Topic: ASIC resale value (Read 5493 times)

Yes, because efficiency is irrelevant to some people, because they have free or almost free power. Some countries have power that is almost so cheap its not worth metering, and in some places, they actually do that.

Also, where I live (Australia) there are a LOT of people who adopted solar when they were being offered lovely 200% feedback tarrifs. But with network saturation and policy changes these are lowering a lot in some places, and in the future, they may be 1:1 with the consumption tarrif and worryingly perhaps even lower. In this case, a clever miner could better utilise that power to run an ASIC farm. In other threads it has already been shown that with some moderate levels of ingenuity (usually involving a RPi and some erupters) you can even run mining systems directly from the panels themselves.

Of course, people living in dorm rooms and renters of properties that have included power / free power are more numerous and those people also won't care much for efficiency. They are essentially making free coins with that power, you could argue the ethics of this if you wanted to, but ethics usually matter little when there's money to be made and loopholes that can be jumped through.

I'd be willing to bet that even in 12-24 months time there will still be people around the place  mining with FPGA's and AM USB erupters, even if difficultly increases in the worse case scenarios. Yes, those devices might have to be sold by some people but they'll find new homes where electricity is cheap. Hell, I'll bet that some people will still mine bitcoin on GPUs: free heat and easier setup/tweaking than scrypt will attract at least a few people. And then, there are those who are into the conceptual, theoretical, and ideological aspects of bitcoin who don't care about efficiency or even profitability at all.

Nobody buys a share in a company for their inventory.  Nobody buys shares in Apple because they want 1% of Apple's office furniture.  ASICMiner has shown the ability to delivery AISCs in high volume.  Something nobody else has done to date.  Eventually more efficient processors will be produced however have you considered

a) more efficient processors don't instant-obsolete existing ones.  An ASIC on a smaller process in theory will have roughly double the efficiency (MH/$ and MH/W).  In reality it is much less maybe closer to 150%.  That doesn't make existing chips unprofitable .... just less profitable.

b) given ASICMiner's history it is plausible that when more efficient chips are produced ... they are produced by ASICMiner.

That requires two assumptions:
1. The fiat/Yuan ratio will remain stable
2. That noone else will come out with more efficient ASIC chips

Also, ASICMiner cannot be compared to a stock listed in fiat on a regulated exchange.  This is in bitcoin to an anonymous person "friedcat" eithe OTC or on an anonymous exchange.  The risk is much higher with no recourse if cheated. 

Their dividend is amazing!. Point me to one stock out there that consistently has >20% yearly returns from their dividends.

ASICMiner reinvests half of their profits in more mining hardware. They will never fall behind.

There are many many potential ways to use proof of work to secure protocols: fight spam, dos attacks, etc. Any of these things could, if they wanted, use the Bitcoin POW function.

But few of them have been adopted— one reason proof of work (e.g. hashcash) hasn't been adopted for these things is because most of the time the enemy has a botnet and botnets are even better at PoW than desktop computers (e.g. the desktop user pays for power, the attacker does not).   But with a mining asic, this isn't so obviously so, at least for now.

So, if people want, they could go out an develop alternative uses for mining hardware. If some take of it may create a useful secondary market.

THis is why I do not understand why ASICMiner sells for so much.  All their inventory once replaced by newer ASICs becomes nearly worthless.  And the dividend is fairly small.

Application Specific. Afraid not . If they could, then their general purpose resale would be a lot more

All it can do is calculate the SHA-256 hash (twice) of a 32 byte number.  So you'd need someone to encrypt their data with exactly that hashing function.

I was thinking, Bitcoin ASICs are basically optimized cryptographic processors at resolving SHA-256 hashing problems.  Can't these ASICs be repurposed for the purpose of breaking strong encryption?

This is pretty generous, too. Most gains from dropping fabrication processes are not that big, though for some of the original partners who started at 110nm and 65nm, the gains moving to a much more modern process would be pretty big (and could be 2x) but once you start moving through the die shrinking process the gains are more in the fact they can produce more chips per sheet of silicon, reducing costs to make the chip in the first place. The gains in power and processing are not forgotten, but it's not always the main advantage of die shrinks.

Ha! I'll just use it to compute my salt for pretty hashed passwords.

Not really good for that unless you know of passwords which are 640 bit strings and contain a 32 bit incrementing nonce. 

In theory you could make a "general purpose" SHA256 ASIC which would be useful for brute forcing passwords as well as mining but it wouldn't be optimized for either and this isn't the approach taken by any ASIC developer.

Password cracking?

I'm sure they'll be given new lives as spam/'ethical hacking'/folding boxes at some point.

The way I see it is everyone knows that when ASIC's are released in the wild in sufficient numbers come this Sep/Oct ( KNC, Terrahash, All Avalon chips orders, Bitfury and the 100TH setup, etc) there will a substantial increase in hash rate and the price of bitcoins will not increase as the ROI windows will be so small that most people and that includes myself will be dumping BTC daily to recoup ROI.

I hope I'm wrong as I've ordered ASIC and taking a gamble, if I break even at the end than I'm happy as its a hobby in sort...

The difficulty won't rocket past the moon without the price heading back up.  Otherwise, who will be buying all the ASICs?  Why not just buy bitcoins?

As far as I can see by end of year any ASIC less than 100GH will be worth almost zero or maybe 1/10th to be nice as a resale value, diff will have sky rocketed beyond the moon

I was thinking the same thing - but I made my move - maybe its just me because I made a lot from BTC. I finally sold all of gpus today, and there was a lot, 85000 khs in litecoin power. I got ~40k euro for all (I wanted to sell it fast). What I paid for all was nearly a 90k. But you cant look at it that way. I made a fortune (sold btc at 100-200 euro), so what I lost on price is miserable. The bigger problem is that I lost 2 years of my life, no social life at all, only bitcoin and fate in bitcoin.

So what I am doing now is that I got 2 avalons left, and I will be most likely investing all the money I got from cards to USB erupters (at first I thought 300 pieces, but seems it will be much more). The math is the following

I had 85 GHS so far, pulling 32kW of power. For same money I can get 800 pieces of erupters, making 260GHS, and pulling 2kW of power. So it is a big move. Even in a year, erupters will be worth something, not much, maybe 10 euro each, but till then, they will double the investment, maybe quadrupple it (money wise), and what is more important, I can have my life back, sleep, and I dont have to fight the heat....

One USB erupter costs 50 euro make a hashrate of 7850 card that cost 130 euro.  If you calculate a year for these 2, the erupter wins however you do it. The difference between 120W and 2W is too huge for the graphics card to overcome

You can get them for 1.05 BTC ($81.37), if you know where to look. I just want to accumulate some coin and hold for the long run. Its a hobby for me and might make a nice profit, no one can predict future BTC prices and diff is bound to level off at some pont. I have a couple of BFL units oddered April 2013 amd a full of USB Block Erupters on the way, mainly for shits and giggles.

I like the fact that the Usb Block Erupters are low power. I have a media server that run 24/7 anyway.
Its easy to set up a Linux or Windows VM to run them, or stop running XBMC on my RPI and use it.