

Bitcoin Mining Hardware + Discussion - dakrisht

I've been looking at Bitcoin in the past few days (haven't we all?) and wanted to open a discussion with some HN members on hardware, mining, and all the other fun stuff - exchanges and "bubbles" aside...<p>You have two key players in the bitcoin mining ASIC hardware space - Avalon and BFL - and they're both sold out of multiple "batches" of products.<p>I get the hype - people want to mine as many bitcoins as possible hoping that they actually have real-world monetary value one day.<p>But isn't the real money in this business in ASIC-based processor mining hardware? (At least, at the moment)<p>How difficult is to build these ASIC boxes?<p>As far as I can tell, the more people mining Bitcoin (with mining pools, GPUs, CPUs, etc.) the more complex the hashes become. So clearly, a few things will happen:<p>1) CPUs and GPUs will become obsolete (if not already) in mining bitcoins. Primarily because they would be incapable of producing enough Bitcoins in an efficient manner (due to the amount of power required for mining among other things)<p>2) ASIC boxes will rule - but the more ASIC boxes out there - the more difficult the hashes become and the more power it takes to successfully mine the coins.<p>I'm not sure if Bitcoin will have real-world value in comparison to paper currency (although maybe it already does considering Namecheap accepts bitcoin).<p>And certainly the best ways to get bitcoins are mining them - and it appears that ASIC hardware boxes are the way to do this.<p>I wonder how many players will be born in the ASIC bitcoin hardware market?<p>What are some thoughts on ASIC hardware, the bitcoin bubble, where this thing goes in the next 6-12-18-24 months, and just a general hacker discussion on this insanity...
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t0
It's almost too good to be true. How can this $274 box[1] make $60 a day[2]?
Why don't the guys making them just plug them in?

[https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage/5-gh-s-
bitcoin-m...](https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage/5-gh-s-bitcoin-
miner.html)

<http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator>

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dakrisht
Because the guys making them are making more money selling the boxes. BitCoins
have no value, really. So it makes sense. People doing whatever they can do
get their hands on BitCoin mining hardware is the play for these guys.

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Cardeck1
It is too late to buy ASICs now.Not only because people from batch #1 and #2
have a significant advantage but also because of the companies that already
have a lot of hashing power.

In 6 months assuming the batches are released and some companies build their
own massive mining centers, your ASIC will be useless...

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jacquesm
it's simple: the people that bought their ASICs in the first batches that
delivered made some more bitcoins by virtue of the difficulty not having
caught up to the new reality just yet. So they could mine a larger number of
coins in a shorter period. Once the difficulty adjusts they still have an edge
over those using fpga's, gpu's and possibly even some cpu's. But after the
bulk of the mining has shifted over to asics we're back exactly where we
started.

So this is just a short lived spike and then the situation will revert to
electricity cost plus.

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dakrisht
You make a good point, unless someone creates an ASICs machine that can
compute 10-20x the current hardware.

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jacquesm
There is a more or less automatic return to a state of equilibrium because
even if you came up with a way of advancing the state of the art by a factor
of 10 or 20 then sooner or later you'll be caught up by the rest. So the
window you've got to gain dominance is extremely short, both because the
bitcoin network will re-adjust for even your (percentage wise) small
contribution and the tech catch-up is not long behind. That's why most parties
that advance the tech chose to sell their findings rather than to capitalize
on them by mining. That way they get to recoup their investment faster than if
they'd be dependent on the window of opportunity afforded by advancing the
technology and mining.

~~~
dakrisht
I fully agree, but that won't stop the masses (average Joe reading about
BitCoin on TechCrunch) from plunking down $1-2k per box or 10 boxes to mine
BitCoins. I think these guys have a solid hardware play, irrespective of
reality.

