ASIC prices ???

[rsbriggs]

I'm watching an eBay auction where a batch 2 Avalon ASIC (when shipped) is up over $25,000 USD.   Can this rig really ever re-pay that in BitCoins???

[illusiveman]

its totally going to be dependent on whether the difficulty shoots up as expected. If i could mine with that thing right now, HELL YA it would repay itself fast, but its likely once those things get out in the wild it will take longer.... people are willing to take the gamble that they will get them early enough to take advantage of the low difficulty. Either way at worse i think they will reach a repayment period as long as GPUS are now, which is about 3 months or so to break even.

Personaly i'd rather just buy more coins and hold on to them long term, in the end its just as profitable as mining, atleast for me it has been.

[KNK]

No one can say that for sure - it's a gamble.

Yes, ASICs are mining fast and having one now will definitely make much more than that, but:
 if BTC price drops too much and stays low - you may never get enough to cover it's price
 batch #2 is not shipped yet
 there will be twice the shipping delay - from Avalon to the owner and from him to you
 after that unknown delay, there might be hundreds of ASICs mining already, so the difficulty will be much higher and your income much lower

[psionix]

Yeah, those are people selling who just want their money back, and didn't want to wait an indeterminate amount of time

[illusiveman]

A gamble is the best way to put it lol

[rsbriggs]

Well, they get rather more than just their money back.  Assuming the batch 2 orders were placed at 65 BTC when the exchange rate was under $150, that's more than a $15,000 profit....

So, with this much money in ASIC miners, why can't anyone build and ship them reliably?  Butterfly labs, for example, has been taking orders and money for over a year now, and shipped nothing.  Avalon ships, but in small batches, infrequently, and it looks more like they want to sell their chips more than they do their systems.  

Seems like a venture capital guy that wanted to invest as little as $1M USD - and actually ship product - could make a fortune....

[g83]

better invest your money in real estate than buying an asic for 25000 $... maybe it will pay for itsself in a long distance but it depends on the marketvalue of bitcoin and of its success @all

[Exoskeleton]

I am "investing" a small amount of coins in ASIC tech that is about 2-3 months away. No, its not Butterfly Labs. I would never trust them now and thank god I stopped myself right before I was going to sink my coins into that quicksand. Im sure I'd get something from them someday, but Id bet after the summer is over.

If you put your money into something like an Avalon the idea is that after you break even you will just keep mining the coins slower and slower, forever. There's a good chance these things will run for over ten years if you replace the fans every year. They are split into 10 chip cards that can be individually replaced if something goes wrong so you don't loose the whole unit to a malfunction. These are not fire hot GPUs burning themselves out every 2-4 years.

If you take the really long view and Bitcoin stays above $100 your going to make 10X what you would if you just bought coins today. Think 4 years from now. Once you pass that break even point...

[derr777]

Are you a gambler?  :p

[honkeylips]

if you figure out a way to predict the future, let me know, we will make some serious bank!

[zimmah]

I'm watching an eBay auction where a batch 2 Avalon ASIC (when shipped) is up over $25,000 USD.   Can this rig really ever re-pay that in BitCoins???

it might, but it's a gamble,

noone knows what effect exactly the release of ASICs will have to the bitcoin economy.

i expect the difficulty to skyrocket for several weeks/months and than almost level out until even more modern technology becomes available. but with the difficulty, the price of bitcoins may become higher.

also, even with the current difficulty it's increasingly less fun and rewarding to mine using normal computers, my computer has a pretty powerful GPU but it can hardly even make $2 per day. (it's just a gaming rig though)

I have purchased a 25GH/s BFL recently and also a 5GHs one from Ebay, i hope they both ship within reasonable timefrimes so that they at least earn their investment back.