I'll throw in my $0.02 about these suckers. Short version - I've got 20 on order.
I had to turn off my GPU farm because electricity vs. difficulty vs. price of BTC means I'm losing every month. While I'd love to believe an investment in BTC is an investment in some utopian future, I'm realistic in that I represent a group who has combined put $12k into BTC at this point, split between hardware and trading. And that's $12k, fiat currency, meaning that at the end of the day that is our "break even" point.
We can easily pull our $4k out of trading, that's no problem, so ROI is ensuring we're not holding BTC when the bomb drops. But hardware is a different story -
- If you weren't in early in the game, AsicMiner blades and Avalons are either out of reach or too expensive to validate the ROI for aftermarket
- If you're ordered from BFL, you're still waiting (like me!) or have a jala or early single
- KNC is still vapor until my shares are hashing
So what's left for a miner? FPGA or GPU. Both are quite frankly overpriced after the AM usb miners had their price drop. As of right now I'm in the process of selling a handful of 7970's and 7950's, if I sell each one for the price I'm asking it'll cover all 20 USB sticks (and gamers are always out there to buy 'em).
The difference, my farm was 3.6GH/s and at my electricity rate absurd to run. My new farm will be ~7.8GH/s, 37.8 when BFL ships, with nearly zero power draw as I can run all my AM sticks off of the home server that runs all the time anyway, so my $200 => $350 => $425 > $578 electricity bill will go back to $200 (so net +~$300 for me each month, minus obvious difficulty increase effects), no longer have the loud hum of all the gpus, no more heat, and at net zero cost above my original hardware cost because I invested in GPUs I knew I could resell. And for the same initial hardware investment (strictly talking GPUs) I have 2x the farm power that'll be live before two more difficulty changes push through.
Not a great investment if you're considering the ROI of *one* stick, but considering I'm effectively performing a hardware / hashrate upgrade at zero additional cost while saving on electricity, it only makes sense.
THAT SAID...If BFL tomorrow said that they're shipping 5GH/s Jala's for $274, I'd feel like the suckers who purchased the 2BTC usb sticks (greedy freaking bastards charging that much at first) only to see people who will get theirs from BTC Guild first and cheaper. But that's the game. This is the ideal, if not the perfect opportunity to recoup investment, get mining again, and have some fun new tech.
That's my story. Time for video games.
Thank you for the read.
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