Topic: Is it even worth it to buy/order an ASIC single now? - page 4. (Read 13879 times)

1) Wel maybe ONE picture of some kind off production line would say more to me then all these words..

2) This is so true 2 me... 

With a 10x increase in difficulty and a 50% pay cut. You'd still make a profit in a reasonable time frame with asic

You're going from 350mhash/s for 150$ to 3.5ghash/s for 150$.

Just multiply everything by 10 and you'll get a good idea of what the network will look like. Total hash rate would be somewhere around 200 teraflops.

350mhash/s now pays out about .1 bitcoins per day (give or take). That would be reduced to 0.01 bitcoins and divide that in half for the block decrease to make it 0.005 bitcoins per day.

3500mhash/s now would pay out about 1 bitcoin per day (give or take). That would be reduced to 0.1 bitcoins and divide that in half for the block decrease which makes it 0.05 bitcoins per day. That's 18.25 bitcoins per year x 4 years to give 73 bitcoins (during the 25 coins per block period). Assuming value stays the same you would have gone from 150$ input to 875$ a profit of nearly 600% in 4 years (at 12$/coin). So, I'm not sure why you're saying that you only have a "fighting chance". Or are you expecting to get a return on investment of 1 day?

It's also logical with the reduction in circulation that the exchange rate of coins will increase. I would not be surprised to see the exchange rate at 25$/coin (steady).

So uh, if you get some asics going now. You're good for the next 8 years or so while it's 25coins/block and you can continue mining at 12.50 a block and earn some additional profit on an investment that was already paid off long ago.

As long as nothing happens to sha256 itself (vulnerabilities) you can also switch over to another block chain. I would not be surprised to see an inflationary coin network pop up. The deflationary nature of bitcoin doesn't really make much sense from an economics perspective. Unless of course you wanted a deflationary system so you could get the original coins and cash them out when it's 100$/coin. I would favor a chain with a steady 2% per year inflation on the chain. (10% increase in bitcoins per block every 5 years or so.) To me, I find it more logical to have a block chain that increases its supply with age so that as the population of users grows, so do the amount of coins available. A steady increase in the coin supply would also help the "lost accounts". I myself accidentally lost a wallet containing 5 btc never to be heard from again. (Accidentally deleted my old windows install before copying my wallet files over ) Not to mention the other inherent flaws (such as the large transaction database).

No, don't buy one. When you use one, the difficulty goes up for me. I am selfish.

I had an nvidia miner @ 20mhash/s get lucky the other day and score a block.

Then you aren't middle class.

If you're looking to make a profit off a bitcoins why would you even bother with nvidia? It's only worthwhile if you've got 1000 of them and only if you dont need to pay for electric.

Yeah, just imagine the boost when webcam strippers/sex performers get wind of bitcoin!  BOOM!

I look at it this way: can you afford not to?

What we should be worried about is a post initial delivery flood of ASICs.  Consider this.  Approx. 3 small time operations, 2-3 individuals each, outside of BFL contributed to FPGA options for Bitcoin mining.  Only two of the small FPGA operations will move to providing ASIC products.  These small operations will rely on electronics assembly companies to produce units in rather small batch quantities.

With BFL having confirmed 22 employees, purchasing PCB SMT assembly equipment typically found in high volume assembly, we must consider BFL's capital and operating expenses, their need to make a profit and what impact that will have on Bitcoin.

Once BFL's capital investments are recouped, e.g. assembly equipment and ASIC NRE, BFL will be free to produce ASIC's at an estimated cost of 10-20 USD, including the PCB and housing.  Then we should add on operating expenses such as labor, executive compensation, facilities, etc.

With all of this in mind the smart miner should keep in mind that Bitcoin is BFL's only market.  That said, with BFL's sole profit center being Bitcoin there is a large incentive for BFL to sell as many ASIC's as possible at whatever cost the market will bare.  The Bitcoin mining community may be faced with a harsh reality that BFL would be the only party that would make a profit with certainty.


BFL has advertised their high volume assembly as a boon to miners, so that they can get their hardware fast - now.  Looking forward, it is another indication to how BFL is poised to saturate the mining market at whatever price point.

edit:
If I did not already have BFL equipment on order I would not invest.  This seems to me to be a very questionable time in Bitcoin mining.

I agree with pretty much what everyone is saying...you have a couple of choices.

1) Buy some GPU cards and use them to mind with the intention to keep them for gaming or sell them to gamers later
2) Buy into ASIC now so you are not 6 months behind everyone else
3) Quit BitCoin and send me all your coins...

Choices...

The biggest unknown here is how quickly the ASICs ship.  If the majority of preorders (up until the end of October) can be filled within a few weeks then you have a fighting chance of recouping your investment.  Otherwise it's anyone's guess (and the odds aren't great).

Butterfly Labs says in its FAQ they're in the hardware business therefore don't keep the ASICs and mine for themselves.  Complete nonsense.  They're just following the age old example of gold rushes where the only people guaranteed to make a lot of money were the ones selling shovels, and other mining related hardware.  Most prospectors went away empty handed.

We're the miners and BFL is selling the shovels.

I usually use the calculator on the right side of this page: https://deepbit.net/stats
Also it's the pool I mine at

832 MH/s is the exact stated speed of an fpga single from BFL.  Their calc says 0.26BTC per 24 hours.  You can multiply that by 30 days and get 7.8.  To be super precise, instead multiple the MH/s by 30 so 7.89.  See, 0.09 extra due to an otherwise unknown rounding error

There is a huge market of gamers who would love to buy those cards used. They're still quite decent for gaming. The price might go down though sure.

I'm getting more than 3.5 per month on less than 800Mhs.  I wouldn't call 8 or 9 per month nothing.
Sam

Should be a bit more, like 8-9 bitcoins, but yeah. 800mh/s is nothing these days.

I'm a bit confused here.  Are you saying a current BFL single, which produces around 800Mhs, gets 3.5 bitcoins a month?

You know, it's strange to say "only the big guys will make money fast" seeing as how let's say 1 Jalapeno for $149 will pay for itself in 3 months after the difficulty goes through the roof.  Then 2 Jalapenos for $298 will pay for themselves in 3 months and so will 50 Jalapenos.

The reality is nobody is going to make money since they'll all screw each other over from driving the difficulty up Butterfly labs will make money though, lol.

I'd say go for it. Buy yourself a raspberry pi or similar low powered computer to operate it.
When ASICs will be available the network hash rate will double every few months for a year at least. I won't try to predict more than 1 year development. In july the estimated preordered mining hardware was 40 ths, twice the current or recent total network capacity. It seems reasonable to expect from BFL (or whoever moves first to market) that they would ship that much hardware to miners within few months.
let the back order queue be 6 months and will slowly decrease to 1-2 months (as observed with fpga bfl products).
if you keep it mining 24/7 since the purchase than you will have fun operating it and watching the payouts. A BFL singe mines 3.50 per month today. It was surely more in february and will be less in the future. jalapenos should perform as well. maybe the payout will decrease faster and never start at 3.50 in the first place, but you'll have fun for sure mining at home with a small number of units. choosing a pool, responding to incidents, watching mining luck & variance or not care about mining as long as it will just work.
I'd wait for first independent reports and then order.

The time for building a GPU rig has passed. You won't have enough time to recoup a fraction of your costs, and the market for used 5970s and 7970s is going to be flooded in about 2 months.

You got two months to put together gpu rigs for about 1500 and you can get some btc fast. Then sell the hardware to recoup some costs. If elect costs are low you will come out ahead.

well said Sam

Plus there is a whole Bitcoin economy out there waiting to be developed, plenty of money to be made in non-mining ways.

Cheers
Graet