Topic: here's just how screwed ASIC buyers are - READ THIS if you have a preorder (Read 23372 times)

Wow, who gimbled your mimsy?

dude nice  waster of bableber there

bfl has 75k chips in preorder with is like 700th  with avalon prime etc its 1000th  payd for already

aka ul be making  2 cois a day with a minirig

i think thats somes up ur monolouge

Hey ASIC pre-order people, you're screwed Here's why:

#'s have been corrected with more accurate info.  Unfortunately not much has changed

I've been going around trying to get more exact numbers from the major ASIC manufacturers and so far they don't even seem to know how many preorders they have   So we're going on ballpark estimates and rumors.  Many weeks ago, BFL had stated they have 7000 pre-orders total.  I heard from several other users that it's now stated to be 14,000, but taking into consideration other things, it's now much lower.  Let's say 5000.

Let's be conservative yet realistic and say that that's 4800 Jalapenos, 150 singles, and 50 mini-rigs.  That's 16,800 GH/s + 9,000 GH/s + 75,000GH/s =  100.8TH/s.

BTCFPGA's line of products:  They're the only other ones expected to ship before 2012 concludes so they've got to be a pretty good target.  Rumor has it, they're around 400 so let's go with that and split em between their 2 product levels.  That = another 16.2 TH/s.

The Avalon allegedly has a lot more than I thought despite shipping in fairly late 2013, like 3-4 months after their competition at which point ASIC mining will be extremely hard to profit form.  Well, they have some special 300 pricing but haven't hit it yet so let's say 150. That's another 9 TH/s.

So that's 126 TH/s total added in just preorders.

The number of people willing to risk lots and lots of money on a preorder for an experimental device from somewhat sketchy companies is definitely less than the number of people who will buy mining hardware soon after it's released to the public and proven to work for at least a short period of time.  I'd say it's 5:1 but let's go conservative and say for every 1 preordering daredevil, there are 2 people that will buy the hardware once it actually comes out and works.  Also they'd obviously be more inclined to buy higher end hardware than the Jalapenos for example once there's practically 0 risk (post-release) but once again, let's go conservative with a best case scenario and not adjust for that.  So with my numbers, that's another 252 TH/s for a total of 378 TH/s.

And the current total computational of the network is around 22.5TH/s.

So, since difficulty and price all scale evenly with each other, I can do this in any order.  A BFL jalapeno runs at 3.5GH/s and at the last price I recall from MTGox ($12.80 USD per BTC) and the current difficulty, that will pay for its $149 price tag in 11.19 days.  Not bad!  HURRAY, let's all pre-order!  Hell no, keep reading, lol.

By the time ASICs are released, 25BTC instead of 50 will be the mining reward per block and I think we all know the price won't magically jump to 2x overnight so let's go ahead and double that.  That's a 22.38 day payoff.  Now let's add all those new miners and readjust for the resulting difficulty increase of approx 16.8x, and you'll pay off your Jalapeno in 376 days which means you're making $0.40 USD per day.  That's all assuming that from release time to about 1-2 months afterwards, nobody ever buys another ASIC miner for that entire 376 days.  Let's factor back in future sales rates and....you're not going to pay it off, lol.  So let's say my numbers or estimates are somehow drastically off and give it a + or - 70% accuracy variance.  That results in...you still being screwed, lol.

Good luck with that!

Since ASICs are finally *shipping* (I guess?) should we update this with new calculations?

I'd be curious to know more actual payoff examples and how people come up with their network hashrate figures, etc...  I saw the graphs in the other thread just need more reasoning!

If someone ends up sitting on your 'asic pre-order' for several years before getting something out the door which is pretty capital intensive and at least as high-risk as Bitcoin itself...you deserve to be screwed.

...

Now, if you just joined teh mining community and blindly bought GPUs and FPGAs when everybody was talking about ASICs and how they are x100 times more efficient ... you deserve to be screwed.

(especially since ASICs keep being postponed, lol).

I disagree with the idea that GPU miners 'can't be screwed' by ASIC investment.  I'm guessing you mean GPU miners who already broke-even and are re-investing profit.  But by no means does this apply to all GPU miners - i) because they may have been late to come on board and are yet to break even; ii) because they may be investing way more than they've profited, out of overconfidence arising out of profitability to date, out of fear of being left behind or simply because they conclude it's a good time to be risking more.

... so you can't actually compare the two because the GPU miners have that headstart. So they can't be screwed. Perhaps the GPU miners that just jumped into mining ...

While I agree that ASIC purchases are a sizable risk, those early adopters that chose the right supplier could potentially receive a large payoff for their gamble and that to me made the risks worthwhile.

How are they in trouble? Most GPU miners have mined more Bitcoin than the average ASIC miner ever will.

Though I agree with the rest of your argument, I don't agree with this statement. If we're talking riskiness (on a scale of 1 [least] to 5 [more] risk), then I'd scale it like this:
CPU - 1
GPU - 1
FPGA - 4
ASIC - 5

The reasoning behind this is because CPUs and GPUs can easily be used for other things besides mining. It was [is] super easy to just set up some software and mine with whatever current hardware you have in your system. Even if you invested quite a bit into GPUs specifically for mining, you can still quickly and easily resell the hardware when you're done with it because it serves secondary purposes.

FPGAs can still be used in other situations besides mining, but they require quite a bit of work to reprogram them for another task.
ASICs, on the other hand, serve one purpose. If they're developed specifically for hashing on the bitcoin network, then they will be completely useless if bitcoin disappears. Reselling them requires pandering to a specific niche market.

Though I agree with the rest of your argument, I don't agree with this statement. If we're talking riskiness (on a scale of 1 [least] to 5 [more] risk), then I'd scale it like this:
CPU - 1
GPU - 1
FPGA - 4
ASIC - 5

The reasoning behind this is because CPUs and GPUs can easily be used for other things besides mining. It was [is] super easy to just set up some software and mine with whatever current hardware you have in your system. Even if you invested quite a bit into GPUs specifically for mining, you can still quickly and easily resell the hardware when you're done with it because it serves secondary purposes.

GPU miners took a big risk by investing time and money into this project at an early stage.

That's exactly what I understood. And that's the reason you're not comparing apples with apples. GPU miners were the early adopters and had an "unfair" advantage that ASIC miners will never be able to catch up with.

Maybe you don't understand the comparison then. I am just wondering why or how a GPU miner who thinks that "ASIC is screwed" is in trouble. As I said, most GPU miners have already mined (lots of) Bitcoins. ASIC miners have not. GPU miners were the real early adopters and ASIC miners are the wanna-be early adopters (caveat: an overlap will exist). On average total earnings of an ASIC miner will never exceed that of a GPU miner.

Why even bother with bitcoins..... shove your money into the stock-market for the day when you see an opportunity.