I don't understand who is buying these, when Antminer is selling USBs for half the price and is easily over cocked to 2ghs and more. Why are these so much more expensive?
they are more parties involved in the development and production. versus 1 for the antminers and the asicminers.
these are easily overclocked to 2.5Ghash+ with a good hub and cooling. can't do that with antminer U1
I'm running 2 at 52 with no cooling other than the cruel, harsh world. One is getting 2.27 and the other 2.11 which includes the ~1.5% errors. Antminer price point is tempting for the "promise" of 2.2 but I wouldn't be cooling them so not sure how that would go. With only 2 running I'm not concerned about ROI, after 1 week I've covered 3-4% and part of the reason I bought them was to convert USD into BTC without the fees.
Either way, mining hardware is going to become profitable with a BTC price increase. At one point everyone was saying USB block erupters would never ROI, so I bought 3 at $20, then saw them spike to $60, and now where they are now. I made a profit mining and not selling, and have 2 that I'm too lazy to resell, only solo mining some alt coins when I'm bored, and burned one out on a crappy hub shortly after I got them.