Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally (opens in new tab)

This is working out exactly as planned - the security of the system against double-spending is predicated on honest nodes controlling the majority of the hashing power in the bitcoin network, so the fact that people are working very hard to add hashing power to honest nodes is desirable for the system as a whole.

Indeed, it is pretty crazy. I know someone with an Avalon ASIC who claims Satoshi is a genius. I think he's biased by the fact he has a small device that plugs into the wall and makes him more money than his day job.

Mining = securing network from double transactions. This is about security of transactions, not about saving. Please stay on the topic.

> The more people get excited about faster ways to hoard bitcoins

People seem to be oblivious to the fact that a currency must be available in order to be useful. There is a reason that Gresham's Law has achieved "Law" status.

Oddly, the right thing to do for currency acceptance would be to shutdown all of the ASICs.

Totally agree.

Why would anyone wants to sell the goose who lays golden eggs while gold cost more than the goose?

They'll pile up cash from "preorders", mine bitcoins and when time is right - will dump outdated devices to customers.

> I doubted that these ASIC rigs would ship any time soon. Wouldn't it be more profitable for the vendors to simply to delay/cancel orders and run the rigs 24/7 themselves?

Only if they're "long BTC". What makes you think they are? They're just providing shovels & tools to "miners in a gold rush". Historically, such providers have always done phenominally well.

At least they get the rigs at production cost to run them---selling them for good ol' USD may just be a hedge or sideshow, only time can tell.

Their competitor Avalon sells the units for "the first 30 days profit of the device". So whatever the current price of Bitcoins and mining difficulty affects the price.

I'm sure the same thing was said during the gold rush days and it was the store owners that sold prospecting equipment that made some very stable money.

what makes you think they aren't doing just that? they could start shipping them out and make a profit on the machines just as the difficulty rate picks up and there is more profit to be made in selling miners rather than mining.

Part of the value of Bitcoin (if any) is that it's decentralized. It should be more profitable to sell the miners out than to hoard them because if they're distributed the cryptographic safety of Bitcoin is greater.

From what I understand these devices started shipping right after the BitCoin peaked... Maybe the vendors kept "testing" them for just a bit longer than they expected?

This seems like it would be begging for a class-action lawsuit.

That said, I've half-joked that probability of receiving my miner is probably about 0.98^(USDBTC).

Also 1/5th the energy efficiency that BFL originally promised when taking orders, and their most vocal spokesperson claimed that there was no way that they'd be significantly more power-hungry than predicted, that anyone who suggested otherwise was trolling, and that the only reason to draw attention to the fiasco when their FPGA mining hardware which was announced with impressive efficiency and blew out the power budget so badly they had to redesign the boards was to shill or troll. Right up until they blew their power budget and had to redesign the ASIC boards.

Additionally, he tried to convince people to buy BFL rather than one of the competing boards by arguing it was so much more power efficient miners using them would be forced to shut down. It's barely more power efficient than ASICs which shipped months ago, and those companies are already looking at newer models.

Oh, for what it's worth that's also less than 10x the power efficiency of the best FPGA boards...

$40 per day?

Well, there were surely a few prospectors who made out like bandits- but on the whole, yes.

Isn't this more selling the pre-used shovels and pick-axes after you've already been at the mine for months using the investors' equipment?

They probably missed the clock-rate by a factor of 2x, or decided to use half the number of chips and overclock them to save money. It may also have been their backup plan because people are willing to pay 8x as much for power, but they're less willing to get 1/2 the hashrate.

If you run a CPU at the same voltage, but at half the speed, it uses 1/2 the power because CMOS circuits only really use power as the transistors change state. However you're also able to run at about 1/2 the voltage without getting errors. Because V=IR, 1/2 the voltage at the same resistance is 1/2 the amperage, and since P=IV, that's 1/4 the power for normal circuits. Of course CMOS circuits already run at 1/2 the power. In the real world there's also leakage and such, but in a perfect world doubling the clockrate takes 8 times the power.

Transmeta's Crusoe was the first processor to really take advantage of this, by varying the voltage and running slower to save battery life. Before this time (2000), laptops would use a duty cycle to save power. Soon all the major chip manufacturers started copying them.

I ordered a Jalepeno almost immediately. I chose to pay by wire, and the email i received included "Your order position won't be penalized for any time it takes to send you this payment information. Please send me an email with a copy of the wire confirmation form. Once payment has been received, I'll respond with final confirmation of your order."

I still haven't paid and am going to now. I wonder if they will honor it or not.

> 220 btc

Holy moly: $27K.

appreciate the thorough burn-in test

High-end ATI cards will do < 1GH/s, with most midrange cards below 500MH/s. This does 5GH/s, while using an essentially an order of magnitude less power than a PC-based rig will use.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

The more important specification is the MHash / Joule (also found in the link below). The video says this thing does 5 GHash/s @ 30W. That's 100x the efficiency of the best videocards (1000x if you count the power consumption of the rest of the PC).