Any speculators buying ASICs for altcoins?

[FuzzyBear]

I was just wondering if anyone was considering buying say a Jal $150 for 3.5Ghash to throw at any of the alt coins?

I know it won't work for LTC as diff algos etc, but my understanding is that it will work for PPC and TRC and NMC etc.... for $150 that not much really to have a play on speculation that these coins may do very well.... I'm half tempted to go for it, but was wondering if anyone else thinking the same, or has thought the same and decided against it? and any reasons?

look forward to your replies have a great day all

[pyra-proxy]

I'll mine with my asics on bitparking when I get them so ya :-)

[maxcarjuzaa]

I will love to see those butterfly fpga modified to mine LTC. I would buy at leas one for sure. Regarding mining an alt coin, only with merged mining. If you support an altcoin, a better way to support it is mining btc and then selling those btc for you favorite alt coin.

[smoothie]

Someone should buy a mini rig at 1.5 TH/s and throw it at PPC.



 

Oh wait...i shouldn't have said anything...damn...there goes my idea 

[SgtSpike]

Why not just find a merged-mining pool that supports the particular alt-chain you are wanting to mine and do both?

[MrTeal]

I will love to see those butterfly fpga modified to mine LTC. I would buy at leas one for sure. Regarding mining an alt coin, only with merged mining. If you support an altcoin, a better way to support it is mining btc and then selling those btc for you favorite alt coin.

How would you modify a BFL FPGA to mine LTC?

[smoothie]

Why not just find a merged-mining pool that supports the particular alt-chain you are wanting to mine and do both?

PPC is not setup to merge mine. You have to setup a checkpoint and all nodes need to download the updated client for merge mining.

Hence right now you can't merge mine with the current PPC chain.

[maxcarjuzaa]

I will love to see those butterfly fpga modified to mine LTC. I would buy at leas one for sure. Regarding mining an alt coin, only with merged mining. If you support an altcoin, a better way to support it is mining btc and then selling those btc for you favorite alt coin.

How would you modify a BFL FPGA to mine LTC?

no idea, I have no BFL FPGA. But i supouse BFL could do it, adding some ram, reprograming the fpga....

[Atruk]

I will love to see those butterfly fpga modified to mine LTC. I would buy at leas one for sure. Regarding mining an alt coin, only with merged mining. If you support an altcoin, a better way to support it is mining btc and then selling those btc for you favorite alt coin.

How would you modify a BFL FPGA to mine LTC?

no idea, I have no BFL FPGA. But i supouse BFL could do it, adding some ram, reprograming the fpga....

Pretty much you'd have to reprogram the FPGA, but that isn't a trivial task. Even for the simpler SHA-512 used by bitcoin it took time before people had it working.

Scrypt needs a lot of memory, but you can alleviate that to an extent by throwing more computing power at it. The thing is in the absence of the extra memory scrypt is designed to degrade in a way that becomes disproportionally more expensive in terms of additional calculations needed. You'd need a very expensive FPGA with a sizeable amount of onboard memory to make it worth even trying to begin programming it for scrypt.

A better bet if you are serious about LTC mining performance would probably be one of the new Tesla K20's from NVIDIA now that they've introduced an architecture to replace Fermi that doesn't suck for crypto. The problem is whether you are interested in committing $4,000 in hardware to LTC.

[tacotime]

Nah, the K20 will still be pretty slow.  It's designed mostly for DP FP ops and not integer ops.  It's actually still slower than a 7970 there, too.

[Atruk]

Nah, the K20 will still be pretty slow.  It's designed mostly for DP FP ops and not integer ops.  It's actually still slower than a 7970 there, too.

Ah, I just looked at the core count and assumed.

[FuzzyBear]

ok so yes people do seem ready to meerge mine btc with alt chains where possible,

and by the sounds of things ... BFL should start work on the LTC ASIC minirig

[DryPowder]

When i receive mines I will “tried” @ TRC, in fact I pre-order 1 RIG for BTC and the other one for ALT.

[maxcarjuzaa]

I will love to see those butterfly fpga modified to mine LTC. I would buy at leas one for sure. Regarding mining an alt coin, only with merged mining. If you support an altcoin, a better way to support it is mining btc and then selling those btc for you favorite alt coin.

How would you modify a BFL FPGA to mine LTC?

no idea, I have no BFL FPGA. But i supouse BFL could do it, adding some ram, reprograming the fpga....

Pretty much you'd have to reprogram the FPGA, but that isn't a trivial task. Even for the simpler SHA-512 used by bitcoin it took time before people had it working.

Scrypt needs a lot of memory, but you can alleviate that to an extent by throwing more computing power at it. The thing is in the absence of the extra memory scrypt is designed to degrade in a way that becomes disproportionally more expensive in terms of additional calculations needed. You'd need a very expensive FPGA with a sizeable amount of onboard memory to make it worth even trying to begin programming it for scrypt.

A better bet if you are serious about LTC mining performance would probably be one of the new Tesla K20's from NVIDIA now that they've introduced an architecture to replace Fermi that doesn't suck for crypto. The problem is whether you are interested in committing $4,000 in hardware to LTC.

All depends on ROI, hoy much Kh/s can I get from 1 k20? how much power consumption? if I can have my invesment back within a year, I would do it


mmmmm or maybe not, I like the idea of mining BTC to buy LTC. For a criptocurrency to success we need miners, we need excangers, we need pools and we need money inflow. So mining btc for LTC is money inflow.

Merchants are not really needed they are desired but not needed. I can not buy milk with gold or silver coins but i can sell my gold for fiat and buy the milk with fiat.

So if there are enough exchangers and market volume no matter if merchants accept it or not the currency will survive

[tacotime]

ok so yes people do seem ready to meerge mine btc with alt chains where possible,

and by the sounds of things ... BFL should start work on the LTC ASIC minirig

Bfl needs to figure out how to make a sha256 asic before it can do that.  An asic for ltc will probably cost a lot more to develop with a much smaller roi than for a sha256 asic (theyll probably only 2-3x more efficient and about as fast as video cards). Couple this with the fact that the ltc asic can only be used to mine ltc and you're looking at very little incentive to develop an ltc asic in the next year or two.

[pyra-proxy]

ok so yes people do seem ready to meerge mine btc with alt chains where possible,

and by the sounds of things ... BFL should start work on the LTC ASIC minirig

Bfl needs to figure out how to make a sha256 asic before it can do that.  An asic for ltc will probably cost a lot more to develop with a much smaller roi than for a sha256 asic (theyll probably only 2-3x more efficient and about as fast as video cards). Couple this with the fact that the ltc asic can only be used to mine ltc and you're looking at very little incentive to develop an ltc asic in the next year or two.

They should figure out how to upgrade BFL FPGA's to perform scrypt mining (and thusly LTC mining).... that seems like the cheapest option especially since they will be getting a lot of BFL FPGA's back in upgrade options.

[crazy_rabbit]

I will be buying for an ASIC for Terracoin.

[FuzzyBear]

I will be buying for an ASIC for Terracoin.

nice i think that could be a turning point for some of the alt chains then... ASIC will possibly have more effect on Altcoins than the block reward halving on BTC the other week


and yes I think a reprogram of the FPGA's to do LTC mining would be the way to go

[Liquid]

Does anybody have a ASIC product hashing away ? ? ? ? ?

as of now or is it coming 2013

[tacotime]

ok so yes people do seem ready to meerge mine btc with alt chains where possible,

and by the sounds of things ... BFL should start work on the LTC ASIC minirig

Bfl needs to figure out how to make a sha256 asic before it can do that.  An asic for ltc will probably cost a lot more to develop with a much smaller roi than for a sha256 asic (theyll probably only 2-3x more efficient and about as fast as video cards). Couple this with the fact that the ltc asic can only be used to mine ltc and you're looking at very little incentive to develop an ltc asic in the next year or two.

They should figure out how to upgrade BFL FPGA's to perform scrypt mining (and thusly LTC mining).... that seems like the cheapest option especially since they will be getting a lot of BFL FPGA's back in upgrade options.

They will likely just be resold as spartan6 chips, you need all new boards with gddr5 in order to efficiently mine with scrypt