I think we are going to see some record breaking dividends in the coming months, due to mining and sales of block erupters.
Here are 2000 of the USBs recently sold, shipped to the other side of the Earth, and in the process of being delivered to group buyers:
The Great Wall from China: These miners were paid for and shipped within a matter of days-- there is currently no other company out there that is able to do this on this scale. And ASICminer's costs to continue to mass produce these is only going to decrease from this point, making it all the harder for their competitors.
1 BFL Minirig is equivalent to about 1500 USB Block Erupters and they've been shipping for a good few weeks now. While these machines may have been ordered lasy year, it does not change the fact that they are coming online on a daily basis. It's amazing how some people can simply dismiss reality.
I ran the numbers the other day for the hashing power shipped out by AM based on the financial report which I will repost below.
USB devices initially cost 1.99 BTC and were later reduced to 0.99 BTC. With discount for bulk orders, the lowest price was 0.89 BTC. If every USB device sold at 1.99 BTC, then that's 18,856 units. If every USB device sold at 0.89 BTC, then that's 42,161 units. At 336 Mh/s per unit, USB Block Erupters make up between 6.336 Th/s and 14.166 Th/s.
There were 3 auctions for blades.
The
first auction sold 2 for 76 BTC and 8 for 75 BTC. That's a total of 10 for 752 BTC.
The
second auction sold 50 for a total of 2578 BTC.
The
third auction sold 180 blades at a fixed price of 49.99 BTC each for a total of 8,998.2 BTC
So, 240 Blades were sold in the 3 auctions for a total of 12,328.2 BTC. By subtracting this value from the Blade Sales Income value, we get the following:
29,594.75 - 12,328.2 = 17,266.55 BTC
which is the amount of income from regular sales, with Blades costing 49.99 each or 47.99 with bulk discount. If every Blade sold at 49.99 BTC, then that's 345 units. If every Blade sold at 47.99 BTC, then that's 359 units. That puts the total number of Blades sold between 605 and 619 units. At 10.752 Gh/s per unit and 619 units, the total hashing power is 6.655 Th/s.
The total hashing power from USB BEs and Blades combined is between 12.991 Th/s and 20.821 Th/s.