Pioneering Bitcoin hardware company to offer full refunds for all chip orders

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/pioneering-bitcoin-hardware-company-to-offer-full-refunds-for-all-chip-orders/

by cyphersanctus • 13 years ago

10 12 13 years ago

s_q_b4• 13 years ago

Are there any reliable Bitcoin ASIC providers at the moment? Butterfly Labs is shipping units now, but it's all in a trickle. Also, the difficulty rate is going to go way up once those machines come online.

Seems like if you bought the FPGA miners at the right moment, you earned massive ROI, but that now the market's too mature and mining profits are in a race to zero. If bitcoin sticks around, mining is destined to become a large-scale low margin business, with companies with investing large amounts of CapEx into massive farms of specialized hardware, thus squeezing out the remaining profit through scale.

mashmac22• 13 years ago

ASICminer (disclosure: I own shares in ASICminer) is shipping smaller miners, powered only by USB. Their larger miners aren't shipping yet in large numbers either.

I agree, at some point this'll be a race to the bottom.

s_q_b4• 13 years ago

Very cool space to be in.

So what's the projected ROI on your units? Which of the units are shipping?

(Caveat that you've got a vested stake understood.)

jared314• 13 years ago

If bitcoin sticks around, mining is destined to become a large-scale low margin business

Large scale, yes. Low margin, no. The dedicated hardware will replace software mining, just like GPU mining replaced CPU mining. But, mining is only initially funded by the direct reward, and is meant to transition to a transaction-fee based reward structure. (It's like starting a fire with lighter fluid.) With the decrease in miners, increase in network transaction activity (and thus transaction fees), and a rise in the bitcoin's value, the people who invest in the network will get the most out of it. I think of it as aligning incentives.

IanCal• 13 years ago

I don't see how that contradicts the "low margin" part. If the hardware is reasonably available then anyone can buy it and start getting some transaction fees. This should drive the required fees down as people drop their prices to compete.

caf• 13 years ago

Since bitcoins can be transferred much more efficiently than electricity, eventually it makes sense for such large scale bitcoin producers to produce bitcoins on-site where cheap electricity is produced.

mashmac22• 13 years ago

Note: this is chip orders of 10,000+ only. Avalon shipped stand-alone Bitcoin miners (each with several hundred chips in them) several months ago.

Pioneering Bitcoin hardware company to offer full refunds for all chip orders

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