Hey ASIC pre-order people, you're screwed
Here's why:
#'s have been corrected with more accurate info. Unfortunately not much has changed I've been going around trying to get more exact numbers from the major ASIC manufacturers and so far they don't even seem to know how many preorders they have
So we're going on ballpark estimates and rumors. Many weeks ago, BFL had stated they have 7000 pre-orders total. I heard from several other users that it's now stated to be 14,000, but taking into consideration other things, it's now much lower. Let's say 5000.
Let's be conservative yet realistic and say that that's 4800 Jalapenos, 150 singles, and 50 mini-rigs. That's 16,800 GH/s + 9,000 GH/s + 75,000GH/s = 100.8TH/s.
BTCFPGA's line of products: They're the only other ones expected to ship before 2012 concludes so they've got to be a pretty good target. Rumor has it, they're around 400 so let's go with that and split em between their 2 product levels. That = another 16.2 TH/s.
The Avalon allegedly has a lot more than I thought despite shipping in fairly late 2013, like 3-4 months after their competition at which point ASIC mining will be extremely hard to profit form. Well, they have some special 300 pricing but haven't hit it yet so let's say 150. That's another 9 TH/s.
So that's 126 TH/s total added in just preorders.
The number of people willing to risk lots and lots of money on a preorder for an experimental device from somewhat sketchy companies is definitely less than the number of people who will buy mining hardware soon
after it's released to the public and proven to work for at least a short period of time. I'd say it's 5:1 but let's go conservative and say for every 1 preordering daredevil, there are 2 people that will buy the hardware once it actually comes out and works. Also they'd obviously be more inclined to buy higher end hardware than the Jalapenos for example once there's practically 0 risk (post-release) but once again, let's go conservative with a best case scenario and not adjust for that. So with my numbers, that's another 252 TH/s for a total of 378 TH/s.
And the current total computational of the network is around 22.5TH/s.So, since difficulty and price all scale evenly with each other, I can do this in any order. A BFL jalapeno runs at 3.5GH/s and at the last price I recall from MTGox ($12.80 USD per BTC) and the current difficulty, that will pay for its $149 price tag in 11.19 days. Not bad! HURRAY, let's all pre-order! Hell no, keep reading, lol.
By the time ASICs are released, 25BTC instead of 50 will be the mining reward per block and I think we all know the price won't magically jump to 2x overnight so let's go ahead and double that. That's a 22.38 day payoff. Now let's add all those new miners and readjust for the resulting difficulty increase of approx 16.8x, and you'll pay off your Jalapeno in 376 days which means you're making $0.40 USD per day. That's all assuming that from release time to about 1-2 months afterwards, nobody ever buys another ASIC miner for that entire 376 days. Let's factor back in future sales rates and....you're not going to pay it off, lol. So let's say my numbers or estimates are somehow drastically off and give it a + or - 70% accuracy variance. That results in...you still being screwed, lol.
Good luck with that!bfl has 75k chips in preorder with is like 700th with avalon prime etc its 1000th payd for already
