

21e6, LLC raises $5 million to manufacture Bitcoin ASIC - mrb
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=334759.0

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wmf
Now we have a Bitcoin ASIC bubble in addition to the regular Bitcoin bubble. I
have a feeling some of these guys are not going to recoup their NRE
(especially at 20 nm) when customers are only willing to pay $0.50/GH/s. Never
mind, I'm sure suckers will buy them.

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ktsmith
Is anyone actually shipping anything performing in the sub $6/GH/s range?
Seems like everyone claiming that has failed to ship. Then again by the time
these guys do ship something it may not matter much given the amount of
hashing power coming online in the next 90 days (assuming knc, hashfast and
others actually hit their targets).

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wmf
The price scales inversely to difficulty which is roughly doubling every
month. Anything shipping right now is probably worth $10-12/GH/s. December
delivery pricing is around $6/GH/s, January is around $3/GH/s, etc.

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ktsmith
Right, I agree about both this ventures potential for covering and at the same
time there are tons of suckers. My comment was just more to the fact that
companies currently claiming they can deliver at $3/GH/s haven't actually been
able to. I'll pick on cointerra since they have a banner that calls out their
price of $3/GH/s. They were supposed to have delivered in November or December
and now it's late January. When they do actually deliver in February (if they
deliver at all) the miners that come on line will likely be producing at a
loss for their buyers. KNC is delivering at $6/GH/s in December and they are
sold out.

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wmf
It is estimated that most ASICs cost less than $1/GH/s to make and the current
prices just reflect demand outstripping supply. Thus by January I expect all
vendors (including e.g. KnC who has known working chips) to be selling for
$3/GH/s.

AFAIK Cointerra's batch 1 delivery date has always been December.

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FlyingAvatar
The difficulty is climbing at an incredible rate because (a) lots of ASIC
miners are coming on-line, and (b) a lot more people have started mining.

At some point very soon, mining Bitcoin will become unprofitable overall
simply because an essentially fixed number of output Bitcoins are being
divided across a larger and larger number of miners.

The only way to mine profitably will be figuring out how to mine both more
efficiently and significantly more quickly than the general mining population.

Essentially if you are newly investing in Bitcoin now, you need to believe
that (a) the mining solution that you're buying into will be at least an order
of magnitude faster than the current generation products, or (b) Bitcoin will
increase in value so much that even a small number of Bitcoins will be very
valuable.

If this is just another Bitcoin ASIC, it's seems a very risky investment.

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dfrey
> Essentially if you are newly investing in Bitcoin now, you need to believe
> that (a) ... or (b) Bitcoin will increase in value so much that even a small
> number of Bitcoins will be very valuable.

If you can't mine profitably, yet believe that the value of a bitcoin will
increase, then you're better off just paying money directly for bitcoins
rather than inefficiently mining them.

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Tarang
Nice name! matches the number of total bitcoins mined + unmined.

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twotwotwo
I was thinking maybe Unicode code point, looked it up, and got ⇦--your
explanation makes a lot more sense.

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csmuk
Last time I looked at ASIC design a few years ago, that might get you a couple
of prototypes and not much else. The software, staff and fabs cost a crap load
of cash.

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mrb
"A few years ago" is a long time ago. Thanks to Moore's law, designing an
ASIC, getting a full mask set made, and the first few wafers etched only costs
$500k at 65nm:

[http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=73](http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=73)

Other Bitcoin companies (KnCMiner, etc) have apparently done 28nm with merely
$1-3 million.

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ChuckMcM
That matched my experience as well in trying to price out my frame buffer
design.

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bitsweet
Question, is it at all possible to mine bitcoins on a personal laptop?

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elliottcarlson
Not with any kind of profit - even with a high end graphics card in the
laptop, such as a HD 8970M, you would be looking at best a 0.0004 BTC daily
return - this would definitely outweigh any profit after you take power
consumption in to account. Any changes in difficulty (which is often), will
lower your return.

