I think people saying we are approaching a difficulty of 1 billion in the near future are a bit lost.

Since BFL is just a figment of everyone's imagination for now until they actually ship mass products, let's focus on Avalon these Avalon chips at the moment.

So let's look at some theoretical numbers for a moment...

For a difficulty of 1 billion that would mean the network hashrate would be at 7,158.39 TH/s.  That is confirmed, as it's a simple mathematical calculation.

Now if you assume that the network hashrate and difficulty would get even close to that, that means EVERYONE is mining with ASIC as anything else wouldn't make any sense.  Let's assume all these chips come from Avalon since they're the only ones that are ACTUALLY shipping and seem legit.

We know that these Avalon chips produce 282MH/s each. 

You would need in excess of 25 Million Avalon chips to create that kind of hashrate.  Although this is theoretically possible, I don't think it's plausible. 

Anyone else want to weigh in on this?

Might sound crazy... maybe BFL is ordering a bunch of Avalon chips. 

this is the Mining Speculation section after all... 

I'm no expert.  But I highly doubt that everyone that's ordering these chips will already have a production line with PCB in place.  This is also assuming that their hardware will be able to push the full 282Mh/s for each chip.  I agree that there will be a HUGE spike, but I think everyone is assuming everything will go right.

From my experience, things that can go wrong, will go wrong.

What would you spend 25k on? curious

I'm just curious as to why people are selling their FPGAs and why you don't hear much about them anymore.

Sure this ASIC trend is(maybe) getting there, but FPGAs are not completely useless...

Thank you so much for the information guys.  I'll do some more reading, great forum you all are very helpful and have a great attitude! Keep it up!

Thanks for that information...

Can it do anything other than mine currencies or would it be able to be modified to decrypt/encrypt anything using the SHA-256 hash?


@antekh - why is that? Simply because a company won't be manufacturing any ASIC chips for this or because of some other restriction?

I'm curious about these ASIC rigs and chips that are hitting the market.  If a company spends tens or hundreds of thousands building efficient rigs for bitcoin mining, and let's say bitcoin goes bust... are these chips essentially useless? It's my understanding that they can't be reprogrammed to use a different form of currency such litecoin for instance or for other computations.  So basically it's written into the chip and it's only used for this process?

If anyone can shine any light on this for me I'm extremely curious.