I was just looking at the KNC site for their various miners, the high end Jupiter model hashes 550 Ghash for $4,995.00 .
I'm telling you, DO NOT BUY ONE OF ANY MODEL!
Why? Simple economics. Run the numbers with me:
At current BTC difficulty of 267 million, you'll get 1.03 BTC per day. In a couple days when the difficulty jumps to ~400 million, you will only get 0.69 BTC per day. And it'll only get worse as the difficulty continues to rise!
BTC is at $215.00 right now, and assuming it stays there (which it won't), and assuming you are mining 0.69 BTC per day (which will fall more and more), you'd have to mine for at least 34 days to break even, and if the BTC price drops, it'll be much longer.
If BTC dropped to $100, and assuming again that you were still somehow getting 0.69 BTC at the 400 million difficulty, which will rise, your break even time is now 72 days or longer.
And this does not take into account shipping costs or electricity costs.
And WHEN the difficulty rises, it'll be much longer.
Do you really want to be on pins and needles for 3 months or more, praying that your foolish purchase at least breaks even, much less makes a profit?
Save yourself the headache.
If you're that desperate to throw money away, PM me for my PayPal address.
And I really had to LOL at how they list the Saturn version as the "more affordable" model. 50% of the hash rate for 60% of the price -- you're already losing money relative to buying the Jupiter version!
And this is not a rip on KNC specifically, this goes for any ASIC built by anyone.
heh this was a fun read in that my oct knc Jupiter has made 40 coins so far on slush (2/9/2014) and I expect to get 45 coins out of it lifetime more or less
there was a guy on knc forums it think it was got 10 knc jupiters (1 for free if you get ten) so a total of 11 Jupiters...he mortgaged the house I mean really really
drank the koolaide...he got his delivered about the same time as me...he has something like 500 plus btc by this point I'd imagine....probably will have 550 lifetime
take away elec costs etc...he is still probably sitting on 450 coins btc
ah crap ..I shoulda /coulda gone 'all in'
hindsight maybe 20/20 but I'd feel really 'sad' if I took the advice above back in the day....
as to the future of asic mining as of feb 2014...well maybe he was just ahead of his time on this post
Searing