going up 50 gigahash a day as the price went below $10, and has since flatlined -- but it has not decreased in any measurable way. *MY* remaining mining hardware is on craigslist, I don't deny it. Already sold two 5830s for $120 each, hoping for a difficulty drop or price pop to sell the last 2. But that won't be the general case until FPGA and ASIC miners make video cards as obsolete as CPUs. It obviously will not come overnight, there are people in special locations with fees of less than 0.1$/kwh who even might be able to continue but for the most people I don't see a way out. (Unless bitcoin suddenly gets a new stream of publicity pumping more money into the system) Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ElectricMucus on September 02, 2011, 02:48:36 PM Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... I don't believe in ASICs either, just extrapolate from the upcoming gpu->fpga trend and with a lack of information think it would be the logical choice.Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Bigpiggy01 on September 02, 2011, 03:26:58 PM Quote I don't believe in ASICs either, just extrapolate from the upcoming gpu->fpga trend and with a lack of information think it would be the logical choice. +1 One of the reasons FPGA and ASIC won't work out is that they have almost 0 other applications than hashing. If all hashing went belly up tomorrow I'd still be able to recoop 60-70% of value from my gpus that's something that I'd never be able to do with either FPGAs or ASICs. So unless you've got balls of steel they're an at best unsound investment. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 03:38:26 PM Though the lay man might not understand the finer technical details enough to comprehend the flaws in the Bitcoin system, the entire mystique surrounding the scam is just foul enough to impart the wisdom to stay away. I explained the, for his use, necessary parts of Bitcoin to my hairdresser (!) yesterday, and showed him Bitcoin Wallet on my mobile. He wants it, now. If we had what Bit-pay offers in my country he would be standing in line to sign up. It might be flawed, but not as much as the existing credit card and banking system is for small merchants. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... Yeah I had this argument in another thread a few weeks ago. People claimed there would NEVER be Bitcoin FPGAs. I think it's the other way around actually. I won't even touch mining until we're at ASICs, since I consider the price to follow production cost until we hit the uptake vs deflation knee of the curve. GPU miners need to charge $6/BTC. FPGA miners can charge $0.5. ASIC miners can ... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 03:41:39 PM Though the lay man might not understand the finer technical details enough to comprehend the flaws in the Bitcoin system, the entire mystique surrounding the scam is just foul enough to impart the wisdom to stay away. I explained the, for his use, necessary parts of Bitcoin to my hairdresser (!) yesterday, and showed him Bitcoin Wallet on my mobile. He wants it, now. If we had what Bit-pay offers in my country he would be standing in line to sign up. It might be flawed, but not as much as the existing credit card and banking system is for small merchants. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... Yeah I had this argument in another thread a few weeks ago. People claimed there would NEVER be Bitcoin FPGAs. I think it's the other way around actually. I won't even touch mining until we're at ASICs, since I consider the price to follow production cost until we hit the uptake vs deflation knee of the curve. GPU miners need to charge $6/BTC. FPGA miners can charge $0.5. ASIC miners can ... Your fundamental inability to do simple math or understand economies of scale betrays you... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 03:44:05 PM Your fundamental inability to do simple math or understand economies of scale betrays you... Feel free to explain where my simple math abilities fail me ;) Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Piper67 on September 02, 2011, 03:44:56 PM Though the lay man might not understand the finer technical details enough to comprehend the flaws in the Bitcoin system, the entire mystique surrounding the scam is just foul enough to impart the wisdom to stay away. I explained the, for his use, necessary parts of Bitcoin to my hairdresser (!) yesterday, and showed him Bitcoin Wallet on my mobile. He wants it, now. If we had what Bit-pay offers in my country he would be standing in line to sign up. It might be flawed, but not as much as the existing credit card and banking system is for small merchants. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... Yeah I had this argument in another thread a few weeks ago. People claimed there would NEVER be Bitcoin FPGAs. I think it's the other way around actually. I won't even touch mining until we're at ASICs, since I consider the price to follow production cost until we hit the uptake vs deflation knee of the curve. GPU miners need to charge $6/BTC. FPGA miners can charge $0.5. ASIC miners can ... Your fundamental inability to do simple math or understand economies of scale betrays you... Ah, see, this is where you lost me. I've not found too many forum members with a better grasp of mathematics than defxor. If you stuck around, instead of predictably coming into the forums when there's a dip in price and equally predictably leaving it when the price rises, you'd know that too. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 03:46:47 PM Though the lay man might not understand the finer technical details enough to comprehend the flaws in the Bitcoin system, the entire mystique surrounding the scam is just foul enough to impart the wisdom to stay away. I explained the, for his use, necessary parts of Bitcoin to my hairdresser (!) yesterday, and showed him Bitcoin Wallet on my mobile. He wants it, now. If we had what Bit-pay offers in my country he would be standing in line to sign up. It might be flawed, but not as much as the existing credit card and banking system is for small merchants. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... Yeah I had this argument in another thread a few weeks ago. People claimed there would NEVER be Bitcoin FPGAs. I think it's the other way around actually. I won't even touch mining until we're at ASICs, since I consider the price to follow production cost until we hit the uptake vs deflation knee of the curve. GPU miners need to charge $6/BTC. FPGA miners can charge $0.5. ASIC miners can ... Your fundamental inability to do simple math or understand economies of scale betrays you... Ah, see, this is where you lost me. I've not found too many forum members with a better grasp of mathematics than defxor. If you stuck around, instead of predictably coming into the forums when there's a dip in price and equally predictably leaving it when the price rises, you'd know that too. When has the price risen since the hype bubble? It hasn't. Every post I will ever make in the future will be at a lower average price than the last. And anyone that believes FPGAs will ever be cost effective for mining is deluded. Anyone who believes there will ever be a Bitcoin ASIC is simply fucking retarded. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 03:51:59 PM And anyone that believes FPGAs will ever be cost effective for mining is deluded. Anyone who believes there will ever be a Bitcoin ASIC is simply fucking retarded. FPGAs are already more cost effective than GPUs at the electricity costs I have. You might have different views on a suitable expected ROI and projected changes in price and difficulty of course, but since it seems you believe the price of BTCs are going down that's actually contradictory to your claims. Additionally, you seem somewhat angry. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 03:54:33 PM And anyone that believes FPGAs will ever be cost effective for mining is deluded. Anyone who believes there will ever be a Bitcoin ASIC is simply fucking retarded. FPGAs are already more cost effective than GPUs at the electricity costs I have. You might have different views on a suitable expected ROI and projected changes in price and difficulty of course, but since it seems you believe the price of BTCs are going down that's actually contradictory to your claims. Additionally, you seem somewhat angry. Lol... Oh god, the stupid you exude is painful. Alright, math boy, lay out the simple math that illustrates how FPGAs are more cost effective for you. This should be amusing... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 04:23:55 PM Oh god, the stupid you exude is painful. Alright, math boy, lay out the simple math that illustrates how FPGAs are more cost effective for you. This should be amusing... Laugh away :) My electricity cost is 0.15/kWh. I believe the numbers below reflect current best-in-class GPU vs current FPGA boards. (I don't mine myself but they'll do for the calculation). $8/BTC: FPGA: 100Mhash/s @ 7W = $0.45/day at a cost of 0.15*24*0.007 ~ $0.035 : (13x) GPU: 800Mhash/s @ 350W = $3.62/day at a cost of 0.15*24*0.35 ~ $1.76 : (2x) ... and, as I project and as you seem to claim, the price of BTC is going down: $4/BTC: FPGA: 100Mhash/s @ 7W = $0.23/day at a cost of 0.15*24*0.007 ~ $0.035 : (6.5x) GPU: 800Mhash/s @ 350W = $1.81/day at a cost of 0.15*24*0.35 ~ $1.76 : (1x) So. Looking at electricity costs at $4/BTC with all other factors equal (difficulty) GPU miners will need to pull out completely, even if they've paid off their rigs. FPGA miners can continue, with a longer expected ROI. The point is, upfront costs are irrelevant when you take the long view. I consider mining bitcoins to be just as mining any other form of natural resource. The price floor is at extraction cost (plus minimal profit), anything above that is speculation. Since I agree with you that speculation won't continue to drive BTC price in the near term my projection is that the floor is where the cheapest mining can be had. Currently that's FPGAs, but they will be replaced by ASICs. GPU miners, like CPU miners already have, will need to drop out. YMMV - and I expect you'll point to investment costs and ROI. That's where we can have differences of opinion ;) [at $0.2/day it will take years to pay off an FPGA miner. At $0/day it will take even longer to pay of a GPU rig] Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 04:30:56 PM Oh god, the stupid you exude is painful. Alright, math boy, lay out the simple math that illustrates how FPGAs are more cost effective for you. This should be amusing... Laugh away :) My electricity cost is 0.15/kWh. I believe the numbers below reflect current best-in-class GPU vs current FPGA boards. (I don't mine myself but they'll do for the calculation). $8/BTC: FPGA: 100Mhash/s @ 7W = $0.45/day at a cost of 0.15*24*0.007 ~ $0.035 : (13x) GPU: 800Mhash/s @ 350W = $3.62/day at a cost of 0.15*24*0.35 ~ $1.76 : (2x) ... and, as I project and as you seem to claim, the price of BTC is going down: $4/BTC: FPGA: 100Mhash/s @ 7W = $0.23/day at a cost of 0.15*24*0.007 ~ $0.035 : (6.5x) GPU: 800Mhash/s @ 350W = $1.81/day at a cost of 0.15*24*0.35 ~ $1.76 : (1x) So. Looking at electricity costs at $4/BTC with all other factors equal (difficulty) GPU miners will need to pull out completely, even if they've paid off their rigs. FPGA miners can continue, with a longer expected ROI. The point is, upfront costs are irrelevant when you take the long view. I consider mining bitcoins to be just as mining any other form of natural resource. The price floor is at extraction cost (plus minimal profit), anything above that is speculation. Since I agree with you that speculation won't continue to drive BTC price in the near term my projection is that the floor is where the cheapest mining can be had. Currently that's FPGAs, but they will be replaced by ASICs. GPU miners, like CPU miners already have, will need to drop out. YMMV - and I expect you'll point to investment costs and ROI. That's where we can have differences of opinion ;) [at $0.2/day it will take years to pay off an FPGA miner. At $0/day it will take even longer to pay of a GPU rig] Upfront costs are irrelevant... With an ROI of never... LOL. So, remind me again which brain-damaged asshole with millions of inherited dollars and their loving relative with custodianship on vacation is gearing up to produce ASICS? Thanks. EDIT: oh and BTW, dipshit, what happened to all the rest of the electricity to run the machine that the FPGAs are plugged into? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ElectricMucus on September 02, 2011, 04:33:13 PM Synaptic you seem to have various problems with your attitude towards the chip industry. Wanna talk about it? :)
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 04:35:03 PM Synaptic you seem to have various problems with your attitude towards the chip industry. Wanna talk about it? :) I love the chip industry. I make my living using the fruits of their labor. The chip industry and bitcoin have no formal or implied relationship. No-one in the chip industry gives a shit about Bitcoin, and never will. So, what are you jabbering on about? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ElectricMucus on September 02, 2011, 04:38:18 PM So, what are you jabbering on about? I can't tell you, it's a trade secret :DTitle: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 04:42:31 PM So, what are you jabbering on about? I can't tell you, it's a trade secret :DWell best of luck to you with that... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 05:04:07 PM So, remind me again which brain-damaged asshole with millions of inherited dollars and their loving relative with custodianship on vacation is gearing up to produce ASICS? Largecoin, although I'm not sure they agree with that description. Quote EDIT: oh and BTW, dipshit, what happened to all the rest of the electricity to run the machine that the FPGAs are plugged into? That changes one parameter of the calculation, but does not change the conclusion :) (PS: I'm slightly worried about your anger issues. Stress is harmful) Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Piper67 on September 02, 2011, 05:07:15 PM Though the lay man might not understand the finer technical details enough to comprehend the flaws in the Bitcoin system, the entire mystique surrounding the scam is just foul enough to impart the wisdom to stay away. I explained the, for his use, necessary parts of Bitcoin to my hairdresser (!) yesterday, and showed him Bitcoin Wallet on my mobile. He wants it, now. If we had what Bit-pay offers in my country he would be standing in line to sign up. It might be flawed, but not as much as the existing credit card and banking system is for small merchants. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... Yeah I had this argument in another thread a few weeks ago. People claimed there would NEVER be Bitcoin FPGAs. I think it's the other way around actually. I won't even touch mining until we're at ASICs, since I consider the price to follow production cost until we hit the uptake vs deflation knee of the curve. GPU miners need to charge $6/BTC. FPGA miners can charge $0.5. ASIC miners can ... Your fundamental inability to do simple math or understand economies of scale betrays you... A good start to dealing with your anger issues would be to acknowledge that you are wrong (defxor is clearly able to do simple math and understands economies of scale) and say "I'm sorry". :D Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 05:09:08 PM So, remind me again which brain-damaged asshole with millions of inherited dollars and their loving relative with custodianship on vacation is gearing up to produce ASICS? Largecoin, although I'm not sure they agree with that description. Quote EDIT: oh and BTW, dipshit, what happened to all the rest of the electricity to run the machine that the FPGAs are plugged into? That changes one parameter of the calculation, but does not change the conclusion :) (PS: I'm slightly worried about your anger issues. Stress is harmful) HAHAHA, Largecoin? You mean that amateur investment scam? Ok... LOL. And your conclusion is so fallacious nothing will change it. Just like the rest of the insane zealots here. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 05:13:12 PM Though the lay man might not understand the finer technical details enough to comprehend the flaws in the Bitcoin system, the entire mystique surrounding the scam is just foul enough to impart the wisdom to stay away. I explained the, for his use, necessary parts of Bitcoin to my hairdresser (!) yesterday, and showed him Bitcoin Wallet on my mobile. He wants it, now. If we had what Bit-pay offers in my country he would be standing in line to sign up. It might be flawed, but not as much as the existing credit card and banking system is for small merchants. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... Yeah I had this argument in another thread a few weeks ago. People claimed there would NEVER be Bitcoin FPGAs. I think it's the other way around actually. I won't even touch mining until we're at ASICs, since I consider the price to follow production cost until we hit the uptake vs deflation knee of the curve. GPU miners need to charge $6/BTC. FPGA miners can charge $0.5. ASIC miners can ... Your fundamental inability to do simple math or understand economies of scale betrays you... A good start to dealing with your anger issues would be to acknowledge that you are wrong (defxor is clearly able to do simple math and understands economies of scale) and say "I'm sorry". :D Yeah I was wrong. He can do math. What I should have realized before is that it's not his math skills that are lacking, it's his complete and utter inability to understand profitable business ventures... And understanding economies of scale? Not possible when your entire premise is throwing money away thinking you MIGHT have an ROI many many years in the future on some asinine investment scam called Bitcoin. EDIT: I mean, I'm not even trying anymore. Lol...I can't even muster the mental fortitude to be on point enough to deal with how stupid you people are. But if you think FPGAs and ASICs are going to be profitable or even exist, then go right ahead and enjoy it while you can. Can't fault a fool... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 05:15:45 PM HAHAHA, Largecoin? You mean that amateur investment scam? If you've got proof they are, feel free to share :) Quote from: LargeCoin at this time, we are unable to and will not raise funds from the public at large, nor will we be taking any deposits for advance product sales Quote And your conclusion is so fallacious nothing will change it. Just like the rest of the insane zealots here. There seems to be a problem with posts disappearing in this thread, I'm sorry. Could you please repost your calculation where FPGA and ASIC mining needs higher instead of lower BTC price to be cost effective vs GPUs? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 05:22:10 PM But if you think FPGAs and ASICs are going to be profitable or even exist https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40047.0 & https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.0 (they sold out the previous run) As to profitable, I thought it was you who - like me - believed $/BTC was going down? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 05:22:58 PM HAHAHA, Largecoin? You mean that amateur investment scam? If you've got proof they are, feel free to share :) Quote from: LargeCoin at this time, we are unable to and will not raise funds from the public at large, nor will we be taking any deposits for advance product sales Quote And your conclusion is so fallacious nothing will change it. Just like the rest of the insane zealots here. There seems to be a problem with posts disappearing in this thread, I'm sorry. Could you please repost your calculation where FPGA and ASIC mining needs higher instead of lower BTC price to be cost effective vs GPUs? Idiot...just...I can't even. Look, if I get insanely bored today I'll come back and take the piss out of you and your little sidekick, but I really don't care to right now. Sorry. But for anyone else watching, please, run the calculations yourself after a bit of research and see how stupid some people here can be when blinded by their bitcoin zealotry. And if you arrive at the conclusion that FPGAs are a good investment for you, then throw some money at largecoin while you're at it. LOL. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 05:25:50 PM But if you think FPGAs and ASICs are going to be profitable or even exist https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40047.0 & https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.0 (they sold out the previous run) As to profitable, I thought it was you who - like me - believed $/BTC was going down? I wasn't unaware of these FPGAs. I was exploring using an FPGA when I got in on the mining hype before the bubble burst. Since of course, a FIELD PROGRAMMABLE GATE ARRAY can be used for whatever the fuck you're able to program on it. ASICs for Bitcoin however, do not and will not exist in the market. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 05:27:47 PM Look, if I get insanely bored today I'll come back and take the piss out of you and your little sidekick, but I really don't care to right now. Thank you for yielding, I was indeed wondering for how long you would continue to post absolutely nothing of value :) (To our readers: I'm sorry I messed up the current state of FPGA price/efficiency. The numbers are even better than what I used - see the first of the two links I posted just now) ASICs for Bitcoin however, do not and will not exist in the market. Thank you for your opinion :) Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 05:30:11 PM Look, if I get insanely bored today I'll come back and take the piss out of you and your little sidekick, but I really don't care to right now. Thank you for yielding, I was indeed wondering for how long you would continue to post absolutely nothing of value :) (To our readers: I'm sorry I messed up the current state of FPGA price/efficiency. The numbers are even better than what I used - see the first of the two links I posted just now) ASICs for Bitcoin however, do not and will not exist in the market. Thank you for your opinion :) My opinions have an uncanny ability to be absolutely correct, borne out time and again. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Nagle on September 02, 2011, 06:00:53 PM ASICs for Bitcoin however, do not and will not exist in the market. Someone might do one for fun, if they're taking an ASIC design course or something. But, remember, all miners collectively are limited to about 7200 BTC per week. Building vast amounts of mining capacity can increase your share of that, but not total production. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 06:05:06 PM ASICs for Bitcoin however, do not and will not exist in the market. Someone might do one for fun, if they're taking an ASIC design course or something. But, remember, all miners collectively are limited to about 7200 BTC per week. Building vast amounts of mining capacity can increase your share of that, but not total production. Right, the whole thing is just asinine in it's execution. The sooner Bitcoin and it's clones die, the better it will be for cryptocurrency as a concept, and potential viable alternative currency. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 06:20:33 PM But, remember, all miners collectively are limited to about 7200 BTC per week. Building vast amounts of mining capacity can increase your share of that, but not total production. Today's share of CPUs in mining is 0%. A product like Xilinx EasyPath ($75000 NRE + lots of orders) would bring current FPGA upfront costs down quite a lot. What's needed for someone to gamble on such a venture is the belief that ASIC (or if you want to call EasyPath a hybrid FPGA/ASIC solution) miners would grab a significant share of those If the BTC price is going down to levels where it's just not profitable for GPU miners to mine due to electricity costs, that will indeed happen. edit: I went with 7200 BTC per week from Nagle without thinking. It's 7200 per day though which changes the calculations a bit. Even with $2/BTC that would still mean the value of bitcoin mining for a year to be $5.26M. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: fcmatt on September 02, 2011, 06:33:31 PM But if you think FPGAs and ASICs are going to be profitable or even exist https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40047.0 & https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.0 (they sold out the previous run) As to profitable, I thought it was you who - like me - believed $/BTC was going down? I wasn't unaware of these FPGAs. I was exploring using an FPGA when I got in on the mining hype before the bubble burst. Since of course, a FIELD PROGRAMMABLE GATE ARRAY can be used for whatever the fuck you're able to program on it. ASICs for Bitcoin however, do not and will not exist in the market. I knew about those FPGAs. They still do not make sense to me from a reasonable ROI. I know about Art Forz and his ASIC work. I cannot quote exactly what he did in detail but he is the closest to actually doing it that exists today to my knowledge. He admits they are not exactly a great ROI either since they are a limited hobbyist type of thing. GPUs are here to stay for quite a while and represent the only real chance to make money when mining in less then 4-6 months with a BTC price around 8 dollars and average elect costs. So to me there is no debate. If the price of BTC goes below that most people are just going to quit and not bother with FPGA/ASIC. If difficulty decreases enough for them to get back in they will. Most miners I know will not tolerate a multi year pay off on hardware, period. So if those people who own FPGA want to carry the load and make 10-20 cents a day.. most miners will let them and move on. None of us really expected the gravy train to last forever. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 06:54:33 PM If the price of BTC goes below that most people are just going to quit and Quote if those people who own FPGA want to carry the load and make 10-20 cents a day are mutually exclusive statements (at $4/BTC most GPU miners will quit, yet there's still Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 07:00:43 PM If the price of BTC goes below that most people are just going to quit and Quote if those people who own FPGA want to carry the load and make 10-20 cents a day are mutually exclusive statements (at $4/BTC most GPU miners will quit, yet there's still $1.5M mined a year) There you go with your lack of math skills again... It seems you've totally forgotten about difficulty retargetings, which in the event that miners continue to drop out, GPU's will sill HEAVILY out-perform even the cheapest FPGAs, especially since most of them will be PAID OFF ALREADY or incidental to a gamers rig anyway... You really embarrass yourself, it's pitiful. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 07:04:23 PM There you go with your lack of math skills again... I'm sure we are all impressed with the multitude of calculations you've posted here today :) Quote It seems you've totally forgotten about difficulty retargetings, which in the event that miners continue to drop out, GPU's will sill HEAVILY out-perform even the cheapest FPGAs, especially since most of them will be PAID OFF ALREADY or incidental to a gamers rig anyway... I agree that the GPU rigs will HEAVILY outperform even the cheapest FPGAs in maximizing electricity costs. (where "paid off already" or being "gaming rigs" is of no relevance whatsoever) Difficulty retargeting is slow and depends on how quickly FPGA/ASIC uptake replaces GPUs in total Mhash/s as well. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 07:06:55 PM There you go with your lack of math skills again... I'm sure we are all impressed with the multitude of calculations you've posted here today :) Quote It seems you've totally forgotten about difficulty retargetings, which in the event that miners continue to drop out, GPU's will sill HEAVILY out-perform even the cheapest FPGAs, especially since most of them will be PAID OFF ALREADY or incidental to a gamers rig anyway... I agree that the GPU rigs will HEAVILY outperform even the cheapest FPGAs in electricity costs. (where "paid off already" or being "gaming rigs" is of no relevance whatsoever) Difficulty retargeting is slow and depends on how quickly FPGA/ASIC uptake replaces GPUs in total Mhash/s as well. There is no FPGA/ASIC uptake, you're just fucking stupid. Ask Vladamir what he's buying, or even planning on buying in the next year. I assure you it isn't FPGAs. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 07:12:16 PM you're just fucking stupid Your math abilities are indeed amazing. Do you always win your arguments with such logical brilliance? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 07:13:17 PM you're just fucking stupid Your math abilities are indeed amazing. Do you always win your arguments with such logical brilliance? Yes. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: fcmatt on September 02, 2011, 07:16:15 PM Would a fair estimate be 200 active FPGA mining boards exist today and that would be about 20 gh/s?
If so they do represent a tiny fraction of the mining power today and their uptake would have to increase in such a dramatic fashion to even become a blip on a chart. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: proudhon on September 02, 2011, 07:21:17 PM There you go with your lack of math skills again... I'm sure we are all impressed with the multitude of calculations you've posted here today :) Quote It seems you've totally forgotten about difficulty retargetings, which in the event that miners continue to drop out, GPU's will sill HEAVILY out-perform even the cheapest FPGAs, especially since most of them will be PAID OFF ALREADY or incidental to a gamers rig anyway... I agree that the GPU rigs will HEAVILY outperform even the cheapest FPGAs in electricity costs. (where "paid off already" or being "gaming rigs" is of no relevance whatsoever) Difficulty retargeting is slow and depends on how quickly FPGA/ASIC uptake replaces GPUs in total Mhash/s as well. There is no FPGA/ASIC uptake, you're just fucking stupid. Ask Vladamir what he's buying, or even planning on buying in the next year. I assure you it isn't FPGAs. I think the reason people aren't getting your point is that you're not being insulting enough. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 02, 2011, 07:22:58 PM If the price of BTC goes below that most people are just going to quit is functionally equivalent to their uptake would have to increase in such a dramatic fashion to even become a blip on a chart. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: doktor99 on September 02, 2011, 07:24:30 PM When the hashing power has decreased and rigs were sold. But yeah people are in denial, that's what gives Deepbit disagrees with you. Over the past month the hash rate there (measured, not estimated) has gone from 5 terahash to 5.5 terahash. It was going up 50 gigahash a day as the price went below $10, and has since flatlined -- but it has not decreased in any measurable way. *MY* remaining mining hardware is on craigslist, I don't deny it. Already sold two 5830s for $120 each, hoping for a difficulty drop or price pop to sell the last 2. But that won't be the general case until FPGA and ASIC miners make video cards as obsolete as CPUs. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... I'm interested to know your assumptions behind your $50 price to justify ASIC mining. Please share if you're willing. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 02, 2011, 07:32:03 PM When the hashing power has decreased and rigs were sold. But yeah people are in denial, that's what gives Deepbit disagrees with you. Over the past month the hash rate there (measured, not estimated) has gone from 5 terahash to 5.5 terahash. It was going up 50 gigahash a day as the price went below $10, and has since flatlined -- but it has not decreased in any measurable way. *MY* remaining mining hardware is on craigslist, I don't deny it. Already sold two 5830s for $120 each, hoping for a difficulty drop or price pop to sell the last 2. But that won't be the general case until FPGA and ASIC miners make video cards as obsolete as CPUs. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... I'm interested to know your assumptions behind your $50 price to justify ASIC mining. Please share if you're willing. I might be far underestimating the necessary value here, but at $50/BTC (sustainable), it becomes feasible for companies with the large disposable capital necessary to fund ASIC development/fabrication to spend with a reasonable expectation of ROI and possibly size-able profit. However, that still doesn't negate the fact I've addressed before that even if an ASIC were developed, as long as it was profitable to mine with one, YOU and every individual idiot wanting it wouldn't get their hands on one, because it will ALWAYS be mroe profitable for the one who spend the development capital to simply mine with the fruits of their effort. ASICs will never have a public adoption if they were to hypothetically developed, because the investors would just put them online and mine for themselves at a much higher profitability than selling the chips. $50 is just my flippant estimation of when a particular set of capital holders feel it's worth their while. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: geek-trader on September 02, 2011, 10:54:48 PM Well, I just "ignored" a user for the first time. ;D Bet you can't guess which one?
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: alexanderanon on September 03, 2011, 03:19:10 AM Synaptic is just another autistic 17 year old INTJ with awkward sentence structure and a general loathing for anyone who doesn't agree with him, whether his arguments are supported or not. Move on, nothing to see here.
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Bitcoin Swami on September 03, 2011, 03:39:43 AM Would a fair estimate be 200 active FPGA mining boards exist today and that would be about 20 gh/s? If so they do represent a tiny fraction of the mining power today and their uptake would have to increase in such a dramatic fashion to even become a blip on a chart. Don't they do around 100 mh/s? Wouldn't that be just 2 gh? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Swishercutter on September 03, 2011, 03:56:50 AM Would a fair estimate be 200 active FPGA mining boards exist today and that would be about 20 gh/s? If so they do represent a tiny fraction of the mining power today and their uptake would have to increase in such a dramatic fashion to even become a blip on a chart. Don't they do around 100 mh/s? Wouldn't that be just 2 gh? 100,000,000 x 200= 20,000,000,000 Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 03, 2011, 04:00:39 AM Would a fair estimate be 200 active FPGA mining boards exist today and that would be about 20 gh/s? If so they do represent a tiny fraction of the mining power today and their uptake would have to increase in such a dramatic fashion to even become a blip on a chart. Don't they do around 100 mh/s? Wouldn't that be just 2 gh? 100,000,000 x 200= 20,000,000,000 Uh, buddy...kinda went a whole fucking of order of magnitude overboard there... But, this community shouldn't surprise anyone by now... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: grod on September 03, 2011, 04:17:13 AM defxor more than gets it.
Those who do not, perform this thought experiment. Assume the price of bitcoin does NOT increase, but in fact decreases to around $1. Now think about what difficulty will do with the current GPU price to produce a coin of around $3. You will see that while FPGA mining makes little sense at the current price and difficulty it is inevitable if price falls low enough. There plenty of reason to expect diffiuculty to follow price, so don't worry about relative performance vs GPU. As the profit from GPU mining goes negative mining hardware will have to become more efficient. In spite of lower performance it will be the only practical way to obtain a piece of 7200 bitcoins a day. It doesn't matter if GPUs will produce 10x or 100x coins at a 50% loss per coin -- that will only be practical for the "free power" miners, and "free power" doesn't scale. ROI is still TBD. The current generation of dedicated mining tech is not price competitive -- but if you look closely you can see promise of pricing equivalent to current GPUs. The first outfit to hit a $100 for 100 mhash price point at ~10 watts will make for millions in sales. 77 boards sold at $610 for < 200 mhash at 15 watts. How many do you think would have sold at $300 for 200 mhash? How about $200 for 200 mhash? How about $100 for 200 mhash? Remember that there's no longer a requirement for an expensive gaming board or PCIe extenders or industrial sized power supplies, other than a cheap recycled laptop it's all about the dedicated hardware. There's a good reason we all expect price deflation for technology. Saying it'll never happen is placing just such a bet. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 03, 2011, 04:23:46 AM defxor more than gets it. Those who do not, perform this thought experiment. Assume the price of bitcoin does NOT increase, but in fact decreases to around $1. Now think about what difficulty will do with the current GPU price to produce a coin of around $3. You will see that while FPGA mining makes little sense at the current price and difficulty it is inevitable if price falls low enough. There plenty of reason to expect diffiuculty to follow price, so don't worry about relative performance vs GPU. As the profit from GPU mining goes negative mining hardware will have to become more efficient. In spite of lower performance it will be the only practical way to obtain a piece of 7200 bitcoins a day. It doesn't matter if GPUs will produce 10x or 100x coins at a 50% loss per coin -- that will only be practical for the "free power" miners, and "free power" doesn't scale. ROI is still TBD. The current generation of dedicated mining tech is not price competitive -- but if you look closely you can see promise of pricing equivalent to current GPUs. The first outfit to hit a $100 for 100 mhash price point at ~10 watts will make for millions in sales. 77 boards sold at $610 for < 200 mhash at 15 watts. How many do you think would have sold at $300 for 200 mhash? How about $200 for 200 mhash? How about $100 for 200 mhash? Remember that there's no longer a requirement for an expensive gaming board or PCIe extenders or industrial sized power supplies, other than a cheap recycled laptop it's all about the dedicated hardware. There's a good reason we all expect price deflation for technology. Saying it'll never happen is placing just such a bet. No, you completely forget the difficulty retarget, just like that other fool did. Yeah, a shitload of miners will bow out when the USA price inevitably plunges further, but then difficulty will decrease proportional to meet the power of the remaining GPUs. There is simply no point at which the difficulty will be low enough and electricity expensive enough to make FPGAs more profitable than GPUs! Fucking christ you people need to buy more nootropic drugs and fewer bitcoins and associated paraphernalia... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: geek-trader on September 03, 2011, 04:27:50 AM Quote from: Synaptic This user is currently ignored. I *LOVE* the ignore feature! LOVE! ;D Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Swishercutter on September 03, 2011, 04:46:33 AM Would a fair estimate be 200 active FPGA mining boards exist today and that would be about 20 gh/s? If so they do represent a tiny fraction of the mining power today and their uptake would have to increase in such a dramatic fashion to even become a blip on a chart. Don't they do around 100 mh/s? Wouldn't that be just 2 gh? 100,000,000 x 200= 20,000,000,000 Uh, buddy...kinda went a whole fucking of order of magnitude overboard there... But, this community shouldn't surprise anyone by now... 20gh/s is 20 billion hash/s. 100mh/s would be 100 million hash/s...multiply that by 200=20,000,000,000. I don't see how that is wrong. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: grod on September 03, 2011, 04:58:27 AM There is simply no point at which the difficulty will be low enough and electricity expensive enough to make FPGAs more profitable than GPUs! Fucking christ you people need to buy more nootropic drugs and fewer bitcoins and associated paraphernalia... Not getting through, let's try a simpler example. If the price per BTC is $50 but cost to produce is $3 there is no real reason to optimize for cost of production. You will want to optimize for volume. If you could produce 2x as many coins at the cost to produce of $6/ea, you would do that. The actual difficulty is immaterial, what matters is the profit margin per unit. If the cost to produce is $3 and price is $8 (as we see now) there is still little reason to focus on unit cost as the main optimization parameter. If the cost to produce is $3 and the price is $1... Well, I've already gone into it, you're just not following along. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 03, 2011, 05:00:56 AM Would a fair estimate be 200 active FPGA mining boards exist today and that would be about 20 gh/s? If so they do represent a tiny fraction of the mining power today and their uptake would have to increase in such a dramatic fashion to even become a blip on a chart. Don't they do around 100 mh/s? Wouldn't that be just 2 gh? 100,000,000 x 200= 20,000,000,000 Uh, buddy...kinda went a whole fucking of order of magnitude overboard there... But, this community shouldn't surprise anyone by now... 20gh/s is 20 billion hash/s. 100mh/s would be 100 million hash/s...multiply that by 200=20,000,000,000. I don't see how that is wrong. Right, I'm sorry. I got the hash levels mixed up, it's been quite awhile now since I've been mining. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 03, 2011, 05:17:15 AM There is simply no point at which the difficulty will be low enough and electricity expensive enough to make FPGAs more profitable than GPUs! Fucking christ you people need to buy more nootropic drugs and fewer bitcoins and associated paraphernalia... Not getting through, let's try a simpler example. If the price per BTC is $50 but cost to produce is $3 there is no real reason to optimize for cost of production. You will want to optimize for volume. If you could produce 2x as many coins at the cost to produce of $6/ea, you would do that. The actual difficulty is immaterial, what matters is the profit margin per unit. If the cost to produce is $3 and price is $8 (as we see now) there is still little reason to focus on unit cost as the main optimization parameter. If the cost to produce is $3 and the price is $1... Well, I've already gone into it, you're just not following along. I'm following perfecly, you're just for some reason completely negating the outrageous cost per mh/s of an FPGA vs. a GPU. Yes, include electricity, but don' just ignore the unit cost of the hardware too. You really need to check your calculations. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: fcmatt on September 03, 2011, 05:18:14 AM There is simply no point at which the difficulty will be low enough and electricity expensive enough to make FPGAs more profitable than GPUs! Fucking christ you people need to buy more nootropic drugs and fewer bitcoins and associated paraphernalia... Not getting through, let's try a simpler example. If the price per BTC is $50 but cost to produce is $3 there is no real reason to optimize for cost of production. You will want to optimize for volume. If you could produce 2x as many coins at the cost to produce of $6/ea, you would do that. The actual difficulty is immaterial, what matters is the profit margin per unit. If the cost to produce is $3 and price is $8 (as we see now) there is still little reason to focus on unit cost as the main optimization parameter. If the cost to produce is $3 and the price is $1... Well, I've already gone into it, you're just not following along. BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP you BLEEP BLEEP and your BLEEP math. I am just not sure many people are willing to spend 420 dollars for a FPGA board that will make 3 dollars a month with difficulty at a million and a BTC price of $1. Lets day difficulty just crashes to 200,000. With a BTC price of $1 that would make 15.29 per month. 27 months until it is paid off without accounting for electricity costs of the board and some low power PC that has a molex connector and a usb port. So we might as well triple or quadruple the cost of electricity? If that happens I have to wonder if bitcoin will just die? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 03, 2011, 05:26:23 AM There is simply no point at which the difficulty will be low enough and electricity expensive enough to make FPGAs more profitable than GPUs! Fucking christ you people need to buy more nootropic drugs and fewer bitcoins and associated paraphernalia... Not getting through, let's try a simpler example. If the price per BTC is $50 but cost to produce is $3 there is no real reason to optimize for cost of production. You will want to optimize for volume. If you could produce 2x as many coins at the cost to produce of $6/ea, you would do that. The actual difficulty is immaterial, what matters is the profit margin per unit. If the cost to produce is $3 and price is $8 (as we see now) there is still little reason to focus on unit cost as the main optimization parameter. If the cost to produce is $3 and the price is $1... Well, I've already gone into it, you're just not following along. BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP you BLEEP BLEEP and your BLEEP math. I am just not sure many people are willing to spend 420 dollars for a FPGA board that will make 3 dollars a month with difficulty at a million and a BTC price of $1. Lets day difficulty just crashes to 200,000. With a BTC price of $1 that would make 15.29 per month. 27 months until it is paid off without accounting for electricity costs of the board and some low power PC that has a molex connector and a usb port. So we might as well triple or quadruple the cost of electricity? If that happens I have to wonder if bitcoin will just die? BLEEP BLEEP mofo, and thanks for that, these people just don't get it, your post is a much milder take on my same reasoning. But, fuck mild. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: grod on September 03, 2011, 05:34:29 AM There is simply no point at which the difficulty will be low enough and electricity expensive enough to make FPGAs more profitable than GPUs! Fucking christ you people need to buy more nootropic drugs and fewer bitcoins and associated paraphernalia... Not getting through, let's try a simpler example. If the price per BTC is $50 but cost to produce is $3 there is no real reason to optimize for cost of production. You will want to optimize for volume. If you could produce 2x as many coins at the cost to produce of $6/ea, you would do that. The actual difficulty is immaterial, what matters is the profit margin per unit. If the cost to produce is $3 and price is $8 (as we see now) there is still little reason to focus on unit cost as the main optimization parameter. If the cost to produce is $3 and the price is $1... Well, I've already gone into it, you're just not following along. BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP you BLEEP BLEEP and your BLEEP math. I am just not sure many people are willing to spend 420 dollars for a FPGA board that will make 3 dollars a month with difficulty at a million and a BTC price of $1. Lets day difficulty just crashes to 200,000. With a BTC price of $1 that would make 15.29 per month. 27 months until it is paid off without accounting for electricity costs of the board and some low power PC that has a molex connector and a usb port. So we might as well triple or quadruple the cost of electricity? If that happens I have to wonder if bitcoin will just die? Now you're following along as to why I think FPGA mining may be the beginning of the end. Also, you don't need a PC. Something like a netgear 3500WR router could feed a few terahash worth of these boards. It runs linux, and has a USB port, and uses something like 5 watts. I think I paid $35 for mine. Power supplies can be stand alone, low end (inexpensive) and each molex connector could split to feed quite a few boards. The marginal cost over and above the FPGA chips themselves would be quite low. So where I'm headed with this: a crash of difficulty because the ONLY viable way to mine is FPGA, with each board having a quite low Mhash/$ but high Mhash/joule efficiency. Further fueling a collapse in price (which makes GPUs that much more impractical for mining) until a new stability level is reached. Mining 3 coins a day at a sale price of $1/coin and power cost of $2 is not as smart as mining 1 coin at a cost of 20c. If you look to recent investment vs price you would see people were more than willing to build $700 machines to make $5/day after power costs. That's a 3 month ROI assuming free power and a 50% depreciation of assets. I could make a guess as to where price and/or difficulty would have to be to justify the current $600 for 200 mhash at 15 watts boards, and it's certainly not $50/BTC. Nor $8/btc at 1.8M difficulty. The big question is: how fast and how far will BTC pricing fall. If you assume a strongly bullish pricing scenario for BTC then I will concede FPGA mining will never be profitable. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Swishercutter on September 03, 2011, 05:56:06 AM Would a fair estimate be 200 active FPGA mining boards exist today and that would be about 20 gh/s? If so they do represent a tiny fraction of the mining power today and their uptake would have to increase in such a dramatic fashion to even become a blip on a chart. Don't they do around 100 mh/s? Wouldn't that be just 2 gh? 100,000,000 x 200= 20,000,000,000 Uh, buddy...kinda went a whole fucking of order of magnitude overboard there... But, this community shouldn't surprise anyone by now... 20gh/s is 20 billion hash/s. 100mh/s would be 100 million hash/s...multiply that by 200=20,000,000,000. I don't see how that is wrong. Right, I'm sorry. I got the hash levels mixed up, it's been quite awhile now since I've been mining. Just the metric system...at least one Mars lander was ruined by not understanding it. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: fcmatt on September 03, 2011, 06:16:05 AM There is simply no point at which the difficulty will be low enough and electricity expensive enough to make FPGAs more profitable than GPUs! Fucking christ you people need to buy more nootropic drugs and fewer bitcoins and associated paraphernalia... Not getting through, let's try a simpler example. If the price per BTC is $50 but cost to produce is $3 there is no real reason to optimize for cost of production. You will want to optimize for volume. If you could produce 2x as many coins at the cost to produce of $6/ea, you would do that. The actual difficulty is immaterial, what matters is the profit margin per unit. If the cost to produce is $3 and price is $8 (as we see now) there is still little reason to focus on unit cost as the main optimization parameter. If the cost to produce is $3 and the price is $1... Well, I've already gone into it, you're just not following along. BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP you BLEEP BLEEP and your BLEEP math. I am just not sure many people are willing to spend 420 dollars for a FPGA board that will make 3 dollars a month with difficulty at a million and a BTC price of $1. Lets day difficulty just crashes to 200,000. With a BTC price of $1 that would make 15.29 per month. 27 months until it is paid off without accounting for electricity costs of the board and some low power PC that has a molex connector and a usb port. So we might as well triple or quadruple the cost of electricity? If that happens I have to wonder if bitcoin will just die? Now you're following along as to why I think FPGA mining may be the beginning of the end. Also, you don't need a PC. Something like a netgear 3500WR router could feed a few terahash worth of these boards. It runs linux, and has a USB port, and uses something like 5 watts. I think I paid $35 for mine. Power supplies can be stand alone, low end (inexpensive) and each molex connector could split to feed quite a few boards. The marginal cost over and above the FPGA chips themselves would be quite low. So where I'm headed with this: a crash of difficulty because the ONLY viable way to mine is FPGA, with each board having a quite low Mhash/$ but high Mhash/joule efficiency. Further fueling a collapse in price (which makes GPUs that much more impractical for mining) until a new stability level is reached. Mining 3 coins a day at a sale price of $1/coin and power cost of $2 is not as smart as mining 1 coin at a cost of 20c. If you look to recent investment vs price you would see people were more than willing to build $700 machines to make $5/day after power costs. That's a 3 month ROI assuming free power and a 50% depreciation of assets. I could make a guess as to where price and/or difficulty would have to be to justify the current $600 for 200 mhash at 15 watts boards, and it's certainly not $50/BTC. Nor $8/btc at 1.8M difficulty. The big question is: how fast and how far will BTC pricing fall. If you assume a strongly bullish pricing scenario for BTC then I will concede FPGA mining will never be profitable. This is simply nit picking but that little netgear cannot possily handle more then 100ish boards from a single usb port. Not due to power but the spec of the usb design. So a max of 10 gh/s lets say. Or for the higher end FPGA board, double that speed. Keep in mind that each hub counts as 1 off the max of 127 devices a single host controller can handle. Also a single molex connector can do ?60-72 watts on average?. Lets say 6-7 of the 100 mh/s boards or 3-4 of the 200 mh/s boards. Giving some room so we do not max it out. I am guessing here what they can do without looking. But even with all this said, I agree it is a small fraction of what several boards would cost let alone 25 of them. I need to chew the fat on the rest of your post before replying. It is an interesting thought exercise to figure out what happens if the price keeps degrading and difficulty goes down with it. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: grod on September 03, 2011, 06:52:06 AM This is simply nit picking but that little netgear cannot possily handle more then 100ish boards from a single usb port. Not due to power but the spec of the usb design. So a max of 10 gh/s lets say. Or for the higher end FPGA board, double that speed. Keep in mind that each hub counts as 1 off the max of 127 devices a single host controller can handle. Good point, that's a design flaw in the current iteration. The cards would need a redesign to use their own bus so that multiple cards could be daisy chained via a single USB connection. Or use other ways to improve the density of FPGAs per USB port. Then again, would be cheaper to go mini-itx with a large number of USB ports. A $150 27 watt device with 6 usb ports to power 600 boards (read: over 100 ghash, $360k farm at retail 1 unit pricing) is probably cheaper than any other custom solution. The routers should suffice for up to 20 ghash ($60k farm at retail 1 unit pricing). The gating factor per power supply would be total wattage, not the number of molex connectors. Each typical consumer $50 500 watt PSUs should be able to power 50 watt FPGAs assuming total draw of 7.5 watts per socket, some cross-loading on 5v and 3.3 and the majority of draw on the 12v. Let's call it another $2/board for power supplies -- so another $1400-2000 in PSUs for the $360k 100 ghash farm. Either way, the marginal cost over and above the FPGAs themselves is still noise. Even if I suspect the actual boards would be 1/2 to 1/3 the current retail pricing in volume and you're looking at $2000 in ancillary paraphernalia for a $100k 100 ghash installation. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 03, 2011, 07:32:35 AM If the price per BTC is $50 but cost to produce is $3 there is no real reason to optimize for cost of production. You will want to optimize for volume. Exactly. That's why I don't get Synaptic's "price must go up for ASIC mining to take off". It's the other way around. Quote from: grod Now you're following along as to why I think FPGA mining may be the beginning of the end. So where I'm headed with this: a crash of difficulty because the ONLY viable way to mine is FPGA, with each board having a quite low Mhash/$ but high Mhash/joule efficiency. Further fueling a collapse in price (which makes GPUs that much more impractical for mining) until a new stability level is reached. Mining 3 coins a day at a sale price of $1/coin and power cost of $2 is not as smart as mining 1 coin at a cost of 20c. this I think it's the other way around actually. I won't even touch mining until we're at ASICs, since I consider the price to follow production cost until we hit the uptake vs deflation knee of the curve. GPU miners need to charge $6/BTC. FPGA miners can charge $0.5. ASIC miners can ... I consider mining bitcoins to be just as mining any other form of natural resource. The price floor is at extraction cost (plus minimal profit), anything above that is speculation. Since I agree with you that speculation won't continue to drive BTC price in the near term my projection is that the floor is where the cheapest mining can be had. Currently that's FPGAs, but they will be replaced by ASICs. GPU miners, like CPU miners already have, will need to drop out. Do note that there's a qualifier, the above is only true if speculation doesn't take over. We've already seen that happen once and it could very well happen again if there's suddenly a huge uptake which needs a capital influx the current 7200 BTC/day inflation can't satisfy. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 03, 2011, 07:48:02 AM If the price per BTC is $50 but cost to produce is $3 there is no real reason to optimize for cost of production. You will want to optimize for volume. Exactly. That's why I don't get Synaptic's "price must go up for ASIC mining to take off". It's the other way around. Quote from: grod Now you're following along as to why I think FPGA mining may be the beginning of the end. So where I'm headed with this: a crash of difficulty because the ONLY viable way to mine is FPGA, with each board having a quite low Mhash/$ but high Mhash/joule efficiency. Further fueling a collapse in price (which makes GPUs that much more impractical for mining) until a new stability level is reached. Mining 3 coins a day at a sale price of $1/coin and power cost of $2 is not as smart as mining 1 coin at a cost of 20c. this I think it's the other way around actually. I won't even touch mining until we're at ASICs, since I consider the price to follow production cost until we hit the uptake vs deflation knee of the curve. GPU miners need to charge $6/BTC. FPGA miners can charge $0.5. ASIC miners can ... I consider mining bitcoins to be just as mining any other form of natural resource. The price floor is at extraction cost (plus minimal profit), anything above that is speculation. Since I agree with you that speculation won't continue to drive BTC price in the near term my projection is that the floor is where the cheapest mining can be had. Currently that's FPGAs, but they will be replaced by ASICs. GPU miners, like CPU miners already have, will need to drop out. Do note that there's a qualifier, the above is only true if speculation doesn't take over. We've already seen that happen once and it could very well happen again if there's suddenly a huge uptake which needs a capital influx the current 7200 BTC/day inflation can't satisfy. it costs at least a million USD to develop and fab an asic in any cost effective economy of scale... if not a million than some other large number that will never be spent on such an idiotic venture. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Revalin on September 03, 2011, 09:32:54 AM Eventually, Bitcoin will go back up. Its fundamentals are too strong not to. The question is when. What fundamentals? I consider the fundamental price to be the amount of value that needs to be stored for a few days in the (buy @ exchange > sit in wallet a few days > buy goods > merchant sells @ exchange) cycle. That will raise the price considerably if BC becomes much more widely adopted. But I don't think we're there yet. The vast majority of the current price is speculation. I believe some e-currency will eventually become extremely popular, but it might not be BitCoin. The deflationary nature makes it very prone to fluctuating value due to speculation, and that (along with the "damned early adopters" effect) might be enough to drive the mass market to another currency (perhaps another cryptocurrency which hasn't been invented yet) which they think will be a safer store of value. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 03, 2011, 09:37:00 AM it costs at least a million USD to develop and fab an asic in any cost effective economy of scale... A product like Xilinx EasyPath ($75000 NRE + lots of orders) would bring current FPGA upfront costs down quite a lot. What's needed for someone to gamble on such a venture is the belief that ASIC (or if you want to call EasyPath a hybrid FPGA/ASIC solution) miners would grab a significant share of those 7200 BTC per day. ($2/BTC is still $5.26M/year) If the BTC price is going down to levels where it's just not profitable for GPU miners to mine due to electricity costs, that will indeed happen. I looked at the Xilinx excel sheet yesterday. Did you? edit: I haven't verified that $75000 is true for all FPGA revisions though, but the point stands. $5.26M/year is absolutely a market into which someone can spend hundreds of thousands if they believe they can capture a large portion of it. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: grod on September 03, 2011, 06:56:57 PM I looked at the Xilinx excel sheet yesterday. Did you? No, actually. I used digikey's retail prices with the assumption they're a viable ongoing concern with sustainable profit margins and extrapolated. That has worked for me before, and I have a feeling the numbers you were looking at aren't that far off from my estimates. Quote edit: I haven't verified that $75000 is true for all FPGA revisions though, but the point stands. $5.26M/year is absolutely a market into which someone can spend hundreds of thousands if they believe they can capture a large portion of it. Yup, his "millions" estimate is way off. Half a million is more than enough to produce a run of devices cost competitive with current GPUs which require a PCIe slot to operate, but which would yield 90% gross margins at the point GPUs are no longer profitable. In fact, a quarter million (aka 32,000 bitcoins) may be. Anyone holding a giant stockpile of bitcoins could simultaneously drive adoption of such a product and increase their total amount by doing just this. Also, it's 5.25M a year right now, but there is potential of wider adoption and a larger revenue stream in the future. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 03, 2011, 07:02:01 PM I looked at the Xilinx excel sheet yesterday. Did you? No, actually. I used digikey's retail prices with the assumption they're a viable ongoing concern with sustainable profit margins and extrapolated. That has worked for me before, and I have a feeling the numbers you were looking at aren't that far off from my estimates. Quote edit: I haven't verified that $75000 is true for all FPGA revisions though, but the point stands. $5.26M/year is absolutely a market into which someone can spend hundreds of thousands if they believe they can capture a large portion of it. Yup, his "millions" estimate is way off. Half a million is more than enough to produce a run of devices cost competitive with current GPUs which require a PCIe slot to operate, but which would yield 90% gross margins at the point GPUs are no longer profitable. In fact, a quarter million (aka 32,000 bitcoins) may be. Anyone holding a giant stockpile of bitcoins could simultaneously drive adoption of such a product and increase their total amount by doing just this. Also, it's 5.25M a year right now, but there is potential of wider adoption and a larger revenue stream in the future. I said ASIC. None of you seem to understand the cost to produce an ASIC. You also don't seem to realize the risk averse nature of capital holders, and the Bitcoin market is shit compared to other investment opportunities. Bitcoin is a scam. No-one in their right mind is going to spend any significant amount of money to see the scam through to it's completion. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: da2ce7 on September 03, 2011, 07:09:05 PM I said ASIC. None of you seem to understand the cost to produce an ASIC. You also don't seem to realize the risk averse nature of capital holders, and the Bitcoin market is shit compared to other investment opportunities. Bitcoin is a scam. No-one in their right mind is going to spend any significant amount of money to see the scam through to it's completion. The market cap of bitcoin is over 60M USD. Since more than half the coins ever to be made are still yet to be made, it is completely feasible that a group of people will want to mine/spend the 1.2M USD capital needed in producing an ASIC miner. 100% return of investment could easily be reached in one year... even if the bitcoin price drops to $1. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: grod on September 03, 2011, 07:16:22 PM Ok, show YOUR math. For the record, you were claiming neither asic nor fpga would ever be viable not long ago.
Here is the pricing from Xilinx's EasyPath website. $13 for 30,000 logic cells. That's about $50 for 100 mhash (it would be far more cost effective to house 60 watts worth of chips per board than the current 7.5-15 watts) so call it *a minimum* 800 mhash device for a $400 production cost, board included. Actual hashing output would likely be a bit higher. How much were people paying for a 800 mhash rig recently? You could retail these with a 100% margin and still sell tons. The startup cost is not millions. It's $75,000. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ElectricMucus on September 03, 2011, 07:29:04 PM This will not happen, just enter structured asics into google and read how they are already obsolete because of higher integration of fpgas.
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: da2ce7 on September 03, 2011, 07:38:23 PM Ok, show YOUR math. For the record, you were claiming neither asic nor fpga would ever be viable not long ago. Hmmm... I was? Please point me to any thread that I say that ASIC are anything but insanely profitable... The maths goes: 200K for development + testing. Do a small run of 200,000 1Gh/s chips @ around 4M transistors each. They cost $1 ea. So that is 200K + 600K setup. Total 800K for a dedicated ASIC run. Building into board, and packaging maybe 1$ each. So total 1.2M You will put 20 boards in a box and sell the box. 20Gh/s @ 40W. Sale price of $1000 per box. That will mean that you produce 10M income on say 1.2M investment. To break even you only need to sell 20% of your production... It is insanely profitable. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: da2ce7 on September 03, 2011, 07:39:12 PM This will not happen, just enter structured asics into google and read how they are already obsolete because of higher integration of fpgas. When you post something like this you sound like a complete retard... I'm sorry, they both serve purposes. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 03, 2011, 07:51:43 PM Ok, show YOUR math. For the record, you were claiming neither asic nor fpga would ever be viable not long ago. Hmmm... I was? Please point me to any thread that I say that ASIC are anything but insanely profitable... He was talking to Synaptic. The guy that accuses everyone of not being able to do simple math, yet shows none himself and all the math that's been done concludes the exact opposite of what he claims :) Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 03, 2011, 08:06:11 PM Ok, show YOUR math. For the record, you were claiming neither asic nor fpga would ever be viable not long ago. Hmmm... I was? Please point me to any thread that I say that ASIC are anything but insanely profitable... He was talking to Synaptic. The guy that accuses everyone of not being able to do simple math, yet shows none himself and all the math that's been done concludes the exact opposite of what he claims :) Not at all. I don't need to post any math because I seriously don't give a fuck to prove anything. My opinions will always be borne out to be accurate. FPGAs will never displace GPUs, and common Bitcoin ASICs will never exist though there may be some hobbyist chips that pop-up (like ArtFortz's mythological chips) though all dubious, and of little consequence. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ElectricMucus on September 03, 2011, 08:31:59 PM This will not happen, just enter structured asics into google and read how they are already obsolete because of higher integration of fpgas. When you post something like this you sound like a complete retard... I'm sorry, they both serve purposes. Come on they spare the extra silicon for the universal routing fabric, fused rom instead of sram or flash. Yeah cirtaily cheaper at high volume, a good thing if you want to build consumer cameras but for something like bitcoin nfw. And fpgas already penetrate market areas where you would expect stuctured asics, the loss of reconfigurability and optimizations at a later date is just too much of a disadvantage. What happens if cryptanalysis discovers something new, do you throw away your chips or hope that the improvements aren't that earth shaking? Seriously, I could imagine some effort for proprietary cryptocurrency by some entity some day which might choose this path but bitcoin is foss and thus subjected to potential change and evolution. period. better now? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: da2ce7 on September 04, 2011, 06:36:16 AM better now? No. Most certainly not. You sound even more noob now than before. We need to be talking "performance per watt" numbers here. The best fpga may be able to produce 200Mh/s @ 4W or equiv. 1Gh/s @ 20 W (Still far more efficient than a GPU). While a fully custom asic would produce 1Gh/s @ 2W. This is 10x more energy efficient. Secondly, lets look at the cost 'per-chip' once you exclude the one-time tooling costs. 5 fpga's @ 200Hh/s fpga's would account for $20 each... so you are looking at $100 total cost, for the best case. 1 asic @ 1Gh/s would cost around $1 each to manufacture (aka cost of a 4M transistor chip on modem wafer technology). You see... for the same hashing speed. Fpga's work out to be 100x more expensive to manufacture, and 10x more expensive to run than fully custom asic's. Also. To make matters worse for your augment, I'm taking the best-case numbers for the fpga... and the average-case numbers for the asic. I do not understand how the can be 'almost the same thing' when there manufacturing costs are 100x and performance is 10x worse. (On first analysis, that would sound like quite a large difference). Well anyway; it was fun showing you to be a retard again. :) Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ElectricMucus on September 04, 2011, 11:23:36 AM The fact that you'll have to resort to insults makes your case so much weaker though.
But you are comparing apples and oranges here. Your $1.2mil just doesn't work out with anything but structured asics which will go no where near your numbers. Feel free to provide sources if really think you're right. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: newMeat1 on September 04, 2011, 08:26:41 PM FPGA costs have come down like crazy in the past few months. Our dual boards do 200 Mhash/s for $610. If we are able to hit an order size of 1000, cost will come down by $50 or so. If we get the automatic overclocking software up and running, then it will be something like 280 Mhash for $550. At 15 watts or less. Sounds competitive to me.
My opinion is, we aren't far from seeing FPGA order sizes hitting 1000. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: kazoo on September 06, 2011, 01:10:41 AM Not so sure that I wish to wade into the toxic soup, but...
Someone please correct me if I misunderstood how far ArtForz was able to take this, BUT, to the best of my understanding: ArtForz, a German person, successfully ordered and implemented his(?) own ASIC design. It set him back ~$60,000, and for his pains, he was mining about a 20-25% of all the bitcoin production, somewhere around May or June of this year. The 60,000 might have been euros. The 20-25% might (and probably was) some other specific quantity. Was this bunk, or did it happen? I read this somewhere out on the interwebs, but so what? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: mizike29 on September 06, 2011, 01:15:44 AM To say bitcoin will go back up is just wishful thinking. Nothing can predict whats going to happe with bitcoin and it has been a slow long downslide that I just hope stops, stabilizes finally. I dont see 20s again, but I liked it being semi stable in the 10 to 12 range that it say for awhile.
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 06, 2011, 02:47:55 AM Not so sure that I wish to wade into the toxic soup, but... Someone please correct me if I misunderstood how far ArtForz was able to take this, BUT, to the best of my understanding: ArtForz, a German person, successfully ordered and implemented his(?) own ASIC design. It set him back ~$60,000, and for his pains, he was mining about a 20-25% of all the bitcoin production, somewhere around May or June of this year. The 60,000 might have been euros. The 20-25% might (and probably was) some other specific quantity. Was this bunk, or did it happen? I read this somewhere out on the interwebs, but so what? I call bullshit. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: nmat on September 06, 2011, 03:03:44 AM ArtForz, a German person, successfully ordered and implemented his(?) own ASIC design. It set him back ~$60,000, and for his pains, he was mining about a 20-25% of all the bitcoin production, somewhere around May or June of this year. I believe he only tweaked the GPU client. I never heard of ASICs mentioned. Here's the wiki article (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/ArtForz#cite_note-0): Quote ArtForz is a regular on #bitcoin-dev. He was the first person to mine with GPUs, using private mining code that he wrote himself. He once held a high percentage of network computation power (~25%) but reports[1] that he now controls less than 1%. He claims that his mining software is still more efficient than all other GPU miners. He uses a heavily-modified version of Bitcoin; notably, he requires less transaction fees and he doesn't perform IsStandard checks. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: osmosis on September 06, 2011, 03:29:23 AM When the hashing power has decreased and rigs were sold. But yeah people are in denial, that's what gives Deepbit disagrees with you. Over the past month the hash rate there (measured, not estimated) has gone from 5 terahash to 5.5 terahash. It was going up 50 gigahash a day as the price went below $10, and has since flatlined -- but it has not decreased in any measurable way. *MY* remaining mining hardware is on craigslist, I don't deny it. Already sold two 5830s for $120 each, hoping for a difficulty drop or price pop to sell the last 2. But that won't be the general case until FPGA and ASIC miners make video cards as obsolete as CPUs. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... You are obviously making stuff up, because the price of BTC has nothing to do with profitability if you dont even mention how many bitcoins are being generated per day. Mining profitability has always been based on the difficulty level that has been expanding with competition. In otherwords, because of the free market which maintains the equilibrium...mining always has the same profitability at entrance point. Thats why early miners made a heck of a lot more IF THEY HELD THEM...because they were speculating on the future of bitcoins. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 06, 2011, 03:42:13 AM When the hashing power has decreased and rigs were sold. But yeah people are in denial, that's what gives Deepbit disagrees with you. Over the past month the hash rate there (measured, not estimated) has gone from 5 terahash to 5.5 terahash. It was going up 50 gigahash a day as the price went below $10, and has since flatlined -- but it has not decreased in any measurable way. *MY* remaining mining hardware is on craigslist, I don't deny it. Already sold two 5830s for $120 each, hoping for a difficulty drop or price pop to sell the last 2. But that won't be the general case until FPGA and ASIC miners make video cards as obsolete as CPUs. Why do you people still believe there's going to be bitcoin ASICs? How many goddamn times does it have to be drilled into your head that the economics will NEVER work out enough to develop one until BTC are trading for well over $50/coin steadily... You are obviously making stuff up, because the price of BTC has nothing to do with profitability if you dont even mention how many bitcoins are being generated per day. Mining profitability has always been based on the difficulty level that has been expanding with competition. In otherwords, because of the free market which maintains the equilibrium...mining always has the same profitability at entrance point. Thats why early miners made a heck of a lot more IF THEY HELD THEM...because they were speculating on the future of bitcoins. Shit son, You're out of your fucking league... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: TraderTimm on September 06, 2011, 08:47:17 PM Shit son, You're out of your fucking league... I guess paid trolls are too much for people who believe in freeing themselves from financial tyranny. So, how much are you getting? Because if you aren't, you'd better offer your psychopathic services to a three letter agency real quick, son. But again, you might just be one of those misguided people who like taking a big steamy e-dump on anything you don't agree with. Gosh, which one could it be? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: molecular on September 06, 2011, 08:50:54 PM Every post I will ever make in the future will be at a lower average price than the last. And anyone that believes FPGAs will ever be cost effective for mining is deluded. Anyone who believes there will ever be a Bitcoin ASIC is simply fucking retarded. If the first statement is true, bitcoin price will be really low at some point. GPU mining is not power-efficient, FPGA-mining more so. FPGAs will be mining while GPUs have to be switched off. Difficulty goes to januar-levels and an FPGA can pay its investment when prices rise again. Far-fetched? yes. "Never" possible? no. As for the ASICS: Ask ArtForz, he has at least 200, probably more, read #bitcoin-dev chatlogs from around February 2011. Simply fucking retarded my ass ;) Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Minsc on September 06, 2011, 08:55:24 PM If the first statement is true, bitcoin price will be really low at some point. GPU mining is not power-efficient, FPGA-mining more so. FPGAs will be mining while GPUs have to be switched off. Difficulty goes to januar-levels and an FPGA can pay its investment when prices rise again. Far-fetched? yes. "Never" possible? no. As for the ASICS: Ask ArtForz, he has at least 200, probably more, read #bitcoin-dev chatlogs from around February 2011. Simply fucking retarded my ass ;) Ugh more hardware investments in mining. This is what is harming bitcoins. Mining needs to stop being profitable so people can get good amounts with the cheap emachine hardaware at walmart and 5 year old computers with built in video cards most people have. See https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=41886.0 Also Mt. Gox low today is 6.12 so anything above that ($6.50 now) is too high. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: molecular on September 06, 2011, 08:56:44 PM So, remind me again which brain-damaged asshole with millions of inherited dollars and their loving relative with custodianship on vacation is gearing up to produce ASICS? ArtForz, although he doesn't fit the description. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Minsc on September 06, 2011, 08:58:12 PM So, remind me again which brain-damaged asshole with millions of inherited dollars and their loving relative with custodianship on vacation is gearing up to produce ASICS? ArtForz, although he doesn't fit the description. Brain damaged you say? http://www.bitcoinminingaccidents.com/?p=271 Oh and he has millions of dollars too. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 06, 2011, 09:07:22 PM So, remind me again which brain-damaged asshole with millions of inherited dollars and their loving relative with custodianship on vacation is gearing up to produce ASICS? ArtForz, although he doesn't fit the description. ArtFortz's ASICs are a myth. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: molecular on September 06, 2011, 09:28:13 PM Not so sure that I wish to wade into the toxic soup, but... Someone please correct me if I misunderstood how far ArtForz was able to take this, BUT, to the best of my understanding: ArtForz, a German person, successfully ordered and implemented his(?) own ASIC design. It set him back ~$60,000, and for his pains, he was mining about a 20-25% of all the bitcoin production, somewhere around May or June of this year. The 60,000 might have been euros. The 20-25% might (and probably was) some other specific quantity. Was this bunk, or did it happen? I read this somewhere out on the interwebs, but so what? I'm pretty sure it happened. Quote from: http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/logs/2011/01/15/10 18:38 molecular ArtForz: how long roughly until you have 100 asics up and running? 18:38 ArtForz I'll get em mid feb, probably late feb/early mar There's a lot more talk about the specifics after that, if anyone's interested. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: fcmatt on September 06, 2011, 09:37:36 PM So, remind me again which brain-damaged asshole with millions of inherited dollars and their loving relative with custodianship on vacation is gearing up to produce ASICS? ArtForz, although he doesn't fit the description. ArtFortz's ASICs are a myth. I read enough of his posts to believe he does indeed have some ASIC type gear running. But they are not the mass produced things we are thinking of in general. I would have to find his chat logs to explain it properly. http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/logs/2011/01/15/9 start reading here i suppose. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 06, 2011, 09:44:15 PM So, remind me again which brain-damaged asshole with millions of inherited dollars and their loving relative with custodianship on vacation is gearing up to produce ASICS? ArtForz, although he doesn't fit the description. ArtFortz's ASICs are a myth. I read enough of his posts to believe he does indeed have some ASIC type gear running. But they are not the mass produced things we are thinking of in general. I would have to find his chat logs to explain it properly. http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/logs/2011/01/15/9 start reading here i suppose. I don't believe for a minute that he's telling the truth. He's never provided any proof whatsoever, just some bullshit claims. Probably a liar like most people on the Internet... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: fcmatt on September 06, 2011, 09:50:02 PM based on what i have read.. Art is not your average bitcoin user. So I guess I will leave it at that.
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 06, 2011, 09:53:21 PM based on what i have read.. Art is not your average bitcoin user. So I guess I will leave it at that. And I'll leave it there's plenty of hobbyists with a lot of time on their hands who like fishermen catching "The Big One" in their friendly stories with fellows, aren't exactly being 100% honest with their claims. I knew a guy in college who knew so much about flying airliners from playing flight-sims that he successfully convinced a number of people that he had flown as an airline pilot for a number of years before being laid off. Completely full of shit. Just like ArtFortz. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: mizike29 on September 06, 2011, 10:58:03 PM Uhhh that sounds like a movie we watched awhile ago buddy
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ArtForz on September 06, 2011, 11:29:58 PM You forgot a few:
I never provided any proof I had a opencl miner capable of ~150Mh/s on a 5770 back in july 2010. I never provided any proof I had a CAL IL miner doing ~650Mh/s on a stock 5970 about 3 months later. I never provided any proof of starting development of a sASIC miner around the same time. I never provided any proof of getting actual devices in early march, which while providing excellent hash/J sucked at attainable clock(= hashrate) relative to cost. And you'll probably also never see any proof I've managed to get a good deal > 200Mh/s from a S6-LX150. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 06, 2011, 11:33:04 PM You forgot a few: I never provided any proof I had a opencl miner capable of ~150Mh/s on a 5770 back in july 2010. I never provided any proof I had a CAL IL miner doing ~650Mh/s on a stock 5970 about 3 months later. I never provided any proof of starting development of a sASIC miner around the same time. I never provided any proof of getting actual devices in early march, which while providing excellent hash/J sucked at attainable clock(= hashrate) relative to cost. And you'll probably also never see any proof I've managed to get a good deal > 200Mh/s from a S6-LX150. So, you claim you had a functioning ASIC, and now you're using the lowest tier consumer FPGA... uh huh. I really believe you had a functioning ASIC... Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ArtForz on September 06, 2011, 11:35:09 PM If you could read, I wrote sASIC, aka structured asic, pretty much the same thing as xilinx easypath but without the niceness of 1:1 FPGA-to-ASIC on a HDL level.
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Minsc on September 06, 2011, 11:36:44 PM If you could read, I wrote sASIC, aka structured asic, pretty much the same thing as xilinx easypath but without the niceness of 1:1 FPGA-to-ASIC on a HDL level. I don't know what that is, but can it let me mine lots of coins without buying a bunch of expensive hardware? Anything over $50 is too much. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 07, 2011, 12:11:19 AM If you could read, I wrote sASIC, aka structured asic, pretty much the same thing as xilinx easypath but without the niceness of 1:1 FPGA-to-ASIC on a HDL level. Thank you for the further clarification, and also illustrating once and for all to the people that have been arguing ASICs with me lately that your project did not validate the ASIC path theory, and from what you've written, actually strengthen the argument that ASICs are completely infeasible. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: ArtForz on September 07, 2011, 12:33:42 AM I guess we're agreeing then. IMO the current bitcoin economy is not anywhere near the size and the future way too uncertain to have anyone blow the money required on the NRE of designing a real ASIC at a competitive structure size. But who knows.
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 07, 2011, 12:37:21 AM I guess we're agreeing then. IMO the current bitcoin economy is not anywhere near the size and the future way too uncertain to have anyone blow the money required on the NRE of designing a real ASIC at a competitive structure size. But who knows. DEFXOR, IF YOU'RE AROUND, PLEASE READ THIS A FEW MILLION TIMES. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 07, 2011, 07:37:10 AM I guess we're agreeing then. IMO the current bitcoin economy is not anywhere near the size and the future way too uncertain to have anyone blow the money required on the NRE of designing a real ASIC at a competitive structure size. But who knows. DEFXOR, IF YOU'RE AROUND, PLEASE READ THIS A FEW MILLION TIMES. Why? You've still been wrong on everything you claim and you still haven't produced any calculations of value for the rest of us :) You're not saved by the ASIC/sASIC/ASIC(EasyPath FPGA)/FPGA distinctions either. To remind you: There is no FPGA/ASIC uptake, you're just fucking stupid. And anyone that believes FPGAs will ever be cost effective for mining is deluded. Anyone who believes there will ever be a Bitcoin ASIC is simply fucking retarded. I'd really like for you to start showing us some calculations. I've done with BTC at $8 and $4 respectively. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 07, 2011, 01:56:44 PM I guess we're agreeing then. IMO the current bitcoin economy is not anywhere near the size and the future way too uncertain to have anyone blow the money required on the NRE of designing a real ASIC at a competitive structure size. But who knows. DEFXOR, IF YOU'RE AROUND, PLEASE READ THIS A FEW MILLION TIMES. Why? You've still been wrong on everything you claim and you still haven't produced any calculations of value for the rest of us :) You're not saved by the ASIC/sASIC/ASIC(EasyPath FPGA)/FPGA distinctions either. To remind you: There is no FPGA/ASIC uptake, you're just fucking stupid. And anyone that believes FPGAs will ever be cost effective for mining is deluded. Anyone who believes there will ever be a Bitcoin ASIC is simply fucking retarded. I'd really like for you to start showing us some calculations. I've done with BTC at $8 and $4 respectively. You fucking idiot. ArtForz himself, the man who supposedly spend a shitload of his own cash, to pursue as close to an ASIC as he could get (the sASIC he mentioned) doesn't believe ASICs are viable... I'm not posting calculations! They would be a waste of my time, as anyone with any fucking common sense already knows these things! Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on September 07, 2011, 06:56:46 PM You fucking idiot. It's nice to see you too :) Quote ArtForz himself, the man who supposedly spend a shitload of his own cash, to pursue as close to an ASIC as he could get (the sASIC he mentioned) doesn't believe ASICs are viable... ... and crush your FPGA argument at the same time? I don't agree with ArtForz though, with a _low_ BTC price ASICs make sense. FPGAs already. Quote I'm not posting calculations! Understandable. After all, those calculations would likely disprove your own point ;) Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 07, 2011, 10:20:05 PM You fucking idiot. It's nice to see you too :) Quote ArtForz himself, the man who supposedly spend a shitload of his own cash, to pursue as close to an ASIC as he could get (the sASIC he mentioned) doesn't believe ASICs are viable... ... and crush your FPGA argument at the same time? I don't agree with ArtForz though, with a _low_ BTC price ASICs make sense. FPGAs already. Quote I'm not posting calculations! Understandable. After all, those calculations would likely disprove your own point ;) ArtForz is hobbyist. Vladamir is a businessman. Which one is using FPGAs? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: newMeat1 on September 07, 2011, 10:37:15 PM Hobbyist or not, which one has made more money? OK, I don't know. They've both probably made a lot.
With these low prices, which one stands to make more in the future? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: logansryche on September 08, 2011, 09:27:54 PM This reminds me of the debate a few months back when they said mining off a sound card was possible. Interesting read.
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: nmat on September 09, 2011, 12:02:49 AM Well, these guys (http://largecoin.com/) say they are developing an ASIC miner. According to this (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/103/whats-the-difference-between-an-asic-and-an-fpga-which-is-better-for-mining/782#782) it will be ready by middle 2012
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: netrin on September 09, 2011, 12:33:24 AM Let's recap shall we?
Winter saw lows of $0.07 and highs of $1.00 Spring saw lows of $0.50 and highs of $9.00 Summer saw lows of $8.00 and highs of $32.00 Autumn sees lows of $6.15 and expected highs between $25 and $100 http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/chart.png?s=2010-10-11&e=2011-10-01&i=Weekly&c=1&l=1&t=S&noheader=1&height=500&width=720&m=mtgoxUSD Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: nmat on September 09, 2011, 12:57:34 AM Autumn sees lows of $6.15 and expected highs between $25 and $100 http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/k81zd/why_i_love_the_bitcoin_forums/ Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: netrin on September 09, 2011, 01:35:54 AM I take it you don't like logarithms.
https://i.imgur.com/qqtEf.png Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Synaptic on September 09, 2011, 05:55:00 AM LOL. nice. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: netrin on September 09, 2011, 01:34:27 PM I can't take credit for the image. While I think the point is invalid (logs are more descriptive), the joke is funny.
Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Fjordbit on September 16, 2011, 04:39:37 PM I really disagree with the way Synaptic has presented himself in this debate, but I do agree with his basic premise. There are some real problems with FPGA as it stands right now. If things improve with respect to $/Mhps, then the equation changes, but I don't see how it's really viable. In fact, without a rise in btc price (or a drop in difficulty), I don't see how buying any hardware now is viable. Here is my math and reasoning (since Synaptic doesn't seem capable of producing any).
Right now the X6500 FPGA costs 610 and will deliver 180 Mhps. I have a spreadsheet I use to calculate out ROI and at least for me the ROI puts it at around 40 months. The problem is in about 15 months the block reward will be cut from 50 to 25. This actually makes the ROI 25 months longer. At the time of recast, there will actually be 50 months left. But wait, in that time, there is another block reward reduction. So assuming a constant difficulty and price, it doesn't seem that the current FPGAs can pay themselves off. People say that at lower btc prices FPGA make more sense but when I lower my btc price to $4, the FPGA ROI goes to 55 months. At $3, it's 76 months. This doesn't include the reward decreases. Another factor here is that the hardware is all continuously improving. What do you think GPUs will look like in 40 months? What about other FPGAs? There's really no easy way to trade up FPGA hardware, but you can pretty easily trade up GPUs (sell on ebay, buy new GPU). When you buy a current FPGA, you lock into a specific amount of MHps. You could sell your FPGA to other miners, I suppose, but my feeling here is that this will more strictly follow performance relative to the latest chips because there isn't any ancillary use (gaming) for these boards. Because the hardware is used as well, you will need to discount it and it's possible that this discount will just take up any profit margin you had on that board. This is all theoretical, but it seems likely to me. At these prices, GPU mining isn't much better. My mining rig is running at 60 months ROI. But then again I've been mining for the last two months and have been selling at some good prices, so when I take out what I've profited, it goes into the 30s. If I take out what I can sell my cards for on ebay today, it goes to under 10 months. So it still makes some sense for me to mine. But I can't recommend it to someone else unless they want to add a card to their machine for gaming and will mine while idle. I don't think that people are being realistic about the price drop and the effect it has on long term profitability. Maybe people will begin to understand and this will result in a pull back in difficulty, but so far this hasn't been evident. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: molecular on September 16, 2011, 04:52:55 PM Right now the X6500 FPGA costs 610 and will deliver 180 Mhps. I know some people here don't give a damn what ArtForz believes. Well, take this as his opinion then: (this was on 2011/9/16 on #namecoin) Quote from: #namecoin <ArtForz> I wouldnt be surprised if someone got 300Mh/s+ out of a S6-LX150 So the parameters of the calculations might change in the future. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Fjordbit on September 16, 2011, 07:08:55 PM Right now the X6500 FPGA costs 610 and will deliver 180 Mhps. I know some people here don't give a damn what ArtForz believes. Well, take this as his opinion then: (this was on 2011/9/16 on #namecoin) Quote from: #namecoin <ArtForz> I wouldnt be surprised if someone got 300Mh/s+ out of a S6-LX150 So the parameters of the calculations might change in the future. 300Mh/s puts the ROI at 26 months, which is really 37 months given the reward decrease. In many cases a 37 month ROI would be great, but there is a severe amount of risk here. That is the ROI today at today's prices and today's difficulty. It's doubtful this will hold up for even 15 months let alone 37. And my main point is that as the btc price decreases, this ROI decreases too. People are saying that low prices are where FPGA shines, but it really just gets worse. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: molecular on September 16, 2011, 07:35:06 PM Right now the X6500 FPGA costs 610 and will deliver 180 Mhps. I know some people here don't give a damn what ArtForz believes. Well, take this as his opinion then: (this was on 2011/9/16 on #namecoin) Quote from: #namecoin <ArtForz> I wouldnt be surprised if someone got 300Mh/s+ out of a S6-LX150 So the parameters of the calculations might change in the future. 300Mh/s puts the ROI at 26 months, which is really 37 months given the reward decrease. In many cases a 37 month ROI would be great, but there is a severe amount of risk here. That is the ROI today at today's prices and today's difficulty. It's doubtful this will hold up for even 15 months let alone 37. And my main point is that as the btc price decreases, this ROI decreases too. People are saying that low prices are where FPGA shines, but it really just gets worse. The argument is, that at really low prices (< $1), the difficulty (also part of the roi calculation) should drop significantly. It all depends on wether or not it really would drop at such low prices. I still hope we wont find out. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Fjordbit on September 16, 2011, 09:59:57 PM The argument is, that at really low prices (< $1), the difficulty (also part of the roi calculation) should drop significantly. It all depends on wether or not it really would drop at such low prices. I still hope we wont find out. I know the argument, and the argument is speculation. I don't think it's something to build a business model after. If difficulty does come down or price does go up or cost/Mhps does go down, then it can change the equation for these things, but making assumptions about what might happen is just gambling. And for the record, if the difficulty drops to 800,000 and the price to $3, then the X6500 has an 18 month (really 21 month) ROI. There is nothing stable enough about BitCoin that I would enter into it with an 21 month ROI on dedicated hardware. When I bought my rig, the ROI was just under 3 months. If the price goes to $2, the ROI is 28 month (41 months). This is using the 300 Mhps number which isn't guaranteed. There is nothing about low prices that is good for FPGA. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: grod on September 16, 2011, 10:26:31 PM One other thing to put into your calculations.
The current board seats two FPGAs which cost $158 retail from Digikey. The power circuitry, and, really, the rest of the board should be manly enough to seat six or eight of those. Basically we're a small rework away from a $1400 board that could churn out as much as 1.8 gigahash (but today would yield around 1.4). That's down there with 3x5830 rigs on a price/mhash, but would use 1/10th the power. Also, with 6 chips per board it'll be easier to hit quantity discounts (lop another 200 off). $1k for a 1.8 ghash board, anyone? This could be done TODAY, with TODAY's pricing. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Nagle on September 16, 2011, 11:39:27 PM $1k for a 1.8 ghash board, anyone? As a rule of thumb, figure a profitable retail price on electronics as 4x the parts cost. 2x in real volume, like a cell phone. What's your time worth? Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: grod on September 17, 2011, 11:25:03 PM $1k for a 1.8 ghash board, anyone? As a rule of thumb, figure a profitable retail price on electronics as 4x the parts cost. 2x in real volume, like a cell phone. What's your time worth? And yet, you can buy a 1 chip board for around $410, a two chip board for $610. Retail. Assuming digikey is a viable retail operation you can guess volume production costs using wholesale pricing could make the final product viable at retail cost of the parts. I won't deny this is not reality today. Reality today is 180 mhash for $610. Possibilities are there for much, much more however. Within a time frame much smaller than "bitcoin at $100." Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: Fjordbit on September 18, 2011, 06:36:15 PM The current board seats two FPGAs which cost $158 retail from Digikey. The power circuitry, and, really, the rest of the board should be manly enough to seat six or eight of those. Basically we're a small rework away from a $1400 board that could churn out as much as 1.8 gigahash (but today would yield around 1.4). This could be done TODAY, with TODAY's pricing. The ROI on this is certainly impressive, but I don't really get how this can be used as part of a business model unless the product were offered on the market or the person running the business knows how to make this mod. I'm still not seeing your numbers though. If we use the current going rates of $210 for the main board and then $200 for each chip and each chip is at 90Mhps, then a 6 chip board is $1410 and does 540 MHps. The 1.8 Ghps board would be 20 chips, which would be $4210. If you got the chips for your retail price, it would be $3160. I think you skipped over something that shows it's possible today at today's pricing. Maybe you were using 150Mhps per chip (the 300Mhps rumor), but that's still $1896 for the chipset from Digikey, so I still don't get it. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: molecular on September 19, 2011, 07:30:30 AM The argument is, that at really low prices (< $1), the difficulty (also part of the roi calculation) should drop significantly. It all depends on wether or not it really would drop at such low prices. I still hope we wont find out. I know the argument, and the argument is speculation. I don't think it's something to build a business model after. I agree. I also agree on your further arguing that diff 800,000 / price $3 is not low enough. Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on March 18, 2012, 01:29:58 AM (Yes I'm sure I want to reply to a thread that has had no posts for at least 120 days)
So, let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months - relevant to the discussion that took place in this thread half a year ago. Since the early FPGA boards were already available then, but didn't convince the GPU crowd that the path CPU->GPU->FPGA->(s)ASIC was clear and inevitable, the new data would be: Butterfly Labs - Single and Rig Box (FPGA, of which the former is apparently selling like hotcakes) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60586.0 LargeCoin (sASIC, although not in customer hands yet) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67505.0 ... and of course the tantalizing (or worrying) prospect of someone throwing a lot of ASIC (?) power online without sharing ;) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67634.0 Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: fcmatt on March 18, 2012, 03:07:44 AM As always one has to do the maths on these FPGA boards which are not cheap.
832mh/s for 600 bucks. Assume diff stays the same. Assume price stays the same at 5.29. Assume 10 cents kW/h and this small board+fan uses 80 watts (butterfly single). After 10 months of non stop flawless running you will finally be ahead by 25 bucks. But... diff will go up. Rest assured. 50 for a block will get cut in half before you break even extending it out to what i will say is a year. Now with that said if I was just getting into bitcoin and wanted to seriously mine at home I would probably buy one. It is much better then setting up a traditional rig. But this assumes you already have a gaming rig or do not want one. If you play games and have an older computer I would probably just go with AMD/ATI and upgrade my home PC to mine. Then there are people like me who have free electricity. I am happy running 5830s, 5850, 6950(flashed to 70s). etc... They represent great value when you buy them used. 630mh/s costs around 150 dollars if you patiently troll ebay. As for what to plug them into.. pfft.. people are at the point they are tossing MB with two pcie slots in them. Cheap money. The power supply is the key of course. In my mind.. the people buying these would just be spending their money on video cards anyway. So diff will go up just the same with or without them. As for the last thread.. dunno. Some AMD place is testing a few hundred cards at once and decided to make money at it ;-) Title: Re: Let's recap on what we've seen in the past few months Post by: defxor on January 31, 2013, 12:24:38 PM Every post I will ever make in the future will be at a lower average price than the last. And anyone that believes FPGAs will ever be cost effective for mining is deluded. Anyone who believes there will ever be a Bitcoin ASIC is simply fucking retarded. ... and finally, we can now end the old heated debate ;) http://bitcoinmagazine.com/working-avalon-asic-confirmed/ Although since price is at $20 I guess we'll never see any posts from Synaptic again - true to his word: Last Active: September 12, 2011, 01:36:26 AM |
