Fair enough, is my limited knowledge making me miss something, or can you really order them at as low as sub $1000 and they only consume 60w of power?
I highly doubt that. the ones I saw were more like 600w an ASIC is just a custom designed processor , you have to actually design, create a mask and start manufacturing this thing in a chip fab (which is NOT cheap) I imagine they are just a normal intel CPU with a special daughter card and some software..
I think the test unit that was shipped to the firmware for the ASIC you are referring to is consuming over 100w of power.
So why do many lower end one keeps quoting this 60w figure? "that the power consumption is as low as the price; the middle-of-the-line $1299 SC Single would provide 60 gigahashes per second (up from 40 as per the original announcement) for only 60 watts, less than the company's current FPGA offering" http://bitcoinmagazine.com/butterfly-labs-offers-lifetime-warranty-asic-competition-surges-on/ Granted that article from last year, but I keep seeing this 60w figure across current stuff too.
Maybe I saw the wrong things, I was looking at these guys http://launch.avalon-asics.com/ reading a bit more i'm thinking their unit ships with a 600 or 700w PSU and they are using chips that dissipate about 150w each, and there will be two in the base unit with the option of adding a third (meaning 300W + overhead in the base unit, up to 450w draw in the upgraded unit, makes sense to ship with a 600w PSU)
Butterfly labs have not yet shipped a thing! Still no demo of a prototype. Some on bitcoin talk are suggesting this is a scam. The Avalon ones are made per batch and snapped up quickly. I thpught they had just sold out their 3rd batch, but it seems available on their website. One can only pay in Bitcoins for them though.
People are selling their pre-orders on Ebay US, the prices they are getting over what Butterfly Labs is charging is insane! A scam within a scam...interesting.
Here's an article about the Avalon ASIC Bitcoin miner, and why someone would pay $20000 for a box that does only one thing - generate Bitcoins http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/en...ifu-guo-creator-of-the-first-asic-based-miner
Looks good, I should fix a spreadsheet tonight to figure out what the most cost effective hashing gear is atm. I imagine the best way to do this would to be to create a bunch of boot via network linux machines but, I'm guessing linux video card drivers wouldn't be as good, possibly leading to a situation where windows is a way better way to do it..
I've found linux gave me a lot less hashing even with the same drivers and SDK installed. Maybe it was something config related but I used the same settings so no idea. Really just need to find out what the most cost effective GPUs are.
linux drivers are very underdeveloped for video cards, okay just put a mild overclock on my 7770 for 200Mh/s @ 65 degrees and about 80 watts let me experiment further...
Chiming in on the subject (a bit late, I know) BITCOIN seems like a pyramid scheme to me. If you get in early you do well. I was reading about it before I joined SS or got into PMs. I get the system but I don't want to buy any of it. Not then nor now. But that may just be because I like to read up a lot before I get into things. My brother however is a brilliant fellow at building PCs so there may be some money left to be made LAN Party anyone?
Most successful investments return the greatest rewards to those who get in early. A pyramid scheme is where investors are pulled in with the promise of great returns and those returns are paid out of money given by later investors. No such promises are made with bitcoin, nor are any returns at all promised. Any potential capital gains are at your own risk. No different to gold, silver, oil, etc. in that respect.
