if I ran a single for say..... 1 year. And it arrived whenever they will arrive .. how many bitcoins in total do you think it will generate? if you had to guess. Let's say the shipping date is the first week of march.
This comes from the Butterflylabs website:
FAQ:Get Rich Quick! Not so fast... Will these ASICs make me rich? If you have done some calculations and have come up with numbers indicating you will be making over 9000% profit your first month, there's a good chance you may be missing something or don't understand how Bitcoins work. After reading this quick FAQ, you should do some more research on Bitcoins, how they started, how they are created and what ASIC's will mean for Bitcoin miners.
Bitcoins are "minted" at a predetermined rate which is roughly one block every 10 minutes. Just because you might now have a 4500MH/s Jalapeno does not mean you'll be making $1500+ per day/week/month. You may now be mining at 60GH/s or higher, but the network hashrate (the amount of mining across the entire Bitcoin network) may now be up in the hundreds of terahashes per second (until now, you've probably been mining in megahashes). In order to moderate the network hashrate to maintain the predetermined minting rate of one block every 10 minutes, there is a variable called difficulty. When the network hashrate goes up, the difficulty adjusts to keep the mining speed at that predetermined rate (similarly, if a whole lot of miners suddenly stopped mining resulting in the network hashrate dropping, the difficulty would drop accordingly). Difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks.
What does this mean for you? Using current figures, a Single SC at the current network hashrate (20.192TH/s as at 13 Jan 13) with 25 Bitcoins (BTC) mined per block, you could expect approximately USD$3670/month. BUT ... the network hashrate will be much higher once ASICs hit the mining scene so taking that into consideration, we should factor in a jump of difficulty to cater for the increased hashrate of 1000% (10x) in the short term. Current price (MTGox) for BTC is USD$14.14 (rounded). So, using that information, and for estimation purposes a conservative flat rate of USD13 per BTC, a safe assumption to make when working out your mining returns is USD6 per month per GH/s (@ 13 Jan 13)
Maximum income per month for the BFL ASICs (using the above) with no overclocking and ZERO power costs in USD is would therefore be around the following:
Jalapeno - $27/mth
"Little" Single - $180/mth
Single - $360/mth
Minirig - $9000/mth
Bear in mind these are laboratory examples (i.e. in a perfect and controlled world) and your returns may not necessarily be this high. These values will definitely fluctuate daily as the market value of BTC fluctuates and hashrates/difficulty changes. If you want to run your own calculations check out many of the BTC calculators online ranging from simple to complex. Here's an example to start you off:
http://bitcoinx.com/profit/ What if you got the difficulty wrong above? It's true there's no real way to predict what difficulty will be a week, month or year after ASIC's hit the network. This table should therefore give you an indication of what you could possibly expect in a perfect world if you were mining at difficulty rates of current, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 & 40 times the current rate (3249550) per 24hr. You certainly shouldn't expect the current (x1) rates to be acheived unless you're lucky enough to get hold of your ASIC in first 24/48hrs of being available (so make the most of it if you do).
This table does not include power consumption or payback of any investment made to purchase your device(s). You should also be able to figure out the BTC/USD exchange rate for yourselves. The formula used for these figures is:
(H x B / D) x (60 x 60 x 24 x 65535 x 10^6 / 2^48)where H = your hash rate in Mhash/s, B = block reward in BTC & D is the current (or expected) difficulty. These figures have been rounded DOWN to 8 decimal places.
