FPGA boards

[Min3Er]

Hello. I am getting more and more interested in Bitcoins every day, and I would like to start mining them. Because I do not have a lot of money available to invest in hardware I was searching for other possible options and I found 1 very interesting to me, FPGA mining.

Now is there anyone who could explain me a little about this concept? About using FPGA boards for Bitcoin mining.

Thanks.

[seleme]

Not sure it would be good investment at this point. They might become pretty worthless and impossible to meet ROI soon.

[helipotte]

FPGA's can be programmed to do many things.  Might be able to resell is ROI is unrealistic.

[Min3Er]

Not sure it would be good investment at this point. They might become pretty worthless and impossible to meet ROI soon.

Hmm, could you please explain me a little more?

[AvenG]

due to current increasing difficulty everyday you might better invest in buying bitcoins, or considering investing in ASIC units (if you still convinced in mining).. you can also buy shares of a mining company and receive proportional revenues.

[Min3Er]

due to current increasing difficulty everyday you might better invest in buying bitcoins, or considering investing in ASIC units if you're still convinced in mining.. you can also buy shares of a mining company and receive proportional revenues.

Ok I see, so what exactly does that mean? Can the difficulty decrease? I would rather invest in mining equipement and start mining. What is most profitable to mine with now?

[seleme]

No, it can't. More hashing power mining it, difficulty rises and you mine less coins with hash power you have.

Since ASIC's are much more advanced they are already taking the network power, and will take it much, much more in the future so FPGA's will be pretty ineffective.

They were good year ago as they consume much less power than GPU's but unfortunately ASICs came and that's pretty much end of a road for new average Joes in Bitcoin mining.

I'd advice you to buy normal mining GPU rigs and eventually mine bitcoins untill difficulty completely explodes and then use them for Litecoin and other scrypt coins mining (scrypt is different algorithm that currently can only be mined with GPU's, not even FPGAs let alone ASICs due to high memory usage).

[Min3Er]

Thanks for the reply seleme.

So you are saying that the ASICs will be the main thing now for mining, right? So what of ASIC would you recommend to invest in (at $500 price range or so).

And for the GPU, which would you recommend for maximum profit? You think they will be effective long enough to pay back for themself and make some profit?