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Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

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Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#41

Post by oscargrouch »

icelancer wrote: post #39
ultimoo wrote: post #36

How does investing engineering effort in designing mining ASICs and spending dollars to purchase what is essentially a currency generating machine help us as a community? I wish we were just as enthusiastic and race to solve other problems too -- like spreading education, finding out ways to purify water, or maximizing agriculture throughput in famine, or predicting when the next hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake is…

Put up a few million dollars as the prize to solve said problems and I bet you get a fair share of applicants. What are you waiting for?

you are just reinforcing what hes saying.. those things shouldnt need to have prizes in Money to people start working on it.. the point being maded by ultimoo (and i agree with it) is that WE need to change the way we think about things.. the way we are.. we need to change our prizes, and become happy with other sort of payments.. (like be happy to help others to have a better life)

if we get to manage to have a income to our needs, and do what we like.. be happy with it, and help others in the process.. what could be better than that?

Is such a waste to have so many bright people working to make rich people even more richier, while there are so many simple needs that all of those good brains could be helping to solve.. there are people that doesnt even have basci needs like water, food security, eletricity, education, dignity, etc..

meanwhile all the rich people problems "how i can get even more rich?" get all the brains working for it..

doesnt it say something about us all?

Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#42

Post by CodeCube »

ultimoo wrote: post #36

How does investing engineering effort in designing mining ASICs and spending dollars to purchase what is essentially a currency generating machine help us as a community? I wish we were just as enthusiastic and race to solve other problems too -- like spreading education, finding out ways to purify water, or maximizing agriculture throughput in famine, or predicting when the next hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake is…

Who's to say that some of the tech developed to mine bitcoins won't find other applications. Or perhaps the expertise developed by people trying to optimize bitcoin mining, or bitcoin commerce infrastructure could end up helping them change the world in other ways.

I'm totally not saying the two are equivalent, but look at the non-obvious ways that NASA has helped all of us: http://www.wtfnasa.com/

Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#43

Post by oscargrouch »

CodeCube wrote: post #42
ultimoo wrote: post #36

How does investing engineering effort in designing mining ASICs and spending dollars to purchase what is essentially a currency generating machine help us as a community? I wish we were just as enthusiastic and race to solve other problems too -- like spreading education, finding out ways to purify water, or maximizing agriculture throughput in famine, or predicting when the next hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake is…

Who's to say that some of the tech developed to mine bitcoins won't find other applications. Or perhaps the expertise developed by people trying to optimize bitcoin mining, or bitcoin commerce infrastructure could end up helping them change the world in other ways. I'm totally not saying the two are equivalent, but look at the non-obvious ways that NASA has helped all of us: http://www.wtfnasa.com/

by the same way of thinking it also could do more harm than good.. like how many nasa technology its being used to kill, to spy, etc..

creating something with good will, and with a good purpose at least can do us less harm.. but even than.. it always depends of the intentions of human beings..

(a plain could be used for fast transport or to kill) (discoveries about the atoms can cure câncer, energy reactors or to create atomic bombs)

Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#44

Post by cantankerous »

I gotta say, am I the only one who see's the numbers and then immediately goes to the Bitcoinx calculator to see how much "money" I could make in a day if I bought one of these rigs? On paper it seems like some of these things could pay for themselves in relatively short order if you could actually get your hands on one and run it day and night...and liquidate your mined coins asap at the current prices. A lot of ifs. Has anybody met somebody who's managed to pay off a big rig in short order? I'd really like to see a "success story" with Bitcoin mining.

Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#45

Post by derekp7 »

ultimoo wrote: post #36

How does investing engineering effort in designing mining ASICs and spending dollars to purchase what is essentially a currency generating machine help us as a community? I wish we were just as enthusiastic and race to solve other problems too -- like spreading education, finding out ways to purify water, or maximizing agriculture throughput in famine, or predicting when the next hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake is…

I already know how to purify water. I go to Walmart and buy a replacement filter for my Britta pitcher. As for fixing famine, that I have no clue where to start.

However, I do know how to write code, and if I can take some of the money I've earned to buy one of theses "useless" devices which can also make me some money, maybe one of the engineers at that company can spend his paycheck to send his daughter to college, where she can study ways to fix these other problems you mentioned.

In other words, read up on the economic theory called "guns and butter".

Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#46

Post by tbrownaw »

ultimoo wrote: post #36

How does investing engineering effort in designing mining ASICs and spending dollars to purchase what is essentially a currency generating machine help us as a community? I wish we were just as enthusiastic and race to solve other problems too -- like spreading education, finding out ways to purify water, or maximizing agriculture throughput in famine, or predicting when the next hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake is…

How does investing engineering effort in designing mining ASICs and spending dollars to purchase what is essentially a currency generating machine help us as a community?

It's supposed to help said currency become more solidly established, and therefore more useful to more people.

I wish we were just as enthusiastic and race to solve other problems too -- like spreading education, finding out ways to purify water, or maximizing agriculture throughput in famine, or predicting when the next hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake is coming our way.

I'm pretty sure people are enthusiastic about those things, and probably quite a lot more people than are into bitcoin. They're just less visible, since those aren't the cool new shiny thing (and aside from the weather/earthquake predictions, they're probably not heavy enough on software to be considered of interest here).

Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#47

Post by dwaltrip »

cantankerous wrote: post #44

I gotta say, am I the only one who see's the numbers and then immediately goes to the Bitcoinx calculator to see how much "money" I could make in a day if I bought one of these rigs? On paper it seems like some of these things could pay for themselves in relatively short order if you could actually get your hands on one and run it day and night...and liquidate your mined coins asap at the current prices. A lot of ifs…

http://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate -- This graph shows the total network hashing power, a.k.a. mining competition. As ASICs are finally being released/shipped on a noticeable scale, the network hash power is massively increasing and will probably increase 1-2 orders of magnitude more. Mining profits will most likely be driven to almost zero.

EDIT: another thing to consider is that the ASIC companies have had much trouble shipping on schedule, affecting ROI calculations

Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#48

Post by maxerickson »

sliverstorm wrote: post #38
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably will. This needs to be repeated every time btc ASICs are discussed: ASIC economics don't work like most physical products, and instead work more like software. For high-performance asics, the costs of design and masks completely overshadow the costs of actually making chips unless your volume is in the millions. To make the first chip costs many millions, to make the next chip costs $15. The most valuab…

Oh shit, so what you are saying is once the R&D is paid for, they can just stop selling them and manufacture as many $15 400GHash units as they please. At that point they would have virtually zero worry about "breaking even", it's pretty much pure profit as soon as they plug in the device.

At the moment, those $15 (or so) units are 1.7 (or whatever it was) GHash/sec. They integrate a bunch of them to get to 400.

In the long term, the mining rigs should barely be paying for the electricity required to operate them.

Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#49

Post by jedunnigan »

wcfields wrote: post #16
jgeerts wrote: post #4

Why don't they plug them into their outlets themselves?

They probably are for awhile, then selling them. Hence the delay. Riding out some mining, then slowly releasing them. I'm thinking if someones smart enough to built a specialized piece of hardware like this, they are smart enough to write up an algorithm that tells when to sell the hardware once the commodity hits peak level. A mass dump of these would too quickly devalue the market since the increase in new Bitcoins…

There wouldn't be any more coins entering the market then there normally would. 1 new block every 10 minutes, doesn't matter how much hashing power there is. You are assuming people would dump them immediately, which I don't necessarily think is fair.

Re: Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

#50

Post by wmf »

mjs wrote: post #23

There's no technical reason there couldn't be a cloud version of this, but of course it makes absolutely no sense as a cloud service, which make me wonder what's going on here. An exchange of money for a thing usually means that the buyer wants the thing more than they want the money, and the seller wants the money more than they want the thing, but in this case the seller is selling ... money? Is, uh, the delivery d…

There are "mining bonds" that are essentially cloud Bitcoin mining. As you said, they tend to not be worth buying. One exception is ASICMiner which has paid very nice dividends to their shareholders.

It's not quite as simple as selling money, since the amount of money that the box will print depends on various factors like the difficulty, exchange rate, and delivery date. So it's really a question of whether the customer's risk analysis is better than the vendor's (which is doubtful given the information asymmetry; see also Goldman Sachs). And the delivery date is definitely not guaranteed; most vendors are shipping late.

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