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Pioneering Bitcoin hardware company to offer full refunds for all chip orders
- s_q_b 13y agoAre there any reliable Bitcoin ASIC providers at the moment? Butterfly Labs is shipping units now, but it's all in a trickle. Also, the difficulty rate is going to go way up once those machines come online. Seems like if you bought the FPGA miners at the right moment, you earned massive ROI, but that now the market's too mature and mining profits are in a race to zero. If bitcoin sticks around, mining is destined to become a large-scale low margin business, with companies with investing large amounts of CapEx into massive farms of specialized hardware, thus squeezing out the remaining profit through scale.
- mashmac2 13y agoASICminer (disclosure: I own shares in ASICminer) is shipping smaller miners, powered only by USB. Their larger miners aren't shipping yet in large numbers either. I agree, at some point this'll be a race to the bottom.
- s_q_b 13y agoVery cool space to be in. So what's the projected ROI on your units? Which of the units are shipping? (Caveat that you've got a vested stake understood.)
- nwh 13y agoNext to none. Their USB powered devices are really just-for-fun, and their larger modular blade systems will make a return on your investment of a few dollars- maybe. The company also keeps rapidly dropping the prices on their products faster than they can actually mine Bitcoin. 335MH/s with a draw of 2.5W at the current difficulty of 86,933,018 nets a gross earning of 0.0019BTC per day. Assuming a low power cost of 0.10c / kWH, you'd lose 0.01 USD to your bill, giving a net profit of 0.24 USD per day. Even at the current selling price of 0.10BTC, you're never, ever going to make a return. Disclosure: paid my rent by buying and reselling the USB devices.
- s_q_b 13y agoSince you have experience in this field, in your general opinion is there any financial opportunity in buying ASIC devices right now, or just in selling Levis to the prospectors by reselling the devices?
- nwh 13y agoIt's an obscenely high risk game (I wouldn't even call it an investment). There's possibility for a complete loss , mediocre return, or a low possibility of high gains. Everybody selling the hardware is against their own interests. If you had a machine that made money, you wouldn't want to sell it for less than your potential profit. Manufacturer wise they come in all shades of dodgy. BFL have such a long order book (year and a half at this point) that the devices they are delivering cost hundreds of thousands in BTC initially, and will never make even their own cost back. Avalon was initially making very profitable products, but suddenly stopped because well, their competition supposedly threatened them. ASICminer sells products that will never earn their cost back. KNCminer is unproven outside of a single FPGA prototype. Bitfury makes nice products and ships them on time, but they're hard to come by outside of Europe. All the others are either blatant scams or appear to be. It's an extremely touchy game to get involved with. I've read enough that I would never take the risk with any of these companies; people get screwed over time and time again. There's people who decided to take out college loans and buy miners with, which just sort of demonstrates the mindset you need if you want to "invest" here. Disclosure: I own one ASICminer device that I kept around to keep my Raspberry Pi busy.
- s_q_b 13y agoYeah, I'd be more in the "what the hell, let's buy one of these boxes because it's interesting tech" camp than the "falsify student loans" interest category.
- nwh 13y agoThere's people on Bitcointalk that will do you a USB Block for 0.10BTC and 0.05BTC shipping. Grab one or two and hash away. It's amazing just that such a small community can generate their own custom-made hardware.
- jared314 13y ago> If bitcoin sticks around, mining is destined to become a large-scale low margin business Large scale, yes. Low margin, no. The dedicated hardware will replace software mining, just like GPU mining replaced CPU mining. But, mining is only initially funded by the direct reward, and is meant to transition to a transaction-fee based reward structure. (It's like starting a fire with lighter fluid.) With the decrease in miners, increase in network transaction activity (and thus transaction fees), and a rise in the bitcoin's value, the people who invest in the network will get the most out of it. I think of it as aligning incentives.
- IanCal 13y agoI don't see how that contradicts the "low margin" part. If the hardware is reasonably available then anyone can buy it and start getting some transaction fees. This should drive the required fees down as people drop their prices to compete.
- caf 13y agoSince bitcoins can be transferred much more efficiently than electricity, eventually it makes sense for such large scale bitcoin producers to produce bitcoins on-site where cheap electricity is produced.
- mashmac2 13y agoNote: this is chip orders of 10,000+ only. Avalon shipped stand-alone Bitcoin miners (each with several hundred chips in them) several months ago.