Total mining investment thus far?

[Cubic Earth]

Does anyone know, between all the ASIC companies, how much USD money has been spent on pre-orders and mining equipment?  And invested in ASIC miner shares?

Looking for a 'total invested in mining' number.

[Leon D]

The companies producing ASICs are all privately held.  I don't know that you could really calculate a number like that based off preorder numbers.  My suggestion for calculating a "total USD invested in ASIC mining" number would be to start backwards, looking first at total mining volume on the BTC network, ~161.5 Terahashes/s currently.  Calculate the approximate cost per Terahash/s of ASIC hardware.  I'd ballpark 1Gh/s from BFL costs about $50 --> $50,000 per Thash/s.  Next, you'll need to come up with what percent of total BTC hashrate is generated by ASIC computers at this point.  I'd go out on a limb and say 30% of the total network but this is probably way off.  Using these numbers, we find that ASICs generate 48 Thash/s of Bitcoin activity.  48.45 Th/s ASIC power * ~$50,000perTh gives us $2,422,500 in revenues.  The real number is much higher obviously, but that's my attempt to help you out.

[Cubic Earth]

I think you approach gives a good low-lower bound.  I would guess that no more than 50TH/s is due to GPUs and CPUs, just looking at where the on the graph the spike started (and that coincided with the first Avalon rigs being brought online).

I think Avalon's batch 3 pulled in about $5,000,000 alone
75 BTC x 600 units x ~$100 per btc at the time (but some were four blade units at 100 BTC)

[Leon D]

Ah, I didn't think to look at network speed over time to come up with my % ASIC power number, nice approach.  Why do you want to know total USD invested in ASIC mining btw?

[Cubic Earth]

Why do you want to know total USD invested in ASIC mining btw?

For a few reasons.  One reason being that such a number would have a correlation to the cost to do a brute force 51% attack.  But mostly I think it is an interesting financial indicator that reflects the sentiment of the bitcoin community.  The price of a bitcoin is of course the primary measure, but I would put investment in mining hardware as a strong second.  It also just sounds cool as a talking point.  Being able to tell people 'well, if bitcoin is bullshit, better tell that to the folks who have dumped xxx millions into specialized hardware' is also a plus.