so you get about 160 mh/s with one of these for what was it $450?? i dont understand how these are better than buying a graphics card for 150 and getting 350 mhs
Its a lot more complicated than that Arij!
Yes you are going to pay around $450 and get only 100-110 Mh/s it seems, thats almost 4x-5x more cost than buying GPU's. But these things are almost magic and this is why.
They connect via USB, So your rig can be anything that has a internet connection (and likely free..., This means no more $300 Power supplies. Hell you could run 10 of these cards on a old ATX 300 Power supply from a computer going to the landfill...)
They consume roughly 1/8th 1/10th the electricity. Perhaps less? So every month the power savings will slowly eat up the 'savings' you think you have buy buying a gpu.
You are wrong. For the majority of Bitcoin users who pay an average worldwide electricity rate of ~$0.10/kWh, buying a $450 FPGA board for only ~100Mh/s makes absolutely
no sense from a financial viewpoint, given the current Bitcoin difficulty/exchange rate ratio. You wrote your post based on feelings, not math. I encourage you to run the numbers yourself.
The only rational decisions for buying these FPGA boards are either (1) your power is a lot more expensive (2x or 3x more, eg. $0.20-0.30/kWh), or (2) you bet on the difficulty/exchange rate to sharply increase in the very short term, or (3) you are significantly power-constrained (eg. want to run a mining farm out of a small apartment).