Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys, this thread is to discuss the options for people with non BLF FPGAs. While GPUs can be resold, the FPGA probably cannot. What do you do if you just bought your board, and are no-where near it's repayment period ?

You just keep mining and hope that your efficiency will keep you profitable... and also hope that the GPUs leaving the hashing market will let you stay profitable for a bit longer...

While I agree that hope dies last, someone who paid around $1000 for 800Mhash, will find it hard to make any profit compared to 40Ghash that BFL plans to sell for $1300. Also ASIC's efficiency reportedly surpasses FPGA's.

Its an equally exciting and worrisome time for miners. At least my house won't need 2 AC units in 1 room anymore. And who doesn't like warm coffee?

GPUs could potentially be profitable (with free electric), and FPGAs as well (with cheap electric), at least at the beginning of the ASIC rollout. The resale value won't be that high, but with the nearly insignificant electric draw why, would you not mine with them?

Well because I suspect BFL Labs have calculated the increase in difficulty after all their current FPGA products are exchanged to ASICs, and priced them accordingly where a 40GH ASIC priced at around $1300 will take 10 months to ROI.
That would mean an 800MH FPGA will bring around $25 per year, so it will make almost no difference if you mine with it or not.

I bet it would warm coffee better than the BFL coffee warmer though.

Kidding aside, the FPGA boards should still have some resale value. The value is concentrated in the FPGA chips, not the board. I bet you could sell each spartan for $100 on eBay or whereever. If there are four on the board, that could buy almost three BFL coffee warmers (so you could upgrade from 800MH to 10.5 GH).

I'm confident and could be wrong, but that at 4 months post BFL ASIC energy efficient FPGA's will be, at most, breaking even compared to electricity cost.

I expect to see network capacity above 100 Terahash.

FPGAs can be repurposed, depending on the design. Icarus/Lancelot boards definitely can. Will be interesting to see what uses are found for them.

GPUs have a good few alternate options to remain hashing in some form without mining BTC. GPUMax is allegedly ready or near-ready to allow those alternate options to be exercised.

Password cracking for hire?

GPU miners will have to look for someone who will pay for their GPU power for use in other services.

FPGA miners left to hope that a new Bitstream will be released and their FPGA's will support other currencies, i.e. Litecoin, and mine them instead.

Why not also use GPU to mine LTC ??? Why only FPGA ?

That's right, because LTC can't be sustained like BTC by Silk Road !

Everybody try and jump to LTC GPU mining and see what happens : LTC price goes to 0.0001 just like all the others :'(

Because hopefully there is something more profitable to do with GPUs than mine Litecoin :)

ATM that is BTC but after reward drop and ASIC anyone mining BTC on GPUs is totally insane.

Where is this GPU "saver" I am waiting for it for long ...

This is why I skipped over FPGAs ;).  I'm also assuming that by the time November rolls around either BFL or a competitor will be able to ship in a reasonable timeframe, so I'm skipping preorders.  In the meantime, my BTC stash is invested in fast growing ventures so I can maximize my purchasing power.  In fact, some of it will probably stay there because while it is higher risk than buying mining hardware, it is more profitable.

You have a good point revenue wise, but bitcoin needs to increase the speed for security reasons ASAP, so by buying ASICs you're protecting all Bitcoin business.

With 40 GH/s for $1500, this will not be an issue.  I'll get some hardware for sure regardless.

FPGAs will continue to be profitable until ASICs actually get enough market penetration to jack up the network hashrate by an order of magnitude.

When that happens, I might go learn Verilog and turn them into tripcode generators.

When it's released? Well, my miners will be worthless. Till then? Well I'm making more than the preorderers...

I am not sure about this in the long-run because of rent.   Now if you have free electricity, free rent, sure maybe sometime down the road, as long as your GPU doesn't die, it can be profitable on a relative basis to not running GPUs at all.   This assume difficulty skyrockets which I believe it will around Dec-Jan.

Dalkore

Yeah I think many will dump their GPUs precisely when ASIC miners start shipping. That's what I plan to do unless I can figure out another use for the several 5870s I still have. I also have a few Icarus fpga miners but those I think I'll have a much harder time selling, so it would be neat if someone released a distributed.net or Folding@home or Seti@home bitstream for them - basically anything to repurpose them away from mining when mining with them is no longer worthwhile.

By my calculations, if you have an FPGA in your hands right now and mine it, you will come close to break even before reward halving and the difficulty rise. Of course it's much better to have a BFL for the trade in, but you aren't completely out of luck.

I would not order a non-BFL FPGA at this point though.

You should ditch them when it's not longer profitable, and no sooner.

Also, you should investigate Litecoin. I've heard someone's written a GPU miner for it, and the only reason people aren't using it is that their video cards are better served mining Bitcoin. If ASICs squeeze GPUs out of profitability... that could change!

if i had an FPGA in my hands right now

i'd sell it while it still had some value

I don't believe this *** hype, I'm just going to let my FPGA keep mining until the boards burn out. If any other vendor comes out with ASIC I might look in to it.

Same here :)

Or someone designs a new fpga miner on 28nm Tech. Then ill rather switch to that before thinking of being a SC from BFL :/

Its simple.  The ASIC users create such a massive difficulty increase all other miners make tiny fractions of a BTC a day or quit.
ASIC centralizes mining further by reducing the number of people who want to play. 
Look at ANY pool to see how many miners they have. There are not nearly as many individuals mining as one would think.  Now ASIC will give power to even fewer people and that centralizes mining even more. The higher the difficulty the less players period...

Do you really think the average person will learn all about BTC and is going to buy a $150 coffee warmer?  Its not going to happen.
So many people know about BTC and simply don't care. Raising the bar for entry means even less people will even bother to look.

IF BTC ever becomes a threat to any currency it will be made illegal and then no reputable business or person will want to bother with it. Think EGOLD and its money laundering issues of 2008 or was it 2009


Simpler version

Game is Tag = CPU for BTC - everyone gets to play nothing is required but you.

Game on XBOX = GPU for BTC - now you need a special box but its not very expensive and so many already have one its no big deal

Snowboarding/Skiing = FPGA for BTC - now you must absolutely have the right gear to play and you have to pay for access to get in the door.

Professional Sports = ASIC for BTC - now you need incredible skill that the average guy will never possess. They don't bother to even try and only watch. Many people don't even care to watch.

they also can change the algorithm a little bit, and continue mining on the split blockchain

because a lot of password systems use double sha256

we can always donate samples to the bitcoin museum that is yet to be founded.

Fixed that. But it doesn't make a difference as PBKDF2 basically does lots of sha256 iterations.

What I would like is a generic PBKDF2 brute force bitstream (to brute force wpa2 passwords i.e.). Or a litecoin miner ;D. Could the ztex boards be used for this or is it impossible because of the ram requirements of scrypt?

just point your hardware / cgminer at litecoin and keep smiling the world isnt ending :)

Doing LTC mining on my CPUS (bout 11 ltc a day worth) is nice, as you actually feel like you are earning something (in terms of units, not $$), compared to the lowly 0.65 BTC I earn a day from my 4 GPU's.

Well FGPA'S (field programmable gate array's) can always be resold. with a little bit of effort they can be used for a multitude of other applications. resale might be quite a bit lower proportionally than a graphics card though, considering alot may be dumped if ASIC does indeed arrive soon. i expect graphics cards will also devalue, just not as much.

gogo sell ure fpga`s cheap, ill have them all, free powah ftw  ;D

Nice trolling

Too bad that being able to buy a Jalapeno for 150$ make your point totally fail. It's easier to buy an ASIC for 150$, plug it via USB and tell it mine or having to buy GPUs, mess with driver and overclocks and having a computer running them?