Bitcoin Forum

how long would do you guys think you'd have to wait to receive a rig buying from the bfl site?

I am hoping to get a few people together to buy about 2-4 rigs.

what do people think?

what do you see happening to difficulty levels?

I know this is talked about a lot but I'm only limited to this forum thus far so forgive me.

My advice is to treat is as if total hashrate will be 600-1000TH/s by the time you get the units. And to also understand it is a risky investment. If you like risky investments, go right ahead.
Take into consideration your power bill and account for possible downtime.
Don't forget about the risk of exchange rate, also.

It is probably too late.  Depends on a lot of factors which are unpredictable.  You'll need to do a worst case evaluation.

I don't think it's too late.
Just don't expect to earn it back in 6 months.

I preordered with bASIC and got a refund when that company folded. I'm not interested in any more of this preorder garbage: I will assess the situation if/when a genuine ASIC product is available for direct order and immediate to near-immediate shipping. Even if the difficulty is 75m+ by then, it may still be extremely profitable if you consider, broadly speaking:

Consider GPU mining last year - it was decently profitable at $10 per BTC with the reward at BTC50/block.
Now, difficulty might go up 30x before you get your ASIC, and the reward has halved to BTC25/block. This is a de-facto difficulty increase of 60x. But the new machines might hash 70x more efficiently (per $ spent)! So ASIC is still about as profitable as GPU was last year... with the exchange rate around $10 per BTC! Now imagine $30, $50, $80 or more per BTC...

Purely speculative of course, but I'm out until there's a tangible product available and I've reassessed everything. I already burned my fingers with the bASIC fiasco as it is.

The PPS systems are already paying significantly less even with less than 10 ASICS on the network.
Expect a delivery in July-August and pay-back on the kit within two years.

I think that once it settles down.... we will see way more DDOS attacks on the major pools in an attempt for other groups to make a higher return on their mining operations.

Probably considerably shorter ROI than that, unless the exchange rate collapses again, or hashrate escalates rapidly beyond a petahash. Both outcomes are possible of course.

Obviously, the cost of purchasing ASICs has to be weighed against that of buying BTC directly.

That is my deciding factor -> the would be difficulty.  What makes you say it'll go up 40 fold??  Is that fair to say??

I tried to buy/order a butterfly labs jalapeno today but they only take bitcoins (dont have enough), paypal, bank wire transfers, .....was hoping to borrow my uncles credit card and pay him cash. .....i did find it odd too that firefox yelled at me about unverified security certificate too, anyone else get that message?

@FarmerBlue

just tested the site.  I have a pretty secure system and no red flags.

say you order a bfl asic now, it will probably be around May or later before you get it. This is based on current orders expected for April.
Now consider the following:
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/bitcoin-discussion/1096-asic-systems.html
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/pre-sales-questions/1047-i-ordered-early-aug-~-4500-bfl-cs-says-will-likely-ship-may-june-true-4.html#post15285

TL;DR

BFL has 75k chips first batch. This equates to 500-800TH. By the time these ship, Avalon and ASICMiner would have brought the network to around 200TH. Making the network 1000TH by August.
If you expect to make your money back in 9 days, I'm sorry to tell you but by the time you get a device the money train would have left and we will be back to the same scenario of GPU mining... Massive mining setups.
So if you have the ability to buy lots of ASIC's miners, I would suggest putting in your order now, if not. Look into other ways of supporting the network.

That sounds like a reasonable estimate.  That accounts for 40x difficulty increase?


Absolutely not.  But I do want to be in the game now and reap the supposed benefits before the block reward is further reduced.

 ::) I heard we should wait till july when the demand lowers... And nomater what the difficulty is going to be high

I'd wait 'til they ship and their product is proven to be within specifications for power consumption and hash rate.

Just my two bitcents.

That was my logic back in September/October. I agree its a difficult decision whether to buy in or not. At the end of the day if you're about supporting the system, you've got to start somewhere.

What else can these miner rigs be used for?  brute force attacks?

Honest question.  What are alternative uses for these miners?

As far as I understand it they don't have much application outside of mining Bitcoin. They're basically circuits designed solely for producing SHA-256 hashes, not universal computers. However, as with most things, I'm sure we'll find inventive other uses for these in the future.

On the one hand, what was interesting is that if you were planning on becoming a miner, you usually ended with a monster machine that had a lot of power computationally.  Meaning if all else fails with mining you could have fun doing some high end encoding / gaming / etc...

I am on the verge of buying 4 of the bfl 30gh/s or 60gh/s devices but am afraid I really can't find any other use for them if things go sour.

That will take 4 years and wil cut your mining revenue at most by half. 
Other asics coming online will take months and reduce your mining revenue to somewhere between 10% and 1% of what it is now.

I did a Microtrend house call scan and found a low level  TROJGEN. It was a cache tmp file. It is cleared now, retesting purchase from butterfly labs and now it is clear with no security certificates issue.

How useful is the Jalapeno going to be in a few months?Im sure you will get profit, but how much?

Are you saying my revenue will be reduced  to 10% (or 1%, yikes!) if I don't upgrade to the asics or are you assuming that from the moment one receives one it will take months to diminish any income?

I am saying your per GH revenue will most likely drop that much over the next months compared to now. Mining revenue per GH is directly and inversely proportional to difficulty which is proportional to the aggregate hashrate of the network. And the latter is about to explode when the various asics finally get to their customers over the next months.

Right, I understand this.  I believe it.  No problem.  Let the 100 fold increase in difficulty come!  :P