Tripamang
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
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No one has actually delivered a commercial ASIC unit yet. A company named Avalon has shipped two demo units to purchasers and I believe there is another company with a finished product but they aren't shipping to end users and they make up about 10TH (1/4) of the current processing power of the network. Butterfly labs has finished testing their chips and getting them bumped, they're currently getting shipped to their assembly line this week and hopefully they'll start shipping finished units next week.Any details on ASICs? I understand that is hardware especially designing for one purpose (in this case bitcoin mining)?
If so, what price range are we talking here? Commercially available or built by enthusiasts?
I don't see it as a way of making money, but I very much like the idea of bitcoins. Maybe a small buy-in wouldn't be a bad idea just to stay interested in following developments.
Given the current price of a bitcoin, though, I can't help but think "bubble." But that's ok, a bitcoin doesn't have to be worth $30 for the currency to serve a purpose. In fact, the USD exchange rate doesn't seem all that relevant, as long as it can reach some kind of relatively-stable exchange rate in the near future.
edit: ok, some googling returns this thing for $150:http://products.butterflylabs.com/ho...oin-miner.html
It's about 100 times as fast as my GPU... yeah. There's one about 7 as fast for 4x the cost. Probably a good deal for people way more serious about this than me.
Anyone you order from now and you're looking at a couple months before you're receive a product, so if you were going to invest in some hardware you'd want the best Gigahash/Watt which is the Butterfly labs product line at roughly 1Gigahash/Watt. By the time you'd get it you're looking at 7-8 months before you'd see a return on your money though, vs the preorder people who are looking at weeks/days to pay it back.