330 TH is less than 15% of the current network, likely 10% by the time they ship.
Of course I do expect HF to ship considerably more than 550 babyjets.

My point is merely that it makes sense for bitmine to provide different performance/efficiency modes. RoadStress  thought it was a waste of time. Besides, not much time will have been spent on that, every chip works in that way; increase voltage and you increase the maximum stable clockspeed (up to a point), but you almost always decrease effiency. When you plot that relationship, you get whats called a shmoo plot:

Oh give Josh a break. From Jody's last blog entry:
"March is heavily populated with orders. We are shipping a lot even though we are moving slowly through the days."

How could Josh possibly have foreseen that?

So, just like KnC?

Who needs opinions when you can have math?

Power figures at the wall will be higher than whats stated for the chip but lets assume the stated power figures apply at the wall with an electricity price of $0.25/KWH.
Assume BTC exchange rate of $150

Once difficulty reaches 10B,  per month each chip:

in turbo mode, 40W 40GH, it will mine $9.17 and cost $7.2  in electricity -> $1.97 profit
in normal mode, 15W 25GH it will mine $5.73 and cost $2.7 in electricity  -> $3.03 profit

Once difficulty reaches 20B in turbo mode the chip will operationally run at a loss, while in normal mode it will still be profitable.


Depending on BTC exchange rate and your electricity cost (and PSU/PCB efficiency), the point where one mode makes more sense than the other changes, but there will always be a difficulty level were turbo mode is less profitable than normal mode unless you have free electricity.

Also note that if you need to actively cool your house/datacenter, effective electricity cost could be 2-3x higher and the point where normal mode makes more financial sense could be achieved at a difficulty of only a few billion, a difficulty level we are likely to see early 2014.

In that case: you are wrong .
What you probably meant to say is something like "If you can't afford to keep the chips running at turbo mode its going to take a VERY long time to break even on your investment". That would be true, at least with todays hardware prices.

That chart is misleading, the axis dont line up. Current network speed is ~2.5PH, which corresponds to a difficulty of 350M. To get to 450M the hashrate will have to increase by ~700TH on average over the period. If we assume linear deployement of that new hashrate, that means ~1.5 TH would need to be added to get to 450M. We may well exceed that, but its certainly not impossible we will stay below that.

Well, you seem to have deleted your post, so maybe you figured that out yourself

Thats completely uncertain.  As donch tried to tell you, we have no idea how many preorders HF has (or bitmine, or cointerra for that matter). What we do know is that at least hashfast will have the manufacturing capacity to crank out miners far faster than KnC. Not that 350 miners per day is shabby, but Ciara (odm hashfast contracted) could potentially do an order of magnitude more without breaking a sweat.

Moreover, you seem to think that because of the hashrate increase, sales will dry up. I disagree.  At the current price, sure, sales will dry up, but all these miners are still operationally profitable and will remain so for a long time. Prices will just drop and keep dropping, but all of those manufacturers will keep producing miners for many months at the very least, and they will sell them at whatever price the market offers until that price is below their cost. KnC might not be best placed in that regard with their monster size chip, but most of the others are still very far from marginal profitability. More over presales may keep them busy much longer than you think. BFL is still shipping perorders almost a year old. Gives you an idea...

Unless Hashfast, Activeminer, Bitmine, Cointerra, BFL, Bitfury and to a lesser degree asicminer, btcgarden, black arrow, avalon and whoever else Im forgetting, unless almost all of them drop the ball, what we've seen in the past few weeks is going to pale in comparison to what we will see over the next few months.


PS: past few weeks werent exactly record breaking:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png

Sure, in absolute terms, as in TH added, every record was broken, but every difficulty change from now to February is likely to break that record. In relative terms, this is pretty mild compared to 2010-211

Not yet. But you will be wrong ~6-12 months from here when electrical efficiency will become pretty much all that matters. Bitmine certainly didnt waste that effort, once the network reaches dozens of PH, they will still have a chip thats worth buying, assuming they can hit those numbers.

Phoenix1969 thought eligius would pay him 105% PPS overall, something only Pirate ever did to launder his ponzi.
What eligius apparently does is pay 5% extra on NMC. I guess Luke has tons of namecoins ?

Doesnt really matter, as long as you have sufficient surface area (heatsink) per chip and enough airflow over the heatsink. Cooling a single 40W chip isnt exactly difficult, but if you cram 12 of them on a small PCB, you will face the same problems as everyone else.


A single bitfury chip consumes only ~2W


The avalon approach should work just fine, large shared heatsinks with case fans providing the airflow. ALternatively the BFL approach could work just as well, grouping the chip closely on the PCB and putting a traditional HSF on that.

There is no way you can cool a (tiny)  40W chip passively without an expensive monster cooler. You will need a fan. Typically anything over 10W needs a fan of some sort.

THats pretty extreme IMO. Die size is 4x4 mm.  Using a 200mm wafer that would yield ~1600 chip candidates per wafer.
110nm wafers may be cheap, but I doubt a fully processed wafer goes for less than $1500 and that leaves you virtually no margin for dicing, testing, packaging or even less than perfect yields.

I think we should consider eliminating signatures all together. Or at least ban advertising in signatures.
THe problem isnt so much the signatures themselves, they can be blocked,  its people creating a shitload of accounts and posting countless meaningless 1 or 2 line messages to bump up their activity level only to sell their signature space. It really lowers signal/noise ratio.

They way I read that (through google translate), is that btcgarden nearly finished the 45nm design. So no tape out yet. Realistically, assuming they tape out this month, they wouldnt get that petahash online before February when they will be competing against at least 10 or 20 more PHs. Dont get me wrong, they might make a decent profit, but it wont be anything like AM gen 1. Nothing will ever be like that again.

I know Avalon has burnt a few bridges, but frankly, at ~2.2 BTC, thats a steal. Yes you will need cheap electricity, but if you do, these are possibly the only available miners that stand a real good chance of turning a profit.

Also for the record, these mini's have 160 ASIC's right? 2.2 BTC x $150 / 160 < $2 per asic and you get the case, PCB, PSU; fans etc for free.
Now Im the one who always keeps harping on how cheap asics are to produce, but at that price, he must have made a loss IMO. Wonder if thats the first bitcoin asic vendor ever to be forced to sell at a loss.

Newsflash: difficulty just went up 41% so your revenue was just cut by that amount.
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png

Better get used to it.

Both will have very unhappy customers clamoring for refunds.

Sounds like you wont.

Even if bitcoin goes x1000 you will think you made the right decision while anyone with a brain would have understood you could have bought more bitcoins than you mined with the same amount of dollars spent on electricity, and they would go x1000 just as well.

Ill grant the exception for electrical heating that lightfoot pointed out, but anyone heating electrically probably didnt do the math on that either.

And Im sure 100 times people have called you buffoon, but you still dont understand it? If you are "mining in the red" it means you are paying more for your bitcoins in electricity than they cost when buying on an exchange or localbitcoins or wherever. There is absolutely zero reason to do that.