

Butterfly Labs Announces Next Generation ASIC Lineup - mrb
http://news.yahoo.com/butterfly-labs-announces-next-generation-asic-lineup-054626776.html

======
Atropos
Interesting company / "press release". So their CTO is named "Nasser G", their
contact is named "Nick W". They have venture capital funding by an unnamed
"private equity group". According to their website, they are based in Kansas
City, Missouri but if you search the states business register there is no
"Butterfly inc." The trademarks “Butterfly Labs” and “BitForce SC” do not
exist in the USPTO database either...

Doesn't this seem a bit unusual for a company promising to deliver a $29,899
product?

~~~
mrkmcknz
<http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=141>

<https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=53530.0>

Doesn't look like the Bitcoin community ever received their first gen of
products.

~~~
mrb
Butterfly Labs is shipping real products. I personally own multiple units of
their first gen product, the "Single". Many in the Bitcoin community own them
as well:
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=70611.msg813386#msg8...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=70611.msg813386#msg813386)

That said, when Butterfly Labs pre-announced their Singles, it is true that
many thought it was a scam... until they delivered.

~~~
mrkmcknz
Did the performance and power consumption live up to the expectations?

~~~
mrb
They claim 832 Mhash/s at 80W for the Singles. And, yes, my units match these
characteristics.

It is worth pointing out that before they had a Single prototype, 6 months
ago, they had pre-announced 1000 Mhash/s at 20W... which turned out to be off
by 5x in terms of Mhash/Joule. I think there is a fair chance that this ASIC
pre-announcement will also fail to reflect the actual numbers. By how much?
Who knows.

------
tokenadult
Perhaps the greatest contribution the Bitcoin experiment will make to
humankind is to teach you and me and our neighbors more about the realities of
economics. Many of the ideas about how to mine Bitcoins, store Bitcoins, and
trade with Bitcoins as a medium of exchange illustrate both the strengths and
weaknesses of any other medium of exchange in a world full of human beings.
Seeing the discussion of Bitcoins here on Hacker News reminds me of the last
time that the price of gold (in United States dollars) crashed, and the
arguments beforehand that such an occurrence was impossible, for instance.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is still
an important principle of investment.

------
ippisl
I think they're using easic.com, which lets you build an ASIC(or something
reasonably close to an ASIC in price and performance), with small minimum
orders, and low cost design tools.

They start at minimum of 45 chips for 45K$ including the tools, and the price
gown down from there.

With the minimum quantities needed in order to justify manufacturing an high
end ASIC rising dramatically, this seems like something that would disrupt the
ASIC and some of the FPGA business.

------
DanBlake
I looked into bitcoin mining before as a possible hackish investment, but
there seemed to be anniversary where they made mining twice as hard. As it
stood when I checked it out (few months ago) you would only make a buck or two
a day with a top of the line graphics card, counting in cheap electricity but
NOT the price of the hardware. I cant imagine what happens if they continue
doing that (making it more difficult)

~~~
dekz
You're meant to move to making money from processing transactions than mining
for new coins, but that's still far from now.

~~~
rmc
That assumes BitCoin takes off and becomes popular. Which has not been the
case yet.

~~~
narcissus
How do we determine 'popular', though? According to
<http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/> there were 3.5M Bitcoins sent in the last
24 hours. MtGox has them at $6.50 each at the moment.

I wouldn't consider $22M worth of transactions in the last 24 hours
'unpopular'...

~~~
ErikHuisman
So, if i move my funds between bank accounts a few times a day i can create a
popular multi million euro economy? I don't think 3,5m * $6,50 is the correct
measurement of popularity.

~~~
narcissus
I guess if you think that people are just moving Bitcoins around to bump up
those numbers, then maybe it's not really measuring anything...

I honestly don't know the best way to measure popularity, but I'd love to hear
a good way to do so. Until then, well, for me at least, that seems to be the
best way to try and work it out. How else do you judge popularity of a
currency other than by how much it's being used?

~~~
Retric
Popularity relates to total value so ~9million coins * 6$ a coin = 54 million
in total value which is minuscule in therms of global finance. But, number of
places you can spend it also counts and there is just not many places selling
bit-coins. Even though it would seem like an easy way to launder drug money
it's still just a toy.

~~~
narcissus
I don't want to sound as though I'm arguing for arguments sake, and I really
have no dog in this fight. But using the argument of 'size in terms of global
finance' would surely render most currencies other than say USD, the Euro and
a couple of Asian currencies as 'not popular', wouldn't it?

To be honest, I look at the total above of $54M and think "transactions over
24 hours worth $22M for a currency whose entire value is $54M... that seems
liquid at least" (for my pathetic understanding of economics). To me, it seems
as though there is a lot of activity within the currency itself, which to me
says its popular in the circles that use it. Arguing that it's not popular
because of its size, despite the activity, would probably mean that something
like the New Zealand dollar would be unpopular. But again, I bet that most
NZers would disagree.

So then it just comes full circle and again, I just don't know if I believe
it's not popular... just maybe, it's 'nichey'?

~~~
Retric
I don't know if you really want to compare the NZD to Bitcoins as the NZD is a
lot bigger than you might think.

Anyway, the New Zealand dollar represents 1.6% of all currency trades globally
which is small but not exactly _tiny_.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_dollar>

Their M3 is also over 200 billion. I am not sure if that's in NZD or USD but 1
NZD = 0.7901 USD so the difference is not that important.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply>

~~~
narcissus
Fair point. To be honest, I just picked the first smallish country I could
think of with a stable economy.

Thanks for that data. I guess I still just see tens of millions of dollars
movement everyday and think "hey, it's obviously popular somewhere". C'est la
vie.

------
mkup
Bitcoin mining coffee warmer is a great idea. But why we don't have bitcoin
mining water heater for entire house? :)

~~~
Strom
That has been done already <http://bitfury.org/bitfury110.html>

    
    
        using mining equipment to produce hot water and house heating

~~~
nivertech
Those who bought old one, now f$%&^d up. New line of mining HW is order of
magnitude cheaper.

------
gwern
> 1) BitForce SC Jalapeno: a USB powered coffee warmer providing 3.5 GH/s,
> priced at under $149

/not sure if serious

------
jamesu
I looked at bitcoin a while back when the hype was at its peak. Sadly though
by then mining using normal equipment was impractical, so i just ignored it.

Do people actually use bitcoins nowadays, or is it more of a speculative
market?

~~~
dscrd
>Do people actually use bitcoins nowadays, or is it more of a speculative
market?

For things that you cannot as safely use normal currency, like drugs. Also,
Wikileaks recently announced that they will accept donations in bitcoins.

------
shaggyfrog
How many other companies are out there selling Bitcoin mining picks and
shovels?

~~~
mrb
At least 3 companies:

Enterpoint: <http://www.enterpoint.co.uk/cairnsmore/cairnsmore1.html>

Ztex: <http://www.ztex.de>

BTCFPGA: <http://btcfpga.com/>

Plus a few independent FPGA board developers on the Bitcoin forums:

ICARUS: <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51371.0>

X6500: <https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.0>

------
Devilboy
Interesting that this press release carefully avoids mentioning 'bitcoin' at
all...

The other thing that caught my eye is that $30k will supposedly get you 1
Terahash/s. Well, the entire bitcoin network hashrate is currently only 12
Terahash/s which means someone only needs to purchase about 12 of these
devices to gain a majority share. That's less than half a million dollars'
investment.

~~~
mike-cardwell
So if you bought one of these for $30k and used it for mining you'd get 1/13th
of the bitcoins generated? iirc, 50 bitcoins are released every ten minutes?
So you'd get mine an average of 550 bitcoins a day. Which are currently worth
about $5 each. So it would take about 10 days to recuperate the cost of the
server.

[edit] Of course this assumes that nobody else buys one of these servers for
bitcoin mining and that using it doesn't cause the value of a bitcoin to drop.

~~~
rmc
The main problem is that if you own the majority of the hashing power, you can
rewrite history. You can make all the bitcoin ever mined owned by you.

~~~
0x0
Assuming the manufacturer has produced 12 of these beasts already, they
already possess the power to rewrite bitcoin history.

Instead of selling the machines for $30k a piece, could they not just use the
machines themselves to transfer all bitcoins in the world to their own wallet?
The total amount of bitcoins mined to this date should value much more than
12*$30k?

Does that mean that the entire bitcoin network should as of today be
considered compromised, game over, pack up and go home?

~~~
mrb
If they did this, the attack would cause a panic, and Bitcoin would likely
instantly loose its value, thereby undermining the validity of their own
(illegitimately acquired) wealth. Not very smart...

The inventor of Bitcoin once described this scenario, saying it would be
smarter and more profitable to simply mine bitcoins legitimately...

~~~
biot
How would it be illegitimate? Mining bitcoins is based on math, and if they do
the math they have earned it.

~~~
mrb
"Illegitimate" is the wrong word. I meant wealth acquired without following
the proper rules (ie. mining on the longest chain, because the attacker would
purposefully try to fork the chain from a past block.)

