Lets be honest here, if you do the calculations almost all the 1th/s machines going for around $4k don't even give you a break even after two months. Ive been researching this stuff the past two weeks and I cant seem to find anything that looks like a solid investment. Is anyone seeing any chips produced for 20nm, 18nm, 15nm or 10nm asics? Also wondering if anyone is seeing any silicon Photonics type chips that might offer improvement on hash efficiency? It just seems like the difficult and value is outpacing the available hardware in the market. I've seen http://minerscube.com/ and it seems like a scam. Can anyone confirm this? Also, wondering if anyone has engineered their own asic chips, PCB and controller etc.? If so did you see much of a price drop from the margins these custom mining machine builders are out making margins on? Any input and constructive feedback will be very much appreciated.
Oddly enough I was writing about ASICs yesterday :-) http://hashingit.com/9-where-next-for-bitcoin-mining-asics. There's unlikely to be anything smaller than 20 nm this year and the value of Bitcoin ASICs are unlikely to be anything like large enough to get the fabs interested until they have a lot of capacity. 10nm is at least another 2 years after that (70% shrinks take 2 years). Even when they do happen though there's not going to be anything like the same jumps in performance that the shift to 28 nm devices has seen. ASIC designers are going to have to get much more creative and that will increase their design times and costs.
