He's saying that we all know ASICs exist already, it's been discussed hundreds of times on the forums, but that it doesn't mean anything to us. Until product meets consumer, it's all just a "let's hope for the best" scenario.

As creativex said, yes, they will probably be able to put out an ASIC, but who puts out what, when, with what specs, we don't know, as everything is in flux. And that is a (the?) critical component of this whole deal.

$1k USD profit off 5 BFL single ASICs, best ROI yet I believe 

I didn't want to step into this thread too much, because I mostly wanted to hear ideas from other people, but I have to say something...

The notion that because "that durned Obama" is in office, capital gains tax rate will go up to 40% is ridiculous. It hasn't been 40% in the past 50+ years (don't know exactly when it has ever been that high). It is currently 15%, a historic all-time low. The inertia working against a 25% increase is immense. Obama himself isn't even talking about 40%, last I heard he was down to 20%, because he didn't gain traction on ANY increase in his first term. Maybe in the future it will go go up as the US faces more and more fiscal failure, but it's certainly going to be one of the later things to worry about.

That said, in my opinion by the time BTC reaches $50/coin, in order to get there it would require much broader adoption in actual usage, perhaps necessitating less withdrawal to fiat.

So both sides still have a point. Carry on.

Actually it wouldn't work at all if they were paid in Bitcoins. They need FIAT to dump onto the exchanges in order to artificially bump up the market price for the eventual dump.

My way is safer, cheaper, fears no competition, and less time-intensive than Cuniculas method, and far more reasonable from a scammers perspective, so I think in terms of the paranoia awards, the clear winner.

Since you guys brought it up, try this one on for size:

-Acquire VC funding to produce ASICs, sell "pre-orders" which are really zero-interest loans. Use VC money to begin production of ASICs, use loan money to begin artificially inflating bitcoin price, thereby increasing fervor for bitcoins and increasing pre-sales, which you can use to puff up bitcoin price more, rinse-repeat, stocking up on coins.
-Create "delays" and "improvements" to line extending time until shipment allowing more pre-orders to pile up and more coin collection / market manipulation, allow market to stabilize at new artificial price.
-At final breaking point, when competitors have product ready, and customers begin to balk and ask for refunds in sizable numbers, begin controlled (limited) shipment of product.
-When product reaches first wave of consumers, collect flood of new orders from people finally reassured that ASICs are real.
-Continue limited shipment until new orders begin to slow pace, ramp up "production" (read: shipping) to fill most orders in short span of time.
-Ship most/all orders (to deny returns), unload stockpile of bitcoin at artificially inflated price, crashing bitcoins price (after taking all the top level bids).

Close up shop, move to Aruba, live nice life.

Nothing illegal done, tons of cash made off pre-orders, tons of bitcoins turned into tons of fiat, miners left with worthless hardware they can't return.

How's THAT for a plan? Easier than supposedly running some 51% scheme, and fits nicely with current events (price rose *sharply* right after July '12).

Was Dec 4th a deadline for something?

Yeah I haven't kept up much with Tycho's development admittedly, because last I heard the specs he released were 80GH/sec for $2800, which is not a comparable cost with the "Big 3" (is what I'll call em now). He certainly could pull out a surprise win though, he has the time (his first announcement said ~3.23.13), and I could be wrong but in my head he's mad bitcoin-rich.  Artforz is a blast from the past, I remember that people thought he had FPGA/ASICs running back in '10.

I certainly concede that there's a lot of unknowns, shoddy production quality devices, dark horse miners, one or all of the Big 3 double-dipping (selling and mining simultaneously), price bottoming out (the least predictable in my mind), exchanges getting seized, etc.  It will be potentially the last really big exciting time left to bitcoin, and I'm looking forward to it, whichever way it leans

It's not screwy at all, it's simply how it is. A=B, B=C, A=C. You are free to look at it solely as $/GH, but equivalence does not end there. I perhaps should have said block instead of coin, and then it would have been instantly clear, but it's obvious enough that I felt laziness was fine.

You mine a block, you get half the coins, the value of individual coinage is still the same, but the value of the block is now half; you can look at this as people getting the original number of coins at half the price. Equivalence for the sake of comparison. It's not backwards, it's the most sensible way to compare today to yesterday, in this context, as evidenced by being able to simply look at a chart on bitcoincharts and draw info from it to reach a conclusion. The price of coins today is fully analogous to the time when BTC was $6.25 and the network of the time is more or less what that was priced at. We won't return there due to sunk-costs, but we won't stay where we are now, QED.

It only breaks down if you want to keep in scope the entirety of bitcoin, which we don't.

Say what? The forums were deluged with threads proclaiming how terrible it was that deepbit was going to break 51%, plans to DDoS deepbit (it did in fact get DDoS'd a number of times but I'm not sure if that was related), pleas to change miners off deepbit, and by and large it actually worked. In fact now deepbit has fallen to being one of the smaller Tier1 pools, perhaps a victim of its' own success.

That aside, it's complete apples to oranges comparison.
1) Most GPU miners are not members of these forums, at the time there were guides floating all about the internet about how to turn your GPU into a magical money making machine, and most of the guides pointed to deepbit. I would wager that as a conservative guess, 75+% of ASIC buyers are registered here, or the BFL forums. Warning flags would be heeded in much more real-time.

2) Deepbit taking over the network had little adverse effect for people mining on deepbit, they were paying their miners (perhaps better than anywhere else), and people were happy for it. BFL has taken money from customers, and given nothing back, the complete opposite, meaning people are not so happy with status quo.

3) Deepbit was an open, centralized, public end-users choice, while a sneak 51%+ takeover by BFL would again be the opposite, etc.


That said, it is interesting how much of bitcoins fate has relied on the good will of fellow man to not be crushed under heel. Something heartwarming there to help balance out the constant scamming and whatnot.

The thing breaking in 13 months doesn't factor in at all to my statement, so it can't really be an assumption, let alone a big one. The warranty info is pretty easy to find, though admittedly not from the main page (https://forums.butterflylabs.com/showwiki.php?title=FAQ:What+is+the+warranty+period+on+your+devices).

I already factored all asic companies products into the difficulty, so again not a big assumption (not any bigger than anything else in the world that is unknown). The pre-orders for Q1 2013 are on the order of 150TH + 57.6TH + 19.8TH = ~225TH, for BFL, bAsic and Avalon respectively. Even assuming 225TH / quarter is reasonable that's only 900TH by end of 2013, far less than my estimation.

Price of BTC makes no human sense, so there is no real way to say what the price should be. I've heard people claim "floors" and "ceilings" to the price based on X Y and Z for literally years now, and they've almost always been wrong, especially the farther one looked in time. The one big assumption is that price will remain close to what it is now, but that is literally the best you can do, so there's no getting around that.

That said I'm not suggesting anyone do anything, but I've always been a middle of the road guy (things are not as great or as horrible as most people claim), and I've been right more often than I've been wrong.

Reward halving does not affect the price, excepting a slight upward nudge overtime, but it will affect mining difficulty. The value of a generated coin is now ~$6.25 when it was $12.50 before. The last time it was @ $6 USD was Jul '12 (was actually closer to $7 then), and the hashrate was roughly 12THash/sec (half of now). You won't necessarily see a drop to half, but you will definitely see a drop.

Reminder: 50x current network = 1.25 Petahash = ~833 BFL Minirigs = $24,990,000 = ~1.75x as much USD invested in GPUs in the past 2 years. If you think that will happen overnight, well...

As I said, if it happens in 59 weeks (seems reasonable), you'll still be making $60/mo, and whatever else you made during the run up to 50x.

I would suggest heavily against buying anywhere near the 50x mark of course, but given the size of the pre-orders out there, the pre-order crowd should do pretty well, and potentially even the early bird post-orders.

Because in the past 5 or 6 months there have been about a billion (+- a billion) topics on just about every aspect of ASICs. Very little truly new thought is coming out on the matter, and most of the rest is just nonsense or people trolling.


The current network size is 25THash, and likely falling as GPUs turn off. If BFL replaced every THash lost, which will happen slooooowly, they could keep the network about even and control 50% in perhaps 5 or 6 months (assuming 50% is made up of marginally profitable GPUs). Or they could just bomb the network and drop 20THash on top of what exists now, but that would be incredibly obvious.

It's fairly impossible to keep secret ASIC coup d'etat for an extended period of time, not to mention that their customers who are already a mix of hopeful optimists, and steely eyed frothing demanding cynics who I doubt would stand for multiple more months of empty apologies about why things continue to not be released. Unless you meant they would slowly begin mining in-time with their shipping of product, in which case this has nothing to do with the OPs question.

In answer to OP, no it would not be more profitable for them not to sell ANY, as mentioned earlier, they would bomb bitcoins value and/or open themselves up to much litigation.

Have him send you his first born as collateral. No VAT there AFAIK.

It will almost certainly go up 50x, and probably even more. How long it will take to do that is anyones guess though. I mentioned in a previous thread that BFLs own estimates are that they can produce and deliver about 21THash/sec of machines (though admittedly this might go up as they become more efficient) per week. The other vendors considerably less. So assuming that BFL is the sole deliverer of ASICs (averaging the addition of the slower vendors against the slower rate of delivery vs BFL and possibility for not enough orders to max everyone out constantly), that still leaves ~59 weeks from start to finish to reach 50x difficulty increase.  At which point machines are still profitable, just less so, a BFL Single SC would net about $60/month. Not that bad really, unless you went into some crazy debt to buy them, which would indeed be bad.

Just to play devil's advocate.

They posted pictures of finished product? Damn, go away for one weekend and the world changes. Where abouts did they post them?

Before I reply I want to say Thank You for writing this long guide and making an Image as well for users. I'm sure it will come in handy for many users now and in the future as they struggle to configure their low power, control devices. Good man.

The flip (complaining) side is how this always seems to happen to me. I recently picked up a Pi for fun and profits (yesterday really), and quickly realized I had forgotten everything about linux. So I set about the arduous task of re-learning linux commands, and how to update and expand the install to get all the programs and whatnot I want on it, and I started nice and early in the morning. And you go and release this in the afternoon, centralizing all the things I would have needed to pick up

End rant, thanks again

How do you connect to just one node (and know it's fast)? I have to download the entire blockchain, and its going to take days at the current rate.

What bank offers 5.5% interest rate for 1 year lockdown? I'm honestly curious, as I have money that needs investing.

BitBlitz, I was not suggesting anyone BUY in to asics at 1billion difficulty. The point was that even a small miner who already had one (hopefully someone bought it waaaaay earlier) could leave it hashing away even if other people jacked the difficulty up to 1 billion later on, which presumably would take quite a long time being a Three-Thousand percent increase in difficulty/hashpower and still make monies.

Would I recommend buying an ASIC of the current gen specs if difficulty were at 1 billion? Of course not.