Bitcoin Forum

What will happen with the trade in program?  What will they use their minirigs and singles for?

The asic pricing will make them worthless.

Well, if they bought used FPGAs for $x USD per FPGA, perhaps they can resell them for $x/2 USD or some other fraction of their original used price.

I'm assuming they can still sell the FPGA chips as used units? From what I understand those are pretty nice chips high quality FPGAs...

One rumor I heard was they could replace the chips with ASIC and re-sell them.

That would require making their ASIC pin compatible with the FPGA they build their original PCBs on. Why limit yourself to these constraints when the PCB and active/passive components are cheap?

They are not only Bitcoin company, they specialize in cryptology, their initial cryptology simulations showed the Single consuming 20watt, but when they run Bitcoin mining on it, it pulled 80watt as we remember.
So they can reuse these devices in other markets.

Regarding using the boards to solder on ASIC, it was mentioned by someone that putting 30watts load on 80watts circuitry is very inefficient.

A few options:

1. Scrap them. This would only be a minor financial loss, as the revenues of the future SC product line will/should far surpass the revenues coming from the current gen products.
2. Develop FPGA bitstreams for the other applications that they have been listing on their site (computational research, medical imagery, etc: http://www.butterflylabs.com/drivers/ ) and resell them.
3. Mine on them until it is not profitable anymore.

The ASIC hardware will have a preset date/time [a countdown] that will trigger all ASIC's to execute a self destruct or cease mining function. ASIC's will all be useless at the same time. BFL will then offer another 50% trade-in program with the timed-out ASIC hardware back to the [renewed] prior-gen FPGA hardware. Then the FPGA once named 'Singles' will be called Double, and the miniRig will earn the new title 'Phoenix' after the mythical bird that arises back from the ashes.

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It's unlikely due to it being an operational PITA, but with an estimate of 127 TH 5 months post ASIC they could make about $6,600 per month on all of the returned FPGA units.

As already discussed in this thread, the most likely event is that they will be repurposed and resold.

Follow the links of the other applications you mention. ;)

I know. That's my point. They have not yet developed them.

If the Singles can be reprogrammed and used for any BOINC projects out there, that will be great.

THIS A MILLION TIMES!

I gots to be mapping the galaxy yo

Oh you just have to write a bitstream for a BOINC project. Dunno how many months does it take. Or years? And if the version change, tons of changes in the bitstream  :D

Is there a decent sized RAM on the BFL units and a high speed USB link? Without that its very unlikely that there is much use. I know they claim medical imaging but X-ray image tend to be large, Computer tomography dataset are even much larger.

They will hold on to them, wait for the bitcoin algorithm to change, update the bitstream,then sell them back to the same people that purchased them before.

Why sell a product once when you can sell it twice for 3x the profit.

Lol, and of course there would then be a new exchange program requiring customers to double down on their investment again!