The bleeding edge in Bitcoin-mining hardware comes to CES

Bitcoin is intangible money, but that doesn't mean you won't see it at CES, the nation's premier electronics trade show. There's currently an arms race in Bitcoin mining, the intense computing required to generate new units of the increasingly popular virtual currency that approximates cash on the internet. And now the companies that produce high-end equipment for generating Bitcoin are here in Vegas, pitching their wares on the convention floor.

Perhaps the best-known source of high-end mining equipment is Butterfly Labs, which came out with some of the first chips that were custom-built for "mining" Bitcoin. The company has teamed up with BitPay, a payments processor, and BlockChain, which runs a Bitcoin wallet service, to set up a Bitcoin-themed booth in the South Hall of the convention. Butterfly Labs is presenting the prototype of the Monarch, its fastest and most efficient Bitcoin-mining card yet. The new cards will retail for $2,196.

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A robust market has increased the interest in Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining

Bitcoin has been on a tear lately, with the price at $972.74 apiece as of this writing. That robust market has increased the interest in Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. But because of the way Bitcoin was designed, mining produces diminishing returns as time goes on. The simple mining rig Butterfly Labs had set up at their booth, using a 250 gigahash per second miner, was producing just .02 Bitcoin per day, or $16.90.

"Mining is a treadmill," said Dave McClain, account manager at Butterfly Labs. "You've got to be reinvesting money into more hardware and the latest hardware. It's like the lottery; the more tickets you buy, the better your chances."

Bitcoin has spawned a secondary economy of goods, services, companies, financial infrastructure, and peer-to-peer transactions, along with the extensive efforts put into mining.

Butterfly Labs says it has shipped more than 45,000 miners, and it's just one of many companies now producing custom chips. KnCMiner, a competitor, is also at CES showing its latest hardware, and claims its customers generate 70 percent of new bitcoins. Another competitor, HashFast, claims to have started shipping its ultra-fast Baby Jet rigs in late December (although customers say the company is past due on its shipments).

The technology is now progressing by leaps and bounds, with second generation chips nearly doubling efficiency of the first generation. Since the chips can't be used for anything else, these advancements only apply to Bitcoin mining. That gives weight to critics who say Bitcoin wastes energy. But mining does more than produce new bitcoins — that computing power is also what's used to process Bitcoin transactions and record them in the public record. If Bitcoin sticks around the technology will continue to be useful. If the currency fails, this miniature industry that sprang up so fast will disappear with it.

Bitcoin may be a weird fit for CES, but it's yet another sign that the currency is moving into the mainstream. Over at the Bitcoin booth, CES visitors stopped by with tales of their own mining efforts, or the friend who bought 16 cards and started spinning them up in the basement. Most people, however, were intrigued but clueless. One man wandered up to squint at the display, and started to stumble through a question. "Don't ask me what Bitcoin is," one of the guys manning the booth joked. Then he paused. "Wait, was that actually your question?"

It was.

Source: Theverge.com

 

Few things I want to point out.

BFL is best known for their prolonged delays of product shipment (few months is a reasonable time to wait for them, some taking 6 - 8 months, and their very earliest orders taking over a year to get into the hands of the customers who pre-ordered.) It has been long suspected that they use their new product line to mine for themselves, then when the hash rate difficulty is edging towards making ROI's much less profitable than when it was first ordered, they begin to ship them out.

The Monarch is not a bad miner, clocking around 600 Ghash/s, but there are companies that have much better regard for their customers that are looking to release (or have released) equally efficient, if not more efficient miners than BFL (who have notoriously bad customer service.)

KnC and Cointerra are 2 companies I believe have a much better track record and I would say considerably more reliable.

Cointerra is going to release a 2 Thash/s (TerraMiner IV) and should begin shipping their early batches in Q1 of this year. While you'd be paying around $3.60 per Ghash with the Monarch, you'll be at around $3.00 per Ghash with the TerraMiner IV (retailing at $5,999) and it's also more energy efficient as well.

KnC already has a variety of products out currently that are already in the hands of many happy folks, along with some very powerful miners on the way this year (Neptune, which will be the first ever 20nm chip ASIC, which is going to have a total of 3 Thash/s.)

 

Thanks for the read

 

I haven't personally been keeping very up to date with the various bitcoin mining rigs (mostly due to the fact that I can't exactly afford one right now) but what you said about the prolonged shipment is something that I've heard a lot of unfortunately :/ By the time you actually receive your order its already lost most of its usefulness. Appreciated reading your post!

 

Do they mean only bitcoin mining, or mining cryptocurrency in general?

 

ASIC is short for application specific integrated circuit. BTC asics are soley designed for one purpose, mining SHA256 coins. LTC and a few others use Scrypt, a different form of encryption so those are not compatible.

 

Ever heard of this saying: "During the gold rush, the ones digging weren't the one getting rich. It was the people selling the picks and shovels".

Something along those lines.

Yeah. I'm sure with enough time you'll make your money back, but honestly if these rigs made so much money the companies would be using them for themselves rather than selling them.

 

This is a joke. The real bitcoin mining is done by mass farms, you might even be mining bitcoins for someone right now, without even knowing about it.

 

Fact.

Similar to how Shawn Hogan did with the EBay affiliate program racking in $30M. Referring others without them even knowing. Except with BTC there is no large company that is going to stop someone from doing it, as they're not losing money or being scammed out of anything when people do it.

 

So I'd still be able to mine other SHA256 coins then? I see...

 

I know someone who has been mining Bitcoins for awhile and has tens of thousands of dollars worth. He'd have to invest more to keep making more and I don't know if he will but there are plenty of small scale people making a decent amount.

 

bitcoin will never die

 

bitcoin will never die

 

bitcoin will never die

 

bitcoin will never die

 

bitcoin will never die

 

bitcoin will never die

 

bitcoin will never die

 

bitcoin will never die

 

bitcoin will never die