What is your reaction to the concept that it may be possible by this October to have 40 Gh/s for $1300? Do you a) doubt this is true, b) already have orders placed with BFL, c) plan to wait and see, d) plan to sell your farm soon, e) something else?
I'm not trying to be obnoxious here by asking this - just wondering what your thoughts are as someone who has recently built a large farm.
Hadn't even heard of bitcoins 3 days ago. Now I'm feeling rather defeated. Haven't even finished rebuilding the rig I was planning to mine with... Really wonder if I'll have enough BTC by end of the year to cash out and get BFL's or other FPGA board to tweak rig with.
I felt the same but there's another way to look at it .. How would you feel if you invested thousands into a GPU/FPGA mining rig? Wouldn't you say "Damn, if only I built a small test rig to get a feel for it and waited for the ASICS to roll out, now I'm thousands in the hole with a few months to recoup those costs ". I spent 993$ AUD on two computers and Win 7.. I have sold parts I'm replacing for 300$.. I'm short one monitor and one keyboard. By November I should recover 320$.. If the ASICS start rolling out then, Thats not a bad loss and remember you need a computer to hook an ASIC to.. I'll have two at a cost of 353$ + monitor and keyboard.
The people who have preordered ASICS will make a profit.. But they are assuming some risk.. ButterflyLabs will probably bring out ASICS but they were smart enough to include a provision in their terms that there may be an extra 60 days before delivery.. so the time frame may be into January 2013, after the reduction to 25BTC per block. They will no doubtably make a fair bit of coin at the beginning, but those huge preorders will all be delivered pretty much at the same time.. So the wonderous profit to be had by ASICS won't be long as they all come online in a short space of time. And of course there is always the possibilty of technical glitchs (Though BFL has an excellent history)
You and I are in a position where we have little capital investment to recover, the ability to invest capital (Not that I've got any) in the next generation of hardware now , or to raise capital in preparation of investing in the next generation of hardware AFTER it has proven itself and the mining environment has stablised..
I'm taking the last option, it doesn't give me maximum profit, but it does give minimal risk.. and when all is said and done I've got two gaming boxes at 33% retail price (except for a monitor) and if it's time to quit trying to set up mining, I had a lot of stimulating fun messing about with bitcoin.
