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Topic: High Efficiency FPGA & ASIC Bitcoin Mining Devices https://BTCFPGA.com - page 34. (Read 218469 times)

legendary
Activity: 3878
Merit: 1193
I just wonder what the PR jackknife will be like if the difficulty suddenly skyrockets on a mere 60GH rig. The electricity argument them becomes very valid in the immediate future rather than in the further future.

The current network is rougly 350 60GH rigs. For the energy costs to skyrocket, we'd have to see 35,000 new 60GH rigs come online! That ain't gonna happen in the immediate future. Energy costs are a distant 3rd priority, behind date of mining start and initial costs. By the time it does matter, next generation ASICs will take over.
legendary
Activity: 1890
Merit: 1003
No, just your assumptions on difficulty. I don't expect any of these 60 GH range ASIC products to make even $1000 in 2013 alone. By design, difficulty will always bring the cost-to-mine very close to power costs. When it catches up, power costs will be all that matters. Until then, delivery dates before it adjusts are the key importance.
Agreed.

The people who have the view that the power doesn't matter only have it because they have high profitability expectations.  The people saying that power is all that matters are expecting very long payoff horizons due to difficulty increases.  I think the latter view is safer and also more correct, especially if you're not counting on being very early in your deployment.

Which I think results is another interesting bit to take away from the discussion:   BFL is apparently not expecting their customers purchases to pay for themselves for quite a long time.   This is fine by me, as it's also what I expect— an I mine for fun and to support Bitcoin... but if you were thinking otherwise you might want to carefully review your expectations.

Although I generally try to take a conservative approach, in this particular case I would tend more towards the former idea: that power is not likely to play a significant role immediately (or more accurately, it is only PART of the equation). Rather, it is the ROI - Return On Investment - that matters. ROI takes into account both net income (from mining) and expenses (capital cost and running cost).

Consider this: I a purchased a mining device 6 months ago for $600 that generates $3/day and costs $0.25/day to operate. Assuming these numbers don't change over time, I can expect an ROI of about 220 days. Not bad.

Now consider a hypothetical device identical to the one above, except that it uses TWICE the power. Thus costing me $0.50/day to operate. Now instead of an ROI of 220 days I can expect an ROI of 240 days. A 10% increase. Is this significant? I would argue that it is not; there is little difference between 220 days and 240 days. Both are equally reasonable.

Let's take this further: if my running costs (electricity) ever became a SIGNIFICANT percentage of the mining income, I would stop mining altogether. I imagine many other miners would as well. For instance, back to my original device making $3/day and costing $0.25/day to operate : if difficulty went up so high to reduce my mining income to, say, $1/day, I would be unlikely to purchase another one. The ROI at that point would become too long (800 days) and it would not be worth buying such a device. Especially in an unstable and risky ecosystem as bitcoin.

So I don't believe that difficulty will ever rise to a level where running costs become a very significant percentage of the gross income; the ROI would simply become too long and many people would stop mining (or, perhaps more pragmatically, people would become increasingly unlikely to invest in new mining hardware, thus capping difficulty).
In this case, the first ASIC manufacturer to diversify into different cyrptocurrencies would have the edge in second and third gen mining devices.
legendary
Activity: 1890
Merit: 1003
No, just your assumptions on difficulty. I don't expect any of these 60 GH range ASIC products to make even $1000 in 2013 alone. By design, difficulty will always bring the cost-to-mine very close to power costs. When it catches up, power costs will be all that matters. Until then, delivery dates before it adjusts are the key importance.
Agreed.

The people who have the view that the power doesn't matter only have it because they have high profitability expectations.  The people saying that power is all that matters are expecting very long payoff horizons due to difficulty increases.  I think the latter view is safer and also more correct, especially if you're not counting on being very early in your deployment.

Which I think results is another interesting bit to take away from the discussion:   BFL is apparently not expecting their customers purchases to pay for themselves for quite a long time.   This is fine by me, as it's also what I expect— and I mine for fun and to support Bitcoin, and not because I'm expecting to make a a lot of funds doing it... but if you were thinking otherwise you might want to carefully review your expectations.

Of course, at the moment— there is still the potential of getting ASIC based miners before they are widely deployed and the difficulty catches up, so thats a competitive factor thats hard to reason about.  Though you can probably count on it not happening for you if you're last on a long preorder backlog…
+1

I agree with this. Seems they (BFL) don't expect the payoff to be very sudden.

I just wonder what the PR jackknife will be like if the difficulty suddenly skyrockets on a mere 60GH rig. The electricity argument them becomes very valid in the immediate future rather than in the further future.

The ultimate question is whether people will make their deadlines or not. I am thinking...not.
legendary
Activity: 3878
Merit: 1193
If you must write it off over e.g. three years, linearly for simplicity, you can add 27.78 USD to the monthly operating costs for a $1000 miner.  I have re-done your calculations below assuming three years useful life

I think a three-year lifespan for this first generation of ASICs is way too long. I would count on 1 year on average, 2 years at the longest.
sr. member
Activity: 315
Merit: 250
Official sponsor of Microsoft Corp.
Sorry for offtopic, but here is...

A bit of bitcoin pr0n from BFL blah blah

I hope Tom will come soon with good news (and pics!) too.
Actually - to be blunt - why are you posting BFL links in here?
Post them in the BFL thread.
That post is actually worthy of a warning IMO.
Lucky I'm not a mod (who edits my posts ...)
Sorry man, I'm Tom's customer and posted this just as first photo of ASIC board available. This also could bring this thread to the Top in the forum, I bet this is good for bASIC business.

Btw kano why not you rebel on the other topic derailments so far? Smiley
legendary
Activity: 4592
Merit: 1851
Linux since 1997 RedHat 4
Sorry for offtopic, but here is...

A bit of bitcoin pr0n from BFL blah blah

I hope Tom will come soon with good news (and pics!) too.
Actually - to be blunt - why are you posting BFL links in here?
Post them in the BFL thread.
That post is actually worthy of a warning IMO.
Lucky I'm not a mod (who edits my posts ...)
sr. member
Activity: 336
Merit: 250
Sorry for offtopic, but here is...

A bit of bitcoin pr0n from BFL http://bitcoinmagazine.net/butterfly-labs-releases-more-asic-photos/

I hope Tom will come soon with good news (and pics!) too.

Quote
In an upcoming article in our next issue of Bitcoin Magazine, Butterfly Labs, arguably the market leader of manufacturing and selling Bitcoin mining equipment, has released a sneak preview of their current state of development for their ASIC-based Bitforce SC line of computers, scheduled to be released in late November or December. As a sneak peek, we have two images for you.
Tom's current schedule says a release date around the last week of November...
This could get interesting  Wink
sr. member
Activity: 315
Merit: 250
Official sponsor of Microsoft Corp.
Sorry for offtopic, but here is...

A bit of bitcoin pr0n from BFL http://bitcoinmagazine.net/butterfly-labs-releases-more-asic-photos/

I hope Tom will come soon with good news (and pics!) too.
hero member
Activity: 637
Merit: 502
having a 7 digit ICQ number

My ICQ number was 4 digits (5xxx I can't remember exactly).
legendary
Activity: 966
Merit: 1000
I can't believe BFL's numbers at all if they're not on a substantially more efficient process than 130nm.

Would they be believable on a 65nm process?
Odi
member
Activity: 73
Merit: 10
I'm personally pre-ordered for the btcfpga devices (as well as avalon, which I expect to have similar economics)— but I expect to lose money on them, and I wanted to support secondary players. If they arrive early enough then even if the BFL's use a lot less power a faster arriving alternative still may have turned out to be a better buy. I expect major price wars in the future, and getting on a backlog list now sounds really unwise to me even ignoring BFL's long history of schedule slips (even on this product now).  (I don't begrudge them for this: doing this kind of small scale high tech stuff is hard... but it is what it is)

These are the two key points for me too:

I am not trying to make money on my pre-order of the bASIC.
I do not want to get on a huge backlog list as things will keep changing.

But most importantly, I also want to be a part of making history.  I was not born yet for the first personal computers.  But I look back nostalgically at using Juno for email access, having a 7 digit ICQ number, hashing with a Pentium III on SETI@Home / distributed.net, downloading Linux on the original bittorrent client, and waiting in line for the iPhone 3G on release day.

My bitcoin story is that I found out about it when GPU mining was already the norm and FPGA's were in pre-order, bought 2x5770's at clearance price (I was not willing to spend the money on an FPGA just to save some power), mined in a pool for a while, mined solo for a long time and forgot about it in the background, and now pre-ordering a 1st generation ASIC with 2 lucky blocks I found solo mining.  I don't plan on buying a mining farm, I just want to replace my 2x5770's with something that will remain useful for a few more years.
staff
Activity: 4242
Merit: 8672
In any case, my major point was that power really does matter— and I think either of these ways of reasoning shows that it does matter.
Using your assumptions that BFL is wrong and that you know bASIC's power figures that Tom hasn't released yet ...
Huh? No. Power matters no matter what sane figures you plug in to either my deprecation free model or sturles alternative. Depending on the power costs you assume you might find that bASIC comes out ahead, or you might find BFL does (which is what I expect based on my prior power estimates at 130nm). But it certainly matters as differences in the figure change which product is more cost effective.

300W?  So BTCFPGA is going to be 5x less efficient than BFL @ 60W?  That seems a little high to me, but maybe you know better than I do.  Let's see what cablepair says..
It's not surprising at all if they're on different process (or have made some improbable breakthrough against SHA256). And I can't believe BFL's numbers at all if they're not on a substantially more efficient process than 130nm.
legendary
Activity: 4592
Merit: 1851
Linux since 1997 RedHat 4
...
In any case, my major point was that power really does matter— and I think either of these ways of reasoning shows that it does matter.
...
Using your assumptions that BFL is wrong and that you know bASIC's power figures that Tom hasn't released yet ...
hero member
Activity: 518
Merit: 500
Manateeeeeeees
For the BTCFPGA:
 $1070 costs you $6.88/month in forgone investment income and $29.72/month in lost resale value.  For the BTCFPGA device to match the BFL operating cost ($ * 9/10 =36.60) under this model it must use less than 49.73 - 36.60 = $13.13 in power or 149.77 watts.

Due to lower initial investment per Ghash, the BTCFPGA is still the most profitable at more than twice the power consumption, assuming a three year useful life for both devices.  (Power consumption becomes more important with increasing expected lifetime, but one should not forget Moore's Law.)

They _tie_ at 149.77 under your deprecation schedule. I will be quite surprised if it comes in that low— a more reasonable number would probably be on the order of 300w.  And the deprecation schedule should properly be somewhat longer for the BFL device: Since alternatives on smaller process that use less power would be the major upgrade driver (assuming bitcoin doesn't go bust Tongue ). I'll have gotten almost two years out of my GPUs and I don't expect to see progress that rapid on the ASIC front, as we've vastly exceeded moore's law by moving to increasingly specialized hardware.

In any case, my major point was that power really does matter— and I think either of these ways of reasoning shows that it does matter. We can debate exactly how much it matters or if bASIC is tied or worse off¸ based on equipment deprecation which is anyone's guess... but at the end of the day delivery times and vibrant competition are more important factors.


300W?  So BTCFPGA is going to be 5x less efficient than BFL @ 60W?  That seems a little high to me, but maybe you know better than I do.  Let's see what cablepair says..
staff
Activity: 4242
Merit: 8672
For the BTCFPGA:
 $1070 costs you $6.88/month in forgone investment income and $29.72/month in lost resale value.  For the BTCFPGA device to match the BFL operating cost ($ * 9/10 =36.60) under this model it must use less than 49.73 - 36.60 = $13.13 in power or 149.77 watts.

Due to lower initial investment per Ghash, the BTCFPGA is still the most profitable at more than twice the power consumption, assuming a three year useful life for both devices.  (Power consumption becomes more important with increasing expected lifetime, but one should not forget Moore's Law.)

They _tie_ at 149.77 under your deprecation schedule. I will be quite surprised if it comes in that low— a more reasonable number would probably be on the order of 300w.  And the deprecation schedule should properly be somewhat longer for the BFL device: Since alternatives on smaller process that use less power would be the major upgrade driver (assuming bitcoin doesn't go bust Tongue ). I'll have gotten almost two years out of my GPUs and I don't expect to see progress that rapid on the ASIC front, as we've vastly exceeded moore's law by moving to increasingly specialized hardware.

In any case, my major point was that power really does matter— and I think either of these ways of reasoning shows that it does matter. We can debate exactly how much it matters or if bASIC is tied or worse off¸ based on equipment deprecation which is anyone's guess... but at the end of the day delivery times and vibrant competition are more important factors.
hero member
Activity: 631
Merit: 500
Here's a visual representation for what different wattage will do to income over time


@ 200W you stop making money at 100X difficulty (assuming $0.24 / KWh and 25BTC/block @ $12/BTC)
@ 60W you stop making money at 1000X difficulty (assuming $0.24 / KWh and 25BTC/block  @ $12/BTC)

So it depends on how long you're looking out or how fast you think difficulty will grow.

legendary
Activity: 1437
Merit: 1002
https://bitmynt.no
[...]
But how do we compare an operating cost with one-time cost? Trying to figure in lifetime costs creates confusion because we don't know what the devices lifetime is: we don't know how long it will last, how long until 13nm ASICs, when really clever SHA256 optimizations make it obsolete, or what its resale value would be. So instead lets use the opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is especially useful when the good in question is durable and can be resold later at a stable price, which may not apply here but it frees us from having to pick a bunch of debatable parameters.

Lets say you have $1000. You could buy a miner or you could put it in another investment, so one way to look at the price of a miner is the forgone income which you could have received by doing something else with it.  8%/yr is a common used figure for very long term average stock market returns, so lets use that.
[...]
You can sell those stocks at any time, and your calculations make the assumption that you will be able to sell the miner again at the same price as you bought it for at any time.  I don't think that is a realistic assumption.  If you must write it off over e.g. three years, linearly for simplicity, you can add 27.78 USD to the monthly operating costs for a $1000 miner.  I have re-done your calculations below assuming three years useful life:

For the BFL:
 $1300 costs you $8.36/month in forgone investment income and $36.11/month in lost resale value. At 60 watts it takes 43.83 KWH/month, or $5.26 at .12/KWH to power.  Only 11% of the monthly cost ($49.73) is power.

For the BTCFPGA:
 $1070 costs you $6.88/month in forgone investment income and $29.72/month in lost resale value.  For the BTCFPGA device to match the BFL operating cost ($ * 9/10 =36.60) under this model it must use less than 49.73 - 36.60 = $13.13 in power or 149.77 watts.

Due to lower initial investment per Ghash, the BTCFPGA is still the most profitable at more than twice the power consumption, assuming a three year useful life for both devices.  (Power consumption becomes more important with increasing expected lifetime, but one should not forget Moore's Law.)
legendary
Activity: 4592
Merit: 1851
Linux since 1997 RedHat 4
Let's assume bASIC 57GH/s uses 180 W.
[...]

Uhh. If you want to do conservative figures— which you ought to if you're trying to convince other people since non-conservative figures will be ignored— you should be using about 3-4x that power consumption. I'd potentially be willing to entertain bets that no 54GH/s device is ever going to exist on 130nm at that level of power consumption, but regardless, it's certainly not a conservative number.
...
Just thought I'd quote that little gem of ... hmm not quite sure what to call it Smiley

...
At $0.12/kwh the btcfpga would need to cost draw no more than 139.87 watts (which isn't going to happen) or the price would have to be _negative_ to make it more attractive than a 60w/60GH device. At $0.04/kwh (about as low as it goes in the US), it could use as much as 311 watts before you should ask to be paid to run one.
...
Ooh another one Smiley

...
It was an analysis like this that convinced me to not produce a ASIC miner myself on 130nm over a year ago. It would have been a bit win IF I was one of only a few to do it. I estimated the odds of someone doing a miner on better process (which was a bit too costly and risky for me to undertake personally) as too great to justify because once they were available they'd be much more competitive than 130nm. I still have a hard time really believing that BFL's products are going to be real and meet their claims, but assuming that they are Inaba is right about his power arguments but at the moment it's all about shipping times.  Six months from now this market may be radically different.
And a 3rd one to add to that.

Well the delivery dates aren't all that far away 1-2 months ... so will be interesting to see if you got anything correct ...

Though I guess I have the risk of you deleting my post in the future as you have done before to other posts of mine ... twice ... under Luke-jr's orders ... or editing them which the evil space aliens told me you would do the last time I forgot to take my meds.
full member
Activity: 408
Merit: 101
🦜| Save Smart & Win 🦜
Let's see some illustrative calculations:

Let's assume bASIC 57GH/s uses 120 W.
The cost of electricity (say 0.11 $/kWh) is about $58 per year higher than that of BFL SC Single.
If one buy this instead of BFL SC Single, the price difference ($230) pays for the more power for 4 years.

Let's assume bASIC 57GH/s uses 180 W.
The cost of electricity (say 0.11 $/kWh) is about $115 per year higher than that of BFL SC Single.
If one buy this instead of BFL SC Single, the price difference ($230) pays for the more power for 2 years

Let's assume the difficulty is 10 times greater than now (10 x 3054627), one block gives 25 BTC, and 1 BTC is $12.61.
In unlikely case of being them constant for a year, the Single net annual profit is 4488 $/year and bASIC net annual profit is 4261 $/year.
The difference is... $227. Interesting coincidence. (I didn't set the BTC price, it was left in my BTC calculator from two weeks ago.)
For 100 times greater difficulty the yearly net profits difference is $396 - $374 = $22.

I believe the differences are way below an error coming from uncertainty (of tech specs, of difficulty changes, of price changes, etc.).
The date when the mining starts is surely the most important factor.

This is a good post.  When the power cost is small compared to the hardware cost, it becomes a negligible consideracion. In GPU mining power cost was important because one would expect to pay several times the electricity over the cost of a graphic card, especially in the case of cheaper GPUs. Obviously these untra efficient Asics are very pricey compared to how much one is going to end up paying for electricity so unless bAsics consume 10 times the wattage of a BFL Single this is not going to be an issue. More important is the release date and price per GH as others have said. Another considerations above power usage is modularity and ease of set up, and of course custormer service and miner support.
staff
Activity: 4242
Merit: 8672
Let's assume bASIC 57GH/s uses 180 W.
[...]

Uhh. If you want to do conservative figures— which you ought to if you're trying to convince other people since non-conservative figures will be ignored— you should be using about 3-4x that power consumption. I'd potentially be willing to entertain bets that no 54GH/s device is ever going to exist on 130nm at that level of power consumption, but regardless, it's certainly not a conservative number.

Though the below analysis shows that even using 150w it's not super attractive.

All the people claiming power matters aren't showing the math. Power only matters at end-of-life. GPUs are still profitable today. Initial cost and starting date are the biggest factors.
Uh.  GPUs are power substantially power cost dominated now.

Lets go through the math:

The equilibrium for mining profits is
Code:
(17179869184*diff*kwh)/(719989013671875*exc*mhj)=1
exc = BTC/$ exchange rate, we'll use 11
mhj = MH/joule, lets use 2 (which is conservative as hell: it's the best gpu figure, and ignores cooling costs)
diff = difficulty, currently 3072321.73202076
kwh = $/KWH

So right now, that means that breakeven is at $.30/KWH. Anyone paying that much or more for power is losing money on GPU mining— thats most (all?) of germany, brazil, most of california (the initial rate is lower, but the marginal rate is higher) and some other places. The US average is $0.12/KWH.  At that price power consumption is _40%_ of your mining income.

Thats where GPUs are today and I believe that the deployment of hashrate is somewhat retarded by expectations around asics: People would buy _more_ GPUs and FPGAs and mining would be even less profitable but they're waiting on ASIC products and they're anticipating the halving.  I don't see any reason to assume the stable point for difficulty vs power to be more profitable in the future than it is now.

Regardless.... It's better if we compare these things without caring with the difficulty will do, since future difficulty just adds a lot more debate to the question.

But how do we compare an operating cost with one-time cost? Trying to figure in lifetime costs creates confusion because we don't know what the devices lifetime is: we don't know how long it will last, how long until 13nm ASICs, when really clever SHA256 optimizations make it obsolete, or what its resale value would be. So instead lets use the opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is especially useful when the good in question is durable and can be resold at any time at the same price, so every day you're effectively making the same decision to keep the device or not, which may not apply here but it frees us from having to pick a bunch of debatable parameters.

Lets say you have a stack of cash. You could buy a miner ASIC or you could put it in another investment, so one way to look at the price of a miner is the forgone income which you could have received by doing something else with it.  8%/yr is a commonly used figure for very long term average stock market returns, so lets use that.

8% per year is 0.6434% per month.

For the BFL:
 $1300 costs you $8.36/month in forgone investment income. At 60 watts it takes 43.83 KWH/month, or $5.26 at .12/KWH to power.

For the btcfpga:
 $1070 costs you $6.88/month in forgone investment income. It's also only advertised as having 9/10th the performance.

So for the btcfpga device to match the BFL operating cost (($8.36 + $5.26) * 9/10 =$12.258) under this model it must use less than 12.258-6.88 = $5.378 in power or 61.35 watts. This isn't going to happen. (And I'm a little shocked by how low BFL's claimed power is...).

This tradeoff depends on power costs, So the formula under this model is:
Code:
((1300*.006434)+(730.5*60/1000*kwh))*(54/60)=(1070*.006434)+(730.5*cpwatts/1000*kwh)
 which we can rearrange to:
kwh = 6434 / (7305 * cpwatts - 394470)
So at 300w your power must cost only $.00358/kwh for them to match, or $.009/kwh for 150 watts.

So I suppose it could be a good deal for people who wouldn't pay for a few hundred watts of additional power (e.g. flat rate rent), or for people who could otherwise make use of the waste heat and only have electrical heating available. Of course, for those people it really is only about the initial cost... at least up to the power consumption level that they can get for 'free'.

We could instead solve for the initial price needed to make it match:
Code:
price=-(365250*kwh*cpwatts - 19723500*kwh - 3763890)/3217

At $0.12/kwh the btcfpga would need to draw no more than 139.87 watts (which isn't going to happen) or the price would have to be _negative_ to make it more attractive than a $1300/60w/60GH device. At $0.04/kwh (about as low as it goes in the US), it could use as much as 311 watts before you should ask to be paid to run one instead of a BFL. At $0.04/kwh and 150 watts the price would need to be $734 or less to make it more attractive.

Of course, all of this analysis can be largely mooted by a small difference in shipping times, failures of BFL to live up to their specs, or CP's device beating its specs.

I'm personally pre-ordered for the btcfpga devices (as well as avalon, which I expect to have similar economics)— but I expect to lose money on them, and I wanted to support secondary players. If they arrive early enough then even if the BFL's use a lot less power a faster arriving alternative still may have turned out to be a better buy. I expect major price wars in the future, and getting on a backlog list now sounds really unwise to me even ignoring BFL's long history of schedule slips (even on this product now).  (I don't begrudge them for this: doing this kind of small scale high tech stuff is hard... but it is what it is)

Plug in your own discounting rate for the costs of assets, but you'll reach the same conclusion for any reasonable value.

It was an analysis like this that convinced me to not produce a ASIC miner myself on 130nm over a year ago. It would have been a bit win IF I was one of only a few to do it. I estimated the odds of someone doing a miner on better process (which was a bit too costly and risky for me to undertake personally) as too great to justify because once they were available they'd be much more competitive than 130nm. I still have a hard time really believing that BFL's products are going to be real and meet their claims, but assuming that they are Inaba is right about his power arguments but at the moment it's all about shipping times.  Six months from now this market may be radically different.

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