[Announcement] Block Erupter USB

[markyminer]

So far only ASICminer seems to have shipped ASICs on mass.

So what, if you can't make a profit with them?

Shares go up, that's what is important mate, screw the ROI 

If ASICminer have no current future development for chips with less power use than BFL you should dump these to a greater fool sooner rather than later because as soon as ASIC miner products are losing money compared with energy used to hash BTC, maybe around the end of the year, then these shares will be worthless almost overnight.

M

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[alibert]

BFL is crap, I better get a KnCMiner Jupiter. 350 GHs baby!

[markyminer]

Lol, funny read. BFL isn't shipping. Buying them is nuts. So far only ASICminer seems to have shipped ASICs on mass.

Not on demand (thank god!) but pre orders are shipping and they are slowly catching up, and this is well documented. Even some bigger units are moving now too. It's no coincidence that network hashrate is 139 TH now and difficulty has jumped from 11m to 19m in the last 4 weeks. Funny enough the same timeframe BFL started shipping back orders!

M

[alibert]

Yeah, or Avalons units made the Hashrate jump. So far I heard that only first 3 days of Jalapenos are shipped, which makes it what? 10 units? Is there a thread of the current number of shipped BFLs?

[markyminer]

BFL is crap, I better get a KnCMiner Jupiter. 350 GHs baby!

I would want to see a working prototype on youtube with a bitcoin dev pulling less than 5w G/H before put down any money on these. It would need to pull less than 1.75KW to compete with BFL.

M

[Anenome5]

As long as the difficulty is lower than 800 million (assuming a btc/USD price of 100$), those devices make profit.

With a break-even of what, 800 years?

exactly - these devices are probably only good for mining alt coins by this point. SHA256 alt coins particularly.

I guess that's the answer why anyone's buying these, but it's not a great answer.

I guess, if you had an alt-coin you wanted to protect from 51% you could buy a bunch of these on the cheap and get them much faster than other ASICs.

But frankly, I can't see why any alt-coin at this point doesn't adopt the Scrypt strategy, as straight SHA256 is going to leave them too vulnerable ultimately, and we've seen a bunch attacked successfully lately.

[Anenome5]

As long as the difficulty is lower than 800 million (assuming a btc/USD price of 100$), those devices make profit.

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function"

You do realise that 800 million difficulty is less than six doublings from 19,339,258 right?

And with difficulty growth @ 33% a month (or more!) difficulty is doubling pretty much every three months.

I will let you work out the maths of how many months six doublings will take  

M

I expect the diff to level off a bit after the avalons and the KNCs ship. A doubling of network power constitutes the deployment of perhaps millions of dollars worth of gear. Double the network power and you're doubling the infrastructure investment cost. That can't happen ad infinitum. Even with a bitcoin price well above the generation cost, at some point an investment only makes sense if the price of bitcoin is assuredly higher than X in the near term, and we've been on a slow but steady downward slope lately and probably will be for the rest of the year, which should make further investment by large investors, like Asicminer, a little nervous. Imagine the price crashes down to 50 or 20, are they leveraged enough to stumble from that? I have no idea, but perhaps so.

And GPU miners haven't fled just yet. But they will.

[Anenome5]

This will only leave BFL customers who got miners now and in the next 2-3 months going, unless someone launches something lower power per G/H.

...such as KNCMiner.

Eventually unless the surviving ASIC manufacturers limit supply onto the market to match hashrate (thus controlling difficultly increases) then it will all go pop.

Huh? They can't keep new suppliers from popping up.

We have less than two years until this happens. And it will happen. Anyone buying anything other than BFL currently is nuts.

BFL - 65 nm. KNC, 28 nm. Conclusion--exactly the opposite of yours here.

[Anenome5]

BFL is crap, I better get a KnCMiner Jupiter. 350 GHs baby!

I would want to see a working prototype on youtube with a bitcoin dev pulling less than 5w G/H before put down any money on these. It would need to pull less than 1.75KW to compete with BFL.

M

The Jupiters are currently slated to use 1kw.

[markyminer]

BFL is crap, I better get a KnCMiner Jupiter. 350 GHs baby!

I would want to see a working prototype on youtube with a bitcoin dev pulling less than 5w G/H before put down any money on these. It would need to pull less than 1.75KW to compete with BFL.

M

The Jupiters are currently slated to use 1kw.

Yes but BFL was initially slated to use 5 x less power than they do now they are shipping. They advertised and took large pre orders based on 1w a G/H.  They are shipping at 5w G/H or slightly less for the bigger rigs.

Until KNC show a working prototype pulling this power I would not order. BFL forced older pre-order customers to accept the new 5 x power increase or they refunded their money.

M

[alibert]

I ask you again to tell me how many BFL devices have been shipped.

[pixl8tr]

I ask you again to tell me how many BFL devices have been shipped.

No One but BFL knows that, and they are not disclosing the exact numbers shipped.

Quote from BFL_Jody on her blog.

Let's get clear about our agreement here. This is a SHIPPING blog. I agree to tell you the shipping dates of the products we are shipping every day so you can have some idea where we are in the queue.

Some people ask me to share the order numbers. These are not relevant, since we ship by pay date. It would tell you nothing. Sometimes we had to assign a large number to an old order because it got lost. The order numbers are only for reference, not shipping queue.

Others ask me to post quantities shipped each day. This also doesn't tell you anything, because you don't know how many orders there are. Some of this information is proprietary and we just don't share it.

[alibert]

a quick search on ebay reveiled ONE butterfly labs 50 ghs unit and SEVEN avalon units in hand (and EIGHT jalapenos).

[markyminer]

BFL - 65 nm. KNC, 28 nm. Conclusion--exactly the opposite of yours here.

I still highly doubt they can have access to the 28 nm factories. It's still cutting-edge technology used mostly by big players with a lot of hard issues to solve.

Yes but BFL was initially slated to use 5 x less power than they do now they are shipping. They advertised and took large pre orders based on 1w a G/H.  They are shipping at 5w G/H or slightly less for the bigger rigs.

I was not aware of that. It's very interesting if you consider the very long-term usage of ASICs: even them could become unprofitable to run given power costs!

Yep, currently BFL has the lowest working power product so will be the last man standing profitability wise until someone produces am ASIC that uses less power than 5w per G/H. Hence why I have a 2 month old pre order with them based on their Youtube prototype video 20/4/13.

M

[mem]

I ask you again to tell me how many BFL devices have been shipped.

LukeJr has 1, so..... 1 ?

[alibert]

I ask you again to tell me how many BFL devices have been shipped.

LukeJr has 1, so..... 1 ?

1 on Ebay, so 2

[Bonam]

1 on Ebay, so 2 Smiley

I realize trashing on BFL is the trendy thing to do on this forum, but I think the best estimate is that they've shipped all Jalapeno orders through the end of August 2012. Assuming that order numbers are consecutive, that would suggest that the list at http://bfl.ptz.ro/ represents about 10% of all orders (not surprising since just people that happen to find that site and decide to enter their order are listed there). A quick glance through the list shows about 400ish Jalapenos delivered so far. If the orders not listed on that site have about the same distribution of hardware types as the ones that are listed (not an unreasonable assumption), that would imply that about 4,000 Jalapenos totalling about 20 TH have been delivered so far...

[alibert]

1 on Ebay, so 2 Smiley

I realize trashing on BFL is the trendy thing to do on this forum, but I think the best estimate is that they've shipped all Jalapeno orders through the end of August 2012. Assuming that order numbers are consecutive, that would suggest that the list at http://bfl.ptz.ro/ represents about 10% of all orders (not surprising since just people that happen to find that site and decide to enter their order are listed there). A quick glance through the list shows about 400ish Jalapenos delivered so far. If the orders not listed on that site have about the same distribution of hardware types as the ones that are listed (not an unreasonable assumption), that would imply that about 4,000 Jalapenos totalling about 20 TH have been delivered so far...

Thanks! Finally some numbers. I count 308 delivered Jalapenos using grep "Delivered" index.html -B6 | grep label | grep -v success | cut -d">" -f3 | cut -d"<" -f1 | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}'

[markyminer]

1 on Ebay, so 2 Smiley

I realize trashing on BFL is the trendy thing to do on this forum, but I think the best estimate is that they've shipped all Jalapeno orders through the end of August 2012. Assuming that order numbers are consecutive, that would suggest that the list at http://bfl.ptz.ro/ represents about 10% of all orders (not surprising since just people that happen to find that site and decide to enter their order are listed there). A quick glance through the list shows about 400ish Jalapenos delivered so far. If the orders not listed on that site have about the same distribution of hardware types as the ones that are listed (not an unreasonable assumption), that would imply that about 4,000 Jalapenos totalling about 20 TH have been delivered so far...

Thanks! Finally some numbers. I count 308 delivered Jalapenos using grep "Delivered" index.html -B6 | grep label | grep -v success | cut -d">" -f3 | cut -d"<" -f1 | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s}'

My best estimate was around 350 jally's, some dev units and some singles. Maybe around 2000 g/h worth so far. But they seem to be catching up fast.

M

[alibert]

Well, around 70,000 GH came online during the last 4-5 weeks. I guess some ASIC manufacturer turned up his machines. ASICMINER sold 10,000 (?) USB miners, which sum up only 3 TH, so eigther they keep a lot for themself or we have a hidden player.