The biggest risk isn't really in not making money back on an ASIC product (unless you paid a retarded price for it, like a blockerupter USB), it is scams. There are so few companies with anything to show for all the money they've raked in, and then you have secondary markets being built around the promises of other companies to deliver something...

It's just bad juju. This is the time where you've missed the boat on being a KA-CHING first batch Avalon winner, or whatever, and the risk is still just about as high now as it was then of getting a big box of air, or a product so late that it will be a nail biter. I'd say that the sensible option is to wait until production and shipping are at a sensible level (you can order and receive a product, how crazy!) and you can actually consider ROI at some reasonable level.

But my personal calculations say that most ASIC products today will deliver bang for their buck given trends, and assuming they don't turn into smoke.

I feel kind of bad reading this thread, mostly because this is a seemingly well-intentioned, rational human being, who most likely would be just the right type to reach out to folks across the aisle; and yet they are destined for a miserable experience from everything I've read.

Bought BTC at a bad point, which was used to pay, with a fairly large markup, for a product that is already overpriced, right on the cusp of a time that will literally obliterate any feasibility of use for that product.

So, while I can say I'm pretty certain of how your investment will go, I do hope that it won't sour you on the bitcoin experience overall.  Enjoy the hobbyist side of patching all this stuff together at least.

Much nicer looking than last I looked.

Confused about KNCMiner numbers though. It offers less GH/$ than MetaBank, and delivers later, but for some reason the ROI is like 5x higher? Maybe it's explained in the 8 pages that I don't want to read, if so, I apologize.

I don't think anyone questions that price influences difficulty. That is almost a given. The question is whether difficulty influences price, which doesn't make sense to some (like me) but does to others.



This is what I believe is the main misunderstanding of bitcoin. Certainly when people hear that their computer can become a magical money printing machine, it sparks some serious interest in bitcoin, but mining is not the driving factor behind the adoption, use and general success of bitcoin. In some ways it's a detrimental factor (it introduces continuous inflation which investors must see as an acceptable loss).

Most of the value of bitcoin comes not from miners (typically they are only a sapping force eating away at its value) but from speculators. Is bitcoin worth the 1Billion USD that it is currently valued at? Probably not. But it is buoyed by those who want to get in at the ground floor, for something they believe will one day grow to something far more valuable than its current worth. Some are emboldened by increased adoption amongst merchants, or news reports of the success of bitcoin in some area, others hope to cash in on the soon to be demise by selling into hype, etc.

But mining by and large is its own separate entity, not completely divorced from bitcoin world, but certainly operating at an arms length.

I read it just fine, it simply failed to provide any worthwhile information. I gleaned through inference (which is a poor requirement when asking a question) the gist of what his question was about, and answered it. You gave him a calculator, which is all well and good, but is essentially redundant with my answer.


Quoted for posterity.

How many states did they register in? Also, I'm late, but, wtf @ OP.

Crazy to me that this thread keeps coming up.

If you think that somehow difficulty influences the price, then you must be buying bitcoins like crazy right now given that difficulty is nearly guaranteed to to explode by the end of the year.

From the wall? Depends on your OCs, but I'd say closer to 850W.

I ran a 2x7970 and 1x7950 system @ 800W, pulling 1.8GH/sec.

It says what method in the settings you select.

When someone develops scamcoin (literal not figurative) I may mine that just for entertainment value.

Your question makes no sense. There is no sure number except that where the miner generates less income than it costs to run. This number is high.

Difficulty determines what amount of coins a miner makes at that difficulty, which can go up or down from that point. You have not specified electric usage, electric cost, whether you're looking at some magical hypothetical world in which people are no longer buying new hardware, etc.

Difficulty today is 15.5Mil, what it will be in a week, or a month, or a year is anyone's guess.

If you have a 50GH/sec BFL Asic (this corresponds to the number they are touting, the only "50 GH/sec" Asic I currently know of that costs $2600) in-hand today, that you paid $2600 for, it will pay for itself in approximately 2 weeks and be all profit from there. The problem is that you don't have this device, and there is no chance that you will have it any time soon.


There are tons of variables, and you need to work the math out for yourself. as one persons assumptions will not match anothers. If you were to receive the miner at 50Mil diff and it increased 10% weekly, you'd see a very different number than if you were to receive it at 100Mil and it increased at 5% weekly.

Most ASICs will pay themselves back at least, or make some money, just far less than people had previously anticipated, assuming price doesn't re-crash to $10.

There is literally no way to even speculate on future pricing of BTC, with any kind of claim to accuracy. It could be $400, or $4000 or $400,000,000, or it could be $1. You can be bearish, or bullish, and you really can't back it up with anything beyond that.

You can certainly speculate on hashing power, based on current available data, pricing, orders-to-date, etc., within a reasonable set of bounds.

To create a spreadsheet predicting difficulty is entertainment, to predict price, madness.

Wasn't KNC originally planned to debut an FPGA product line, to demonstrate their ability to quickly produce a design, which was then scrapped? So they have absolutely no demonstrated production ability? And now they're just another faith-based pre-order money ASIC company?

Or am I incorrect?

It is a simple value. What you make today x Decline/yr = what you make in 1 year.

So, you make 1BTC/day currently. 1yr from now you make .61BTC / day. Whether the calculation for the interim is linear or not I dunno. It is close to linear however, as if you look at 3 month projection, the amount mined in 3 months is listed as 0.32 per day, and a linear decline would project .3051 per day.

dogie found a way to invalidate my argument. Mine early on blades then resell for original price. Touche.

@50Mil difficulty 1TH produces 302BTC/mo
@75Mil 202BTC/mo
@100Mil 151BTC
@150Mil 100BTC
@200Mil 75BTC

etc.

Pick your poison for what you think difficulty will be at the time you come online. Keep in mind that if you are able to get 1TH online, so can many others. I believe the estimates for the chip buys run at ~250TH total, so I certainly would use 50Mil as the absolute most optimistic bestest best case scenario you could ever hope for, and more likely in the 75Mil range as a minimum.

Growth rate after that is of course unknown, some sort of exponential decline, to arrive at an equitable cash-out value, recalling that you are shifting all risk onto the buyer, to offset your 'early order' advantage.

BFL isn't supposed to do any live-testing, so to say that they "use" Josh's pool when testing is just an assumption on your part.

No one ever knows. ASICMiner is at about 30TH/sec now, some batch 2 Avalons are arriving, buncha chumps bought up ASICMiner blades, some unknown quantity of people have been getting jalapenos, and probably someone is sitting around mining with peoples preorder ASICs (maybe, dunno).

Only thing we can say is, It's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better for almost anybody.

Summer rates, $0.13668 tier 1
$0.13668 tier 2
$0.29742 tier 3 (130 - 200% of baseline)
$0.33742 tier 4 (over 200% of baseline)

+ $0.42 "customer charge" per day.

Baseline is about 12kWh per day (360 kWh per month) or in more simple terms a single refrigerator with freezer uses about 230kWh per month, so baseline is not much to work with.

A kill a watt is about $10. More than worth it.