|
It seems that some people don't understand the development cycle at all.
The initial design of the hardware (chip or board) takes time and wages. this is a relatively small investment. Once this is done you can start development of the firmware.
The largest costs for an ASIC run isn't the run itself - it's getting the manufacturing in setup to make it. That's a huge front-loaded cost... followed by a relatively tiny price per unit.
That's just the chip. The board production is much much much cheaper. It does have a front loaded cost, but when you're talking about 10s of millions it's trivial.
Now if you're designing a such a product - it makes sense to make it modular in the sense that some small number of chips goes on each board and that board is designed to be linked together (either physically or by production of larger boards with more modules on them).
The reason we've got 27/54 as a number is because he's done exactly that, added a unit in the same enclosure or made a double board. I assume he's got harder numbers than BFL had because of the existing sha3 bASIC products that exist...
BFL on the other hand, going completely custom had very little hard numbers to base estimates on --- and given what happened with their fpga initial releases (instability, design/version changes, heat issues, etc). I'd expect them to take a best guess based on workbench schematic testing (or whatever) , and then lowball it... by a lot. If for no other reason then to prevent a customer service nightmare if they had to ship a product at 50% of the estimated spec. It also has the advantage of leaving them 'firmware' updates that could keep their prices up for a longer period of time as competition develops.
The fact remains, there are still ways to refine the machines themselves once they're released - if they're well designed. for example of any of them have the top of the chips as the highest points on the pcb then some other company (or the makers themselves) could design a custom enclosure/heatpipe/cooling system that could provide for better hash rates. Just like some people are replacing BFL's stock heatsink and fan with a 120 mm fan and massive piped CPU block (or water cooling).
But I imagine effeciency of the hardware hasn't been a primary concern for anyone at this point - this is a race to get a product out first, at a price people will pay.
~~~
That being said, I would expect faster firmware / enclosure refinements / changes in board design to be what happens after they've released and get initial orders shipped.
And of course, there's always potential competition from some as of yet unknown entity. What if AMD jumped into the market --- how would existing companies compete with deep pockets + production side being owned in house + 20 years GPU production experience + much more compact chips?
Only time will tell.
|
|
|
|
yes he is right, as far as I know - no current FPGA Bitcoin mining device is capable of mining scrypt alt-coins
Maybe that's the project - making a new board for your modules to plug into... that allow them to scrypt. --- Then you could at least offer that as an 'alt-grade' for close to cost. |
|
|
|
We're already at the expected price increase (from $5ish to $12ish) It could nearly double, yes, and that would mean GPUs are just as profitable then as today when the block reward drops (presuming difficulty doesn't change. That's a big if).
oh I hadn't thought so... pure speculation on my part of course, but I'm expecting to see ~25% increase in price within a week of the halving. For the simple fact that some people will shut down small mining operations and imho the bigger mining operations tend to sell less of their earned btc. |
|
|
|
If everyone else is mining at 1TH/s we're back to no profit for the average miner. You only make a profit if you are "lucky" enough to get an EARLY ASIC or you have access to free power.
Not true - I actually did the math on this (based on 10000 pre-orders) if every single one of those is a 1th/s sc rig, the network difficulty will increase by a factor of 40. in that cast - you're sc rig would make you just over 8 btc per day. at currect rates thats over $100. That's $3000. That's 10% a month. 120% per year. 10 month ROI. A stellar investment if you can afford it. ~ as for me, I've already invested in bfl singles, and have sc upgrades ordered for 1 of them (It's in the 2500 range) so I'm hoping to catch a bit of that wave, but if I don't no big deal. I'm also planning on getting a couple of pre-orders in for bASICs - since (while the prev hardware was lackluster) I love the level of customer service given... You should all do what any smart investor would do - act to mitigate your risk own risk. There's risk in pre-ordering a product that doesn't currently exist --- there's risk in not - because you'll have dead time where you aren't earning. Spread it around get orders in with competitors. |
|
|
|
|
Sounds like you need some custom web design, age verification shouldn't be a bit deal... - I'm available to do this - including setting up a vending system for you (btc or any other payment you'd prefer) - for a very modest 1% of sales made through the site.
|
|
|
|
Its not just BFL. Other comapines are developing ASICs and these will hit the network sooner or later. Combined with the reward drop, it will put GPU miners out of business and make FPGA unprofitable in some areas (depending on electricity costs). The BTC price is not dependent on difficulty, so you may not see any real impact in pice!
That's another good point - with a single source (BFL?) shipping - there was huge profit potential to ride the wave before difficulty adjusted enough to get the real numbers. Suppose you got an sc single 40gh - the first week they ship... difficulty doubles - and you'll pulling 7 or 8 btc a day. average time to find a block solo... less than 5 days. So your index on difficulty (if they ship 1000 orders a week) factor of : 2, 3, 4, 5 --- in 2 months we're at 10x increase. During that time you'd earn 8 grand before the network hash rate grew to the point where it normalized. I suspect that when everything is said and done... a jalapeno will earn about what a decent gpu does now - while a single will make about what I single makes now etc... But then I'm planning for a 40x increase in difficulty. It's still profitable if you can throw enough of a large enough investment at it. That of course assumes that asics don't kill btc entirely - by forcing gpus out and killing the hobbyists interest in spending btc. |
|
|
|
Yes, the graphs and the hash rates aren't extremely accurate but the shares are 100% accurate as that number is directly pulled from MySQL. The graphs are simple Java scripts that calculate your hash rate based on the time stamp and how often you send shares, so it's not actually reading your hash rate in real time, thus making it inaccurate from what I understand. I'll see what I can do on fixing this, however, for now it won't be something that is immediately resolved since I believe an update of the entire website will be coming soon enough.
Oh crud - total shares - My mistake. I'll be editing my posts to reflect it. As for the hash - I went ahead and sold my free hashes to someone so I won't be able to mine on your pool for the next 13 days... unless more hardware arrives --- if ASICs don't start shipping in october, I may just hit you up to 90% of pool capacity then. Is that number accurate... if not how much getwork could you actually handle? |
|
|
|
|
actually that sounds normal pool guesses hash rate based on submitted shares or getwork rate... and both can vary.
So what I'm not understanding is... when I'm at ~3500 mh/s and another user is at ~3500 mh/s and our shares are in the 8000 to 9000 range... meanwhile your shares are close to 2500 and you're only hashing at 60mh/s
My first reaction was, that you've somehow inflated your shares.
|
|
|
|
If the exchange rate is still $12.32/BTC on halving day I'll drop to $0.43/day. Presuming you are like most other GPU miners and pay a normal electric rate (e.g., $0.15 per kWh) then your electricity for the rig will likely exceed $0.43/day. But let's say it is break even. You'ld rather pay $12 to your electric company for a month of mining which yields 1 BTC versus sending $12 to an exchange and getting your 1.0 BTC that way? And if your electric bill comes in higher than the $0.43 per day, then you are paying above market rate to buy -- and you are going through the effort of managing a rig for free. If it is a hobby, then call it a hobby. But anyone mining GPUs for the purpose of profit should know right now ... in about 60 days the party is over. [Edit: Of course, there are other uses for your GPUs, but mining BTC for-profit is specifically what I'm addressing.] No - everyone was making statements like this when btc was 5.50 with lower difficulty. halving the block reward is effectively the same as halving the price of btc. People are were still mining at 5.50, and 2.50, and 0.02. Minor point, pools may need to charge higher fees. Major point, tech change - ASICs coming out, what if you're lovely BFL SC single is only netting you $120 per month (40x difficulty) - extreme example, but thats the only uncertainty in btc right now, the potential for asic mining to kill the hobbyist aspect by making gpu mining pointless, thus killing demand for btc in general. Personally, I think we'll see a 10 or 20 times increase in difficulty once asics saturate the market... which probably won't make gpu mining die entirely, if it comes with the price increase expected to go along with the halving, you might see people running gpu farms for another year or so. |
|
|
|
|
example at this time:
overall network statistics reports: 4080 mh/s for the pool. You're listed on top hashers this round ~90 mh/s.
Last round lists your total shares at aprox 2600 thats in the 1000 mh/s range.
-----
If it turns out buggy I'll retract my prev post. What's your actual hash rate?
|
|
|
|
|
Agreed. 2nd factor type shouldn't matter much, only how its implemented.
|
|
|
|
|
Rad - I'll keep watching the thread for updates.
|
|
|
|
|
~3500mh/s online for the next 14 days. This puts average time to find a block at ~40 days.
If we could get another 6.5 gh/s --- we could bring our average time to find a block down to 14 days. C'mon folks, lets get it done.
Noticed a 2.5gh/s discrepency between the pool owners hashing numbers and reported statistics. I'm out.
This has been resolved to my satisfaction, turns out some software needs updating, and I wasn't reading as carefully as I thought.
|
|
|
|
|
~3500mh/s online for the next 14 days. This puts average time to find a block at ~40 days.
If we could get another 6.5 gh/s --- we could bring our average time to find a block down to 14 days. C'mon folks, lets get it done.
Noticed a 2.5gh/s discrepency between the pool owners hashing numbers and reported statistics. I'm out.
This has been resolved to my satisfaction, turns out some software needs updating, and I wasn't reading as carefully as I thought.
|
|
|
|
My only question about BFLabs is:
Why would they sell a ACSI equipment for $30,000 that can mine 1,000G/Hash (roughly 4,500 dollars in BTC per day) and you can recover the investment in about 8 days, when they can easily build it for themselves and mine the shit out of it and become millionaires by running 10-20 of those themselves?
If I had the capacity to build such miners, would I build them and sell them at such a low price or would I just mine with them and make my business the mining business?
Just a thought...
You might have a point there - If they're being dishonest: they should put together a sc rig and mine with it while assembling other asic products - then the moment another company releases or starts selling asic products ---- they ship 100% of orders. Completely tank the competition and also (probably) earn out the investment of setting up the asics in the first place. |
|
|
|
well I don't think there's enough supply to be picky, I'm seeing what's out there; unless you have many homes. I like small town but need fast internet
I think there's a supply in NorCal. Details send via pm. |
|
|
|
This would take approximately 4 months to pay off at current BTC rate
Yeh, it's paid itself off a couple times for me. I really want to play around with litecoin mining but I can't seem to get all 4 running under xubuntu 12.04 with cgminer and bfgminer. I had the same issue on my 4 card rigs. Finally bit the bullet and put win7 on a partition and there they work. You're linux isn't right dude =P |
|
|
|
|
Well you can't blame me for trying =P
Besides - BFL is shipping at between 3 and 5 weeks now (depending on who you talk to). So the incentive really isn't there to pay above retail price (for me anyway).
|
|
|
|
In theory, sure, though at that point I might as well just stick to USD. My problem isn't with holding BTC it's making sure I decrease my risk to strange market manipulations in the middle of the night. If I had an automated BTC system I'd want it to value BTC at the weekly average, with a manual approval required to update every week. In theory that's what I'd like to use but only experience will teach me what I need.
Other than not trusting any of the exchanges, I also value BTC (for now) differently for shipping costs and product. For product I'm valuing BTC at around 10USD but for shipping I'm cutting this in half. For 30 dollars worth of product that costs 20 dollars worth of shipping I'd charge 7BTC.
I'm looking to collect BTC in the hopes that later I can find people who will take it for labor trades. Graphics design, web design, sales calling, voice acting, and other remote services are all likely BTC paid candidates. We also use Tradebank in order to gain labor and service trade with local businesses and we get more than a little trade from it. I'm trying to view it like that.
Anyone else on here use Tradebank?
I sort of understand - sort of, no I guess I really don't understand. What makes you think you're going to be able to sell product when you're undervalueing btc by 12% ? Its like charing me extra to pay with btc. In this scenario I'd rather pay your retail price in fiat and hold onto my btc. That being said - if your goal is to collect btc in the hopes of using it to pay for services later --- then you shouldn't care about market manipulations - because even if the price is manipulated by say +50% when someone buys from you... on a long enough time-line it will increase in value to the point where you can trade/sell it above the manipulated price. My advice would be this - Set a limit on dollar amount of purchases in BTC. Make it small enough that you'd feel comfortable with the risk (read: shorter time to recovery value if there's market manipulation)... and automate the purchase process. That way sales can trickle in --- and you don't have to mess with each one =P |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
