Other applications for ASICs ???

[ATC777]

I've been looking into these ASIC chips from Butterfly Labs and a few other designers. I'm told they're tailor-made for Bitcoin mining. But what I wonder is if they have any other practical application...

Let's suppose I drop $30k on BFL's top-of-the-line chip. I mine Bitcoins with it for a little while, but for some reason the mining industry hits a dead end (it is destined to happen someday). Now I'm stuck with this chip that cost me more than most people earn in a year. What do I do with it? 

Are these ASICs so "application-specific" that the chips are useless for anything else? Or could I indeed find other uses for it? My company operates a tech/software subsidiary and we are the developers of a cutting-edge game and simulation engine. A chip as powerful as this seems quite appealing if I could harness its power for calculating physics or processing graphics resources...but is that even a viable option with this mining hardware? And what else might they be used for?

Also, what do you suppose the resale value of these next-gen ASICs will be when the mining industry begins to unwind?

Regards,

--ATC--

PS::

It's my understanding that these ASICs from BFL are going to begin shipping out in two months. Folks tell me the mining difficulty is going to get so high that it's going to shutdown virtually every hobbyist and GPU miner. Supposing this is the case, how might a guy like me fare with a couple high-end ASIC rigs? Do you think the market will be so saturated with ASIC miners that it will be extremely difficult to ever see a return on my chip investment, or might the increased difficulty chase away most of the miners out there and actually make the rewards better?

So what do you think will happen to the Bitcoin market and the mining game when these ASICs come online? (Please be detailed and talk about long-term consequences for the entire BTC economy and mining industry)

[stevegee58]

Short answer:

The ASICs are application specific and are not useful for anything but BTC mining.

FPGAs are field programmable but ASICs are masked in a chip fab.

[pieppiep]

You can use them for decoration on the wall or to test a blender.

[witherworth]

As others have said, these really aren't useful outside of bitcoin mining. If you had an application which required a double sha256, you could use these, but that's pretty unlikely. Unfortunately, if mining completely collapses, the units you've purchased will be worth nothing more than the intertaining value you can get from running massive amounts of voltage through different components to see how they explode.

As far as what's going to happen, my best guess is that the price of BTC is goin to decrease sharply. When ASICs hit, the difficulty will spike, but not enough (in my opinion) to justify as high a price as they are now. Whatever happens, I predict about a 6 month wait time for full returns on the cost of your machine. The early adopters will probably be good to go in 3-4 months.

As far as kicking out the casual participants, it's kind of weird here. No longer can the random gamer help mine BitCoins when not gaming, so he's going to have to buy dedicated mining equipment. You'll still have people that only run 1 Jala as a "cuz it's cool" kind of thing, but I think many of the coincidental miners who are actually gamers will stop participating. However, you'll still have the huge big timers with 5-6 TH/s, medium guys with 1-2 TH/a, and the smaller guys with 50-250 GH/s. Each group will earn their proportional share. I don't see a complete snuffing out of the smaller miners at any point in bitcoin's future.

[DeathAndTaxes]

You can use them for decoration on the wall or to test a blender.

Lots of uses ...

Doorstop.
Improvised blunt force weapon.
Paperweight.
B Movie sci-fi prop
Space heater

To the OP.  The "Application Specific" part of "Applications Specific Integrated Circuit" means exactly what it sounds like. The chip is designed to do one thing and one thing only.  On one hand that makes it cheaper, faster, and more efficient than using general purpose hardware, on the other hand it means it does one thing and one thing only.

In this case the application is performing a double hash of a block header (fix size binary value) where one part of the value to be hashed is a 32 bit integer and you wish to increment it from 0 to 2^32, locating the inputs which produce a hash smaller than a target value.  If you know anything else that would benefit from that well it could be used to do "that" also.

[crazyates]

Space heater

It'd be annoying to have to redirect your space heater towards a live server running bitcoind, and it might be a little noisy, but that's about your best option. 1.5kW space heater FTW!

[repentance]

ASIC itself is not a new technology.  If you can think of another application where it would be useful, ASICs designed for that particular application probably already exist.

It's not like your ASICs aren't going to be useful for helping maintain the network, but they aren't going to be perpetual profit machines. 

[ATC777]

Understood. 

I've been in software development and programming (i.e., C, C++, C#, x86/64 assembly) for over 7 years now...and I have even more years of general IT/tech experience, mostly in repairs, upgrades and custom-builds. But I am by no means a hardware or chip expert, and my knowledge of cryptography only goes about as far as encrypting/decrypting sensitive data and hashing passwords. Ah, and my knowledge of networking leaves much to be desired...my greatest accomplishment in the field was nothing more than a p2p chat application w/ file sharing lol... So please forgive me if my Bitcoin questions seem a bit n00bish...I'm learning about BTC very fast, and I hope I can someday do something to thank/reward all of you for your help and guidance! 

Any of you guys have some links to share for programming resources related to Bitcoin? I'm interested in exploring the world of Bitcoin-related software development and seeing if there's anything I might be able to do for the community...

Regards,

--ATC--