Yeah sorry man, but hardware is A) large, B) heavy and C) worthwhile for other uses.

You are very unlikely to find a 1kW machine for < $500, no matter how many GPU miners jump ship. For example, the 5830, the cheapest, most energy wasting, strongest (in its class) GPU on the market pulls like 300MH/sec? Roughly 7 to 2GH/1kW, even at $50 per card, that's already $350, toss in a 2x $25 CPU, 2x $25 Mobo, and $100+ PSU + cables/extenders/splitters/etc. (I dont remember the wattage on the cards but 180/card sounds reasonable, you can do a crap PSU I guess, and potentially blow up the system or burn down your place), and before shipping you're at $500 bucks, for potentially the most discounting you can do on a system outside of slitting your own neck.

BUT, hope springs eternal, I don't want to say that NO ONE will ever discount their system beyond that.

I don't mean to sound insensitive but it sounds like you're approaching a very technical problem from a very non-technical point of view. So let's try a different approach.

To date there have been 0 confirmed CPU botnets, 0 confirmed GPU botnets, and 0 confirmed FPGA botnets on bitcoin. Why would this change with ASICs? If as you say, ASICs become cheap like water, difficulty becomes high like a mountain. A 60GH/sec ASIC becomes the equivalent of a 300MH/sec GPU today, and there is as little incentive to seek out ASICs as there is for the other methods.

How many people are rich? By definition, very few (limited resource world). Thus very few people would "set it and forget it" after buying hardware that has no function except mining. Most people with money would as MrTeal said rather buy Bitcoins directly. It's faster, easier, can just throw it somewhere and forget about it. This idea of an ASIC botnet is really just a bugaboo.

Good thing for whom is the question.

It's good for people with an academic interest in bitcoin. It's incredibly bad for people who plunked thousands of dollars down 5-6 months ago.
On a grander scale, it is neutral and doesn't matter either way.

ebay = 13% off the top guaranteed as well (to ebay and paypal). People alwaaaays neglect to mention that.

Half is a pretty good deal though imho.

6pin CPU power is very common, not sure what you guys are talking about, that you've never seen it before.

That motherboard is not exactly high quality, but it's not the worst thing in the world either. I'd say it's a coin flip there. However Core 2 Duo CPU is still quite expensive though, so probably negates the savings from buying the board, unless you have an extra lying around (which doesn't sound likely if you don't recognize 6pin CPU power ports).

I believe I got an AMD Sempron for like $25, and MB for $45,  (both new) which would be cheaper than most C2D CPUs.

Well, that's fine. I don't know how to be more succinct and to the point than I usually am, but that's my limitation. However, people directly quoted me, and just simply ignored the relevant portion of text, then began grandly theorizing the opposite of stated fact. To me that is an inability (or unwillingness) to read. See quotes below for examples.


Why does it matter who came up with it? BFL implemented it. The rest of this text is completely redundant with what I said already. Example #1 here.


So rather than take the direct word of a BFL employee speaking about how many orders and chips there are, you look at a thread of unconfirmed self-reporting of people talking about what they're buying, then do some internal voodoo calculations with no basis, and use that instead?

You guys are right, there is a lot of crap to wade through.

Takes like 20 minutes to take some good pictures, and provides people with days/weeks of things to talk about, drool over, and be satisfied with. I suppose in a perfect world everyone would both have the hype and high energy to throw thousands of dollars into an unknown pit, but also the calm and patience to not need any kind of reassurance that they didn't get ripped to kingdom come, but let's just deal with things as they are yes?

Well you cut out the most important part of that sentence, but ok.

As to being halfway there, that is anyone's guess. We've gotten figures of 20,000 7.5GH/Sec ASICs from BFL (less actually since jalapenos are 4.5GH/sec), 800 54GH/sec Pre-orders for Tom, and 300 66 GH/sec units  for Avalon (in Jan), which is still  < 250TH (approx 200TH). This includes all demand built up over the last 6 months, with the excitement of hashing 50Coin blocks at 3.3M difficulty (again less when this started).

To think that you will see the same demand at 33M difficulty, 25coin blocks and whatever price bitcoin will be as the first 250TH ($5Million) sell sell sell to repay their investments is... somewhat unreasonable.

Will we hit 500TH by the end of 2013? It's certainly possible. Will we hit it significantly before the end of 2013? It's not very likely.
Why? Well just think of the demand vs. difficulty curves we have seen thusfar. Then extrapolate to the upcoming situation, @25TH we have 3.3M difficulty and a $1299 60GH/sec machine takes 1 week to pay off, @ 250TH we have 33M difficulty, it takes 18weeks (4.5 months) to pay off. @ 350TH we have 46M difficulty, 25weeks (6.25 months) to pay off, @450TH 59M diff 32 weeks (8 months). As difficulty increases, ROI decreases and people become increasing skittish, slowing down demand, and that is only difficulty increasing, no other factors.

It seems difficult to comprehend that people are this unable to read. 20k chips was MORE than enough for ALL pre-orders placed from June to end of October.

from 10/30/2012

You're free to think that, but it directly contradicts a statement from Inaba/BFL_Josh from only a couple of weeks ago.

Shush Frog. Hey mrb can I take you up on your quoted bet right now?!

It certainly makes no sense to have "no batches" and a "1/3rd" plan.

However it seems as though their communication just sucks, not necessarily that nothing makes sense.

They ordered 20k ASICs, they said that it was enough for "all the pre-orders, and more". Meaning 20k ASICs > orders for ASICs. So, 20k is not a useful number.

They plan to ship 1/3rd, they said that they will ship in some bizarre lump batch, I don't remember the rationale behind. This will be for as many as they can produce in Z amount of time (all very vague and unclear).

After which they will build X units per day, and ship Y units per day (X could = Y, one would hope) until they have exhausted all remaining pre-orders, and regular orders. This could happen with the 20k chips, or they might be ordering more if demand surpasses stock.

It all makes sense, though as one commenter suggested, it hints and under-sized production facilities. C'est la vie.


Yes and no. If you take into account 20k ASICs are greater than the number of pre-orders you can only use that as an upper bound. With that said, you are also assuming no money has been put towards development, hardware, shipping, salary, facilities, etc, and instead envision it going into a bank account. Unlikely.

Yes and no. Process size matters, and who can deliver what volume in what time frame matters. Pricing also matters, speed matters, efficiency matters, it all matters.

Are the competitors doomed simply because they are not on 65nm? Not really. Will they need to work to remain competitive? Of course. If there are 2 products, with equal prices, and equal hashing power, I will choose the one with the lower fixed cost to run, no question. It's foolish to think that no one has any plans for changes in design and pricing however and everything will remain stagnant.

500TH in a year is certainly possible, however do keep in mind the following:

500TH = 500,000 GH. Prices are currently on the order of $20 / GH, so that's roughly $10,000,000 of ASICs at current pricing/performance. At current pricing after block halving the total amount of coins generated per month will be worth roughly $1.25Million. That means at 500TH, it will be 8+ months selling 100% of the bitcoins generated, to break even (if somehow the price could hold that up). So this is for a product with as you said a potential 10month ROI (or more), and no other possible use except bitcoin. Not as sexy as the "GPUs that pay themselves off". I certainly expect to see 500TH, but I imagine it will be a slower run-up than many people think, As shown by Organofcorti, bitcoin miners are typically fairly risk-averse, despite appearances to the contrary.

0 day of what? Some flaw in the ASIC miners code? Or a flaw in the host machine? These are not typically the leads to botnets anyway.

Here's the thing, what are botnets used for? They are used for DDoS, and spam-mail traditionally. Why? Because every computer that is on the internet, has access to the internet. Traditionally low-hanging fruit is picked from this bunch, such that easy vulnerabilities that have remained unpatched for long periods of time allow for continuous usage of the targets.

So let's look at this: Every computer on the net has an internet connection, only a fraction are part of botnets.

Every computer has a GPU, only a fraction are "botnettable", only some portion of these GPUs could be used for effective mining, and it's a high-risk venture that would likely lose the machine, and thus is less profitable than other botnet ventures. This is likely why we've not seen any evidence of a GPU mining botnet on bitcoin.

An extremely tiny fraction of computers will have ASICs connected to them, of these some fraction will be botnettable at some point, and most use of this botnet will result in the botnet being broken up in very short time-scale. The difficulty will both be in even locating computers with ASICs, let alone exploiting them, let alone exploiting them effectively.

Is it impossible? I will go ahead and say it is not, just so I don't have egg on my face at some point. But will it happen? I will again say no, it is too difficult, with too little reward.

The only scenario I could really foresee would be some disruption hacktivist, who manages some malicious code that can collect the IPs of the vastly reduced mining world, and utilizing some "zero-day attack" disrupts the block chain, either taking control, forking it, or generally fouling it up. This would likely be as easily or more easily accomplished by finding the IPs and DDoS'ing the heaviest ASIC miners connections though.

Always ask yourself for the motivation behind actions, they are very important.

That made me "lol".

I was going to be dismissive of this, as usually these guides just tell you everything you already know dressed up with pretty pictures and dire warnings, but I learned something even in the preview video (FBAR? bah), so this might be a valuable find after all. Thank you for sharing this.

Makes me kind of sad how complicated it is to be a law abiding citizen.

This might help

This argument is mildly pointless.

An ASIC botnet? Bitcoin ASICs can be used for nothing but mining, subverting a machine used for one purpose will be quickly detected and rectified. It's not like a computer which can and will be left on for long periods of time, while idle.

You have your miner up and running, you expect it to give X performance. As soon as it doesn't do that, you check why. This would be a terrible "botnet".

Potentially, perhaps that is why no such deal was made? But I see your point, and retract that portion. I still foresee that it was a vapor-offer, as to why it was never finalized.

Ahh, danke for the link. The wiki has evolved since I last set foot in bitcoin world. Well it sounds like some accountant has taken a look at these issues, and thrown his hands up a little bit as well, at least on the matter of mining.
But it looks like the "safe" route is fairly cut and dry as you mention, and if you wish to cap gains by trading, you need to make a clear books trail.

Appreciate the feedback, as you increase your investment, so needs you increase your "above the boardness" it seems.