Planning to buy kncminer and some general asic questions.

[moneydeep]

 If I order now kncminer should deliver by october Which means ROI within a couple months according to this. With current difficulty and 75% difficulty increase every month. according to the calcs difficulty will be approx 115 then. This is also taking into consideration that BTC will stay 100 or more.

http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

• I had a few questions if somebody could kindly clarify.
  
  I'm not looking to make a quick buck but looking to mostly hold BTC until prices rise (after ROI)
  
  Is it possible to mine other sha-256 coins with the miner I will get? (Example say in the future bitcoin gets lot harder to mine because of all the asic would't it be feasible to mine other coins where asic hasn't hit yet and then convert it to bitcoin?)
  
  Is there a place where I could read more on basic asic setup?
  
  I know BTC could go down too but with everyone hopping on the bandwagon and BTC getting accepted more and more it should go up. (any comments would be helpful)

[pacojones]

Yes.  Technically there is no such thing as a "Bitcoin" ASIC.  The ASIC has no idea what it is hashing.  You give it a blob of data, it adds a nonce to it, hashes it and checks to see if it meets a target.  It then increments the nonce and tries again.  When it gets to the last nonce is starts over. 

Anything that uses the same hashing algorithm can be mined with a "Bitcoin ASIC.  If the coin is merge mine capable (i.e. namecoin) you can mine both Bitcoin AND that alt-coin simultaneously.

As for FPGA & Scrypt based coins.  Not at this time.  In theory you could however someone would need to develop an efficient firmware and nobody has yet.  It also probably would require a larger FPGA chip than the SpartanIV because the version of scrypt used in altcoins requries 128KB of cache as a scratchpad.

Regarding ASIC in general - your asking for details on an application specific device - bitfury will have some information about their devices, bfl about theirs and knc about theirs - you would probably get more information from wikipedia.

[honky1492]

If your sure kncminer will deliver by october your today order, which i doubt, you must add thousands+ kncminer orders received (yesterday and sonner orders) before yours

[moneydeep]

Thanks for the answers.
I believe that the thousands you are mentioning didn't all pay for them? They said the queue is according to payment and not order date.
They said they will ship as soon as ready and not in batches. If I order Now I'm expecting to start mining in Dec I guess with the delays and all.

Ok according to the website
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com

A 100gh/s machine if started mining from December would give 4.2 BTC 1st month 2.4 2nd month and 4.3 3rd month 1.3 4th month. It's a real exponential decrease. Taking 75% difficulty increase per month. I know people are being put off because the ROI is not say within the first few months. But I am looking at BTC going up in the long run.

Do you think It would still be profitable to be running it getting 0.2 BTC per month mid-2014 If I'm aiming for a longer time investment? Forget electricity costs.
I mean when the difficulty gets higher only the large ASIC's will be running. With a 100gh/s machine I'll be the runt of the litter but difficulty increase will also mean higher value of BTC so say at the end of 2014 if BTC is up say 400$ then It should be a sound investment shouldn't it?

Another question I had was Is it worth spending 2000$ getting an ASIC to mine BTC which will start mining in say NOV-DEC or spend that money now and setup a LTC mining rig. Would the amount of LTC I can make in the next 3 months be worth more than the ASIC can make within 6-8 months from nov-dec?
If someone could kindly crunch some numbers for me I would be greatful.

[showtimex]

Do you think It would still be profitable to be running it getting 0.2 BTC per month mid-2014 If I'm aiming for a longer time investment? Forget electricity costs.
 
Another question I had was Is it worth spending 2000$ getting an ASIC to mine BTC which will start mining in say NOV-DEC or spend that money now and setup a LTC mining rig. Would the amount of LTC I can make in the next 3 months be worth more than the ASIC can make within 6-8 months from nov-dec?
If someone could kindly crunch some numbers for me I would be greatful.

No it will not be profitable to run the thing at that rate. KNC will be realeasing a newer model next year to replace their first gen model. It's always an invest and re-invest in the next gen trying to keep up with technology (and stay profitable). Pretty much impossible but that's the idea.

It might be worthwhile to build a LTC rig, depends on alot of factors. They can certainly be time consuming and lots has to be taken into account if you are putting a few together. Go to coinwarz.com and use their calc, look at litecoin hardware mining comparison to get a sense of expected hashrates, its pretty easy to see what kind of return you'll get. Nothing is cheap or easy I'm afraid.

[pacojones]

A large part of mining is time spent making sure your miner is online and working properly - once it's stable and mining at a consistent rate, if power is not a concern (cost factor) then mining with 100GH would be fine.  If it's returning .2 coins per month at $100 per coin, that is still $20.

I look at it like this, I'm going to invest in a bunch of Gen1 hardware, get it rolling and watch, then I'll sell of my oldest (most power hungry) hardware for Gen2, rinse and repeat.  I don't need to make a crap ton of money though, I'm doing this for the coins and for fun.  Those "investing" in bitcoin for a quick return will likely be very disappointed in their returns.

Now there are other scenarios - BFL can't ship anything, KNC ships 1/2 their orders, Bitfury dissappears and the difficulty doesn't climb.  Is that likely - NO - but anything is possible.

One last thing - 75% increase each month is not likely to continue...  you'll probably see stops and starts...  meaning %50 one month and %80 another month and %20 another month.  I'm guessing %60 average is a worst case scenario.

[moneydeep]

Hmm. I guess I was few months late to the party. I guess I'll stick to my forex trading for now. I was just looking to see if this would provide a less risk income venture.

I'll wait and see how it develops though. Its fun to see.