Aren't you guys worried about never paying off your wonderfully efficient FPGAs due to Largecoin/ ASICs?
Why would that happen? FPGAs are well within profitable operating range. Even at high electricity prices, the operating expense is just like 10% of the mining income. So unless the difficulty explodes by a factor of ten, this would just delay the payoff.
In order to double difficulty you'd have to invest like $15M into largecoin units. In order to make FPGAs unprofitable you'd have to invest like $150M, and your own payoff would take ages as well, even assuming you control 90% of BTC production (at the current exchange rates, and if those increase you'd have to invest even more to kick the FPGAs out) that would take like 15 years, not counting interest rates.
FPGAs are certainly a threat to GPUs these days, but ASICs aren't one to FPGAs because of the similarly high investment cost (which becomes the dominating factor instead of operating expense, as for the GPUs).
Thank you, I'm now planning to buy some FPGAs. Just not sure which one. I don't want to wait forever and end up paying high duty fees here in Europe for those coming from USA. Aren't their european/chinese alternatives? Anyway, will read some more.
Yeah, ztex. I think they are in Germany.
