Bitcoin Forum

I have some experience with mining. I used to use slush's pool to mine with my GPU. Now I have been hearing more about ASIC mining the new best way to mine. What is ASIC? Please help me understand ASIC and advise me on best way to get back into mining.

They are chips that are designed to do one thing - the SHA256 operations that make the core of bitcoin mining.

Right now, the best way to get into mining is to take a large pile of money, buy ASIC mining hardware, and get a small pile of money out.

There is no profitable ASIC currently available for purchase in terms of immediate delivery, and preorders are a risky gamble.

Of course if you just want to play with it till you think there is a good buy you can get a couple of ASICminer USBs from the group buy page for .18 bitcoins each. Please do not think you will get your investment back but you can play with them and use the different miner software. I have 15 in one pool I can around .0235 bitcoins a day in another I cam Make .00035 bitcoin a day and the pool I am in now I make .0375 bitcoin per day. 

Thanks for the reply. I heard about what happened to people who preordered from butterfly labs and were ripped off. I have a few more questions...

How do you install ASIC into a computer? USB? PCI Express?
How does power usage of ASIC compare to GPU mining?
Does anybody still use GPU's for mining BTC?

To date all rigs have either been standalone (the rig has ethernet and you just connect it to a network) or use USB to connect TO a computer (host).  None have been installed inside a computer.

It is not even close.  Depending on the ASIC model, a GPU uses about 50x to 500x as much power.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281279.0

A 2.5W USB Block Eruptor outhashes many 200W+ graphics cards.


No.  Well maybe if they already own GPUs and they have free power but even then it is getting close to the point it isn't worth it.

LTC gets 4x as much in USD value as BTC mining, just mine it and convert, even that's getting close when you pay for power. Anyone still GPU mining BTC is either daft and using free power, or daft and loosing money.

Daft it is then!

the being. well , removing unnecessary, adding more integer part for it.

What are you talking about?

^^deserves a sticky.

I have 1 GPU that throws constant errors if I mine Scrypt but earns me .0018BTC per day.  At my power costs, I am spending ~$.21 a day to make ~$.20.  It'd probably cost me $.25(or more) a day to get that .0018 from someone willing to sell it.

I guess its easier for me to tell you cex.io (https://cex.io/r/1/fattypig/0/). Its a website that you can buy part of ASIC and help you do everything which also include free electricity, management fee and so on.