Yea, but check out the new price on the L3+
$462?
I smell a "new node" Gigahash Bitmain miner announcement in June for Scrypt.
Guess they got tired of being beat on efficiency by the A4 and matched/beat by the L21 - or more likely slowing sales of the S9 have left them some "available space" to order current-node chips for something else they've been working on for a while.
Dam $462, that might be the sign of the last squeeze before a new scrypt miner announcement. Getting every last drop. I guess not so bad with a coupon i mean even at a 100% loss its doable for someone looking to mess around with a miner.
It's significantly better than a D3 or V9 based off current earnings for both miners (through Nicehash's calculator) at $0.10/kWh (both are in the red), no ASIC Bitmain currently offers really beats the L3+ at this price point. Wouldn't be a bad miner to introduce people to mining or how to set up miners in general, and at lower electrical costs this thing could potentially be quite profitable. Plus these things are supposed to deliver in just a week or two, not bad at all.
I also agree there's got to be a new Scrypt miner coming from Bitmain soon- there's no reason that they'd drop prices this steeply without something new coming soon.
Since we are already so far off track, I just noticed the X3 has sold out as well. Could just be Bitmain removing all stock on their site, I find it unlikely that anyone would buy that $2000 heater that also happens to ship in May.
I'm more worried about another BIG hashrate jump, like the one Litecoin had in mid-December where total network hashrate almost DOUBLED in a bit over a week.
Even without factoring "new miner" and that big hashrate jump into the equation, and just looking at average hashrate growth this year, I'm not sure if a L3+ will pay itself off before it become uneconomic to operate even at the new low price and MY very low electric cost.
Looking at Bitcoinwisdom's difficulty chart, it seems you are right about difficulty growth- I haven't checked in with LTC difficulty in a while, and even in a theoretical situation where a new miner isn't even introduced, the difficulty on the chain could double in just around three months (and historically speaking again, it has), and considering Bitmain's practices with releasing ASICs difficulty could be in a position to skyrocket once more when they release a new Scrypt miner. The 4-5 month return given by Nicehash seems like a mirage given these factors.
If coupons are applicable for these units (I'm not completely sure if they are, IIRC you can only use $200s or something of the sort), the prices still go down to ~$300-350 with a PSU. It's not a large amount of money lost if you don't make all your money back, but overall I do agree there is some risk involved in buying an L3+ right now.
Its not just more algos thx to gpus but also they have some kind of resale value unlike asics and you get at least 2 year warranty....