Peripherals Bitcoin Mining ASICs (was: good enough for a home server)

A Block Exploder. Completely useless - 300MH/s - but I wanted to play, and at ~£20 on eBay it's the cheapest option. A better choice would be the Red Fury/Blue Fury: 2.7GH/s in the same footprint and power draw, but about £150. And, as I've mentioned elsewhere on the topic, you'll never earn that £150 back. Ever. (Neither will I my £20, but like I said: I bought it to play with, not to get FEELTHY RICH.)

 

Hah! Yeah, 2.5-2.7GH/s.

 

Christ, prices have shot up. I paid £21 for my Block Erupter:



At the time, there were several Blue/Red Furies on Buy It Now for ~£150, too. Hey, this means I could put my Block Erupter back on eBay and double my money - now there's a thought!

 

I shall spend my newfound wealth (£20, minus eBay's cut, minus PayPal's cut, minus postage and packing) unwisely.

 

I'll never have to deal with any of that - in the time I've had it, I've generated around one-fifth the minimum payout value of the pool I'm using. Which is to say: I'll never get my hands on those Bitcoin fractions. I did mine Terracoins for a week, though. Got about ten of those, street value of about 3p.

 

Y... nope. Even those won't work. Don't believe me? Run the numbers yourself. Remember, however, to accurately enter the delivery date: sure, if you could get one of those lovely 600GH/s PCI Express-shaped ones from ButterflyLabs tomorrow, you'd earn a few grand; but they're not being delivered until February/March 2014. Put that in, and uh-oh: "No break even in first year."

Let me put it another way: why do ASIC makers build ASICs? To make money, right? I mean, they're not doing it out of a passion for painful product development processes. So, if I design an ultra-fast ASIC which can be sold for £500 and will, in its first month, earn you £1,000 in Bitcoins - why am I selling it for £500 again? Why aren't I keeping it, mining Bitcoins for a month, and doubling my money before the difficulty ramps and it stops earning its keep?

Answer: I am. By the time the ASIC hits the general market, it's already too old to be of any use. Spending money on ASICs is a mug's game; you'd be far better off just spending that £500 on buying Bitcoins directly. Doesn't matter whether the ASIC is 300MH/s or 300TH/s; if someone's trying to sell you it, that's because they know they can't make any money using it directly.

 

For SHA-256 altcoins, yes. For scrypt altcoins, no: GPU-based mining is the only efficient way to mine scrypt, and that isn't going to change in the near future. Unlike SHA-256, which is small and easy to build an ASIC for, scrypt is big and complex and basically goes out of its way to make it uneconomical to build an FPGA or ASIC implementation - a direct response to how anybody who doesn't have an ASIC has been pushed out of the Bitcoin mining game. For scrypt coins, like Litecoin, GPUs will continue to be the only economic method of mining for the foreseeable future.