Topic: High Efficiency FPGA & ASIC Bitcoin Mining Devices https://BTCFPGA.com - page 35. (Read 218494 times)

Any chance you could quote it?  I can't find it.

(also a "yes" answer is ambiguous to the question given.)

Wrong.

If you buy one, two or a hundred ASIC miners, the initial costs vs power consumption equation comes out exactly the same.  Small or large scale makes no difference at all.

What about these "3D transistors"?  Are you guys using them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigate_transistors#Tri-gate_transistors

I didn't make any assumptions on difficulty.  I fully agree with you there.  Plugging it in first of all matters, but the gold rush will be over in a few days.  Almost everyone buying ASIC miners will get them after the few first difficulty jumps, and probably after the block reward halving as well.

I do not agree that power costs matters as a competition factor between different current ASIC designs.  All are going to be within the same order of magnitude.  If it takes 25 years to spend as much on power for the product as you spent for the product itself, the price of the product is all that matters.  In 25 years the next generation graphene ASICs will make the current ones compare to CPU mining in 2013.

Power costs is only a concern for miners using old technology.  ASIC miners only have to worry about price per Ghash/s, because power costs will be negligible compared to their initial investment.

Why would he do that? He's already got them beat on MHs/$.

+1 No one's saying it's not more profitable to pay for less electricity, it's just not a deal-breaker for most. Compared to the BFL Single, the bASIC is 90% of the hashrate at 82% of the cost. In the long run, power usage can make up for this discrepancy, but it won't be by much, and hopefully by then both pieces of hardware will have been paid back.

Makes me think. If Tom really wanted to throw a wrench into the debate, he'd drop his unit price by say 25% - 50%.

||bit

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.

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.

EDIT: The 57 GH/s number should be 54 GH/s. The differences of annual profit are actually two times greater: $454 and $44.
The annual profit I'd calculated as if both devices use the same power (60 W for both), so I shouldn't call it "net".

It is Friday. I didn't bother to read any of the posts that weren't Tom's but I gather the big announcement with power consumption estimates, process specifications and board renders didn't happen? Had a reminder set on my calendar but I wasn't sure if that date had changed? Gave up trawling this thread for information due to all the trolling by BFL.

+1, seriously, if I were Josh's boss I would fire him right away. All this is doing is making BFL look like a giant douche.

Having free power, it'd be nice if there was an ASIC that was grossly inefficient but had great $/MHash

Depends on other factors as well, delivery time being the biggest. Cablepair has said he could do up to 1000 units in the first batch the he planned to have shipping the week after Thanksgiving, and as far as I know that number hasn't been reached yet. BFL has a much larger list of preorders; if an order placed today doesn't ship until January that's a pretty huge difference. If the bASIC is consuming 150W@54GH/s, and you got it Dec 1 vs Jan 1 for a BFL Single, you would make $284 in December assuming an average difficulty of 250TH/s. That's enough to pay for electricity @ 150W and $0.15/kWh for 17 months.

Other things to consider are the company's track record and what else is offered. If BFL's SC singles are anything like the FPGA ones, it's pretty likely that they'll look the nicest of the new generation products sitting on a desk, so that could be a factor for you as well.

Well summarized.

And mybe epoch is right and thinking too long term doesn't make sense and instead we should focus on Gh/$. What if you have similar Gh/$ offers? Wouldn't you go for the one with best Gh/W?

When your ceo is a convicted scammer of millions from elderly people, you can only expect the employees to behave similarly since their tactics seem to be effective in generating sales.

wow I haven't checked this thread in awhile, it's getting crazy! 

Not too long ago Josh "Inaba" must have figured out that BFL was a losing venture, and secretly resigned.  He then went to Tom and said, hey, can I work for you?

Tom said, sure.  Here's your first task.  Go into my forum and troll away.  Make it look like you're attacking me, but in reality you're discrediting BFL and making bASIC look good.

Only thing that makes sense really.

M

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).