Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

http://codinginmysleep.com/bfl-jalapeno-unboxing-and-demo/

by enmaku • 13 years ago

83 99 13 years ago

w-ll• 13 years ago

I ordered the 60gh/s SC Single the night preorderes opened like a year ago. I think there are maybe ~7 orders before me. I hope I get it soon. I paid 220 btc@5.45 usd for it, let's see if its worth it.

eof2• 13 years ago

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.

ghshephard• 13 years ago

"time it takes to send you this payment information. "

I don't see where it says you won't be penalized for the time it takes for you to make a payment. With that said - I'm curious, did people pay in advance of shipping?

jpdoctor2• 13 years ago

> 220 btc

Holy moly: $27K.

ValentineC2• 13 years ago

If he paid with Bitcoin, it was probably handled through BitPay, which might have in turn converted it to USD before paying it out to the company. I'm not sure the company could have foreseen the spike in BTC and held off the USD for that long.

I wonder who reaped the most out of this.

sjtgraham3• 13 years ago

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?

gesman• 13 years ago

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They'll pile up cash from "preorders", mine bitcoins and when time is right - will dump outdated devices to customers.

BaconJuice• 13 years ago

are there any alternatives to this? and some thing that's already selling them and not pre-orders?

starpilot• 13 years ago

I see it as a futures contract on the value of the BTC. Selling a mining ASIC locks in profit for the seller, betting that this will exceed the time-value generated from the rig itself. Buying a rig locks in a loss, betting that it will pay for itself. We can't be certain whether the BTC will be at US$1,000 or US$1 a year from now. You could make a case for either side, that's why the contract exists.

sachingulaya2• 13 years ago

The profitability of ASICs is going to decrease at a rapid rate once they start shipping to consumers. Additionally, in a few months the market is going to be flooded with cheap ASICs.

From BFL's perspective if they don't release first they're dead in the water. They don't know where their competitors are compared to them but they recognize it's a winner take all situation. The natural thing to do would be to take pre-orders to fund the manufacturing and start realizing profits now. Also, if your competitors are offering pre-orders you should be too.

rscale• 13 years ago

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).

sjtgraham3• 13 years ago

How can one litigate against an entity beyond the jurisdiction of the US court system, e.g. say the rig manufacturer was the crook and not in the United States? What are the options there?

daniel-cussen3• 13 years ago

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.

illuminate2• 13 years ago

"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"

Can you explain this in more detail? I don't understand what decentralization has to do with miners' profit.

unreal372• 13 years ago

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.

SG-• 13 years ago

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.

liveaxle• 13 years ago

Those store owners couldn't use a thousand pickaxes simultaneously.

dualogy7• 13 years ago

> 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.

Too2• 13 years ago

The difference with shovels is you need to be there and shovel yourself. Here if you have tool, you just plug it in and it does all the work for you.

MasterScrat• 13 years ago

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?

uid• 13 years ago

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.

lingben• 13 years ago

selling shovels and pick-axes to miners was always much more lucrative than being a prospector - plus ca change

sliverstorm3• 13 years ago

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

illuminate2• 13 years ago

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?

daniel-cussen3• 13 years ago

I thought they had been ripped off by their suppliers and they just never got wise to it.

sliverstorm3• 13 years ago

The heat is of course a byproduct of the higher wattage, but I wonder what on earth happened to make them miss the wattage target by 6-7x?

nbanks• 13 years ago

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.

kevinpet• 13 years ago

I'm sure with enough digging around I could find this out for myself, but could someone familiar with things comment on how the performance of these boxes compares to a standard ATI card miner?

loser777• 13 years ago

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

greenmountin• 13 years ago

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).

nly2• 13 years ago

I work this out to be about 180 Mhash/J, which is 80-100x more energy efficient than any GPU mining.

Also, for anyone wondering: At current difficulty and rate of exchange this will cost you <$0.10 a day to run and generate $40 of Bitcoin.

fiatpandas• 13 years ago

$40 per day?

Tichy• 13 years ago

Yes?

DougWebb• 13 years ago

I estimate it'd produce around 0.25 BTC/day, mining in a pool. That's about $30/day USD at today's price.

As ASICs come online, the difficulty is going to go up, which will reduce the daily generation rate for any given miner. I've been trying to decide whether or not to order a device now based on my profitability prediction for months from now when I might actually get it. I'm guessing by the time I get one I might be able to produce at least 0.05 BTC/day. Assuming that's $6/day, the $274 device will take about six weeks to pay for itself. Not too bad, but I don't know if keeping tabs on it afterwards is worth it for $6/day. It'd only be worth it if I think BTC are going to be worth a lot more in the future... getting back to hoarding coins as an investment rather than using them as currency.

nly2• 13 years ago

Yes, sorry.

makomk• 13 years ago

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...

baddox2• 13 years ago

That is the current expected bitcoin per gigahash earning rate?

yekko• 13 years ago

Arrived just after the peak too.

Create• 13 years ago

appreciate the thorough burn-in test

Homunculiheaded• 13 years ago

The more people get excited about faster ways to hoard bitcoins and eventually make a nice profit (presumably in USD in the end) the dramatically more cynical I become about its future. When the bitcoin discussion was mainly around its use as a currency for things like silkroad, VPNs etc I actually thought it seemed to have a promising future. I really hope I'm wrong, but I have a feeling in 2023 the bitcoin discussion will be relegated to nostalgic jokes about how crazy we used to be.

nvarsj• 13 years ago

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.

pdog• 13 years ago

Is there any doubt that Satoshi is a genius? Look at what he's accomplished.

jpdoctor2• 13 years ago

> 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.

pseudonym• 13 years ago

I think people are more oblivious to the fact that a "deflationary currency" is inherently flawed because it by definition results in hoarding, which is not what you want people to do with your currency. Why would you bother loaning or investing it if you can make more money just sitting on it?

fleitz4• 13 years ago

Why does the method of mining mean that a currency should not be accepted?

Gold serves as a currency yet the methods of mining have changed drastically in the last 1,000 years.

zwily• 13 years ago

The same number of coins will be mined, no matter how many ASICs are online.

skriticos2• 13 years ago

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

caf• 13 years ago

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.

ValentineC2• 13 years ago

More discussion on this article at Bitcoin Talk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=181849.0;all

Bitcoin ASIC Miner from BFL, finally

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