ASIC

[buttacup]

Hello everyone, I am fairly new to bitcoin and bitcoin mining in general. For the last week or so I've been mining litecoin but only at 200kh/s so I am looking for alternatives for bitcoin. I was looking into ASIC's from Butterfly labs but it seems a little fishy to me.
Here is a 5GH/s miner for $280
https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage/5-gh-s-bitcoin-miner.html
At these rates legit? And from what I read it would take nearly 3 months to deliver. Will the bitcoin network be so flooded with ASIC's/difficulty go up to the point where this miner will not yield a profit? Also general ASIC thread.

[1714291251]

1714291251

[1714291251]

1714291251

[1714291251]

1714291251

[Wilderness]

I'm a newbie also but that's the big question. Some things that reassured me towards it being a scam and still buying some GPUs for minging were;

- I saw a thread about the founder being a con-man
- if it seems too good to be true, it probably is - why would they sell their devices if they could just mine with them?
- this whole preorder business / you will get dispatch based on queue priority blah blah seems congruent with fear and greed based marketing aka a con

[middlemarkal]

No IMO they are ligit just incompetent, very late to deliver, a lot of people before you on preorder.

[noob_jul11]

If I'm not mistaken, there were more ASIC manufacturers than ButterflyLabs (BFL). Cannot recall the name, but, one of them supposedly said it's not going to happen and refunded everyone's money. As for BFL, there are a long list of preorders ahead of you if you order now - which means the likeliness that by the time you receive yours, the difficulty has gone up so much that your miner is on the low end and won't make enough to cover the costs of the miner.

As for your question - why won't they just keep it for themselves - there are a lot of threads and opinions that discussed that before. Look it up ...

[headygains]

BFL isn't scheduled to actually start shipping the ASIC's until the end of april 2013, if you preorder now they speculate by July you will have your equipment. Do you really think the difficulty of mining will be harder in 3 months? Plus the way the market is right now you could be up or down on your mining either way.

[noob_jul11]

What do you think - 5gh/s compare to https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage/1500gh-bitcoin-miner.html

The question is how many of the latter product on preorder and will be ship??

[advanced]

search the forum guys

[noob_jul11]

Hope this helps ... http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

Current hash is about 60000 GH/s - add a modest 50 units @ 1500GH/s = 75000 GH/s. Doubled the hash rate, what's the difficulty going to be?

[kojo23]

The difficulty correlates with the hash rate.

Double Hash Rate <=> double difficulty

[headygains]

So if we add alot of these ASIC miners to the network and the hashrate doubles then, any miner but the big ASIC is going to be
screwed over by difficulty?

[brinebold]

So if we add alot of these ASIC miners to the network and the hashrate doubles then, any miner but the big ASIC is going to be
screwed over by difficulty?

You are correct. GPU mining will never even come close to paying off the cards once a few hundred of these make it out the door. A few more batches and a thousand or two ASIC systems will make GPUs not even worth the electricity they cost to run. The same thing happened to CPU miners back whenh GPUs started showing up.

[stryder]

Avalon already shipped some ASICs which can make 60GH, BFL should ship first ASICs soon, but they constantly delay the shipment. However, ASICs can mine only BTC, not LTC. So, when/if they hit the market, the most of people with GPU mining will switch to LTC

[Wilderness]

So if we add alot of these ASIC miners to the network and the hashrate doubles then, any miner but the big ASIC is going to be
screwed over by difficulty?

You are correct. GPU mining will never even come close to paying off the cards once a few hundred of these make it out the door. A few more batches and a thousand or two ASIC systems will make GPUs not even worth the electricity they cost to run. The same thing happened to CPU miners back whenh GPUs started showing up.

wahh that's what I'm afraid of - I was reading a thread that Avalon asics have already shipped and people are mining with them. If that turns out to be the case buying 2 new rigs in the last 2 weeks probably won't turn out to be the best idea T_T

[adamthefishman]

I think the last to get to the party, are the ones that miss out.

But as almost everyone will be on ASIC's, you will have pretty much the same gear as the experts. Therefore its more of a level playing field, and each player has a certain percent of the hashrate, and therefore the same percent of the mined bitcoins.

[Wilderness]

is there some way to verify the validity of these asics?

i.e. when I was reading the avalon forum and dudes were saying "OMG IM GETTING 50 GHASH from my tiny little device". I started thinking well if that's really the case we should be able to measure vs the networks total ghash rate and expect it to dramatically rise right?

if it's true wouldn't the difficult raise so much almost overnight that all the GPU miners will just turn off their systems as they will no longer even be able to generate electricity costs?

[solidshotnosh]

These guys are legit, but I think anyone just now getting in (like us) are going to have a very hard time finding one for awhile