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Comment by polskibus | Hacker News Reader

Can someone describe what Avalon's hashrate: 66 Gh/s means in terms of bitcoin production (or better, in terms of money). How many days would Avalon need to work 24/7 to provide 100% ROI ? I don't know much about bitcoin, I would imagine such info should be the first thing a potential customer reads on Avalon's front page.

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It's very difficult to predict how much money these will make as it's unknown by the time you get one how many other ASICs will ship. If you look at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89685.0 these are preorders for BFL ASIC that people have reported.

So at the current difficulty you would make $220.35 / day with a 66 Gh/s Avalon. If you look at predictions people are throwing around though on what these BFL orders will do to the difficulty (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=89685.msg1218884#msg...) then your $/day would go down to $11.42.

The question is will BFL ship on time and how many units will they ship. They claim to be shipping their first batch on the week of Feb 10th. This second batch from Avalon is said to be shipping March 5th – April 5th, 2013. So if you believe BFL will ship before then, then the difficulty will look very different by the time you get your Avalon.

I don't think they could put how much money you'd be expected to make, as that fluctuates in relation to the dollar etc.

But I'd be interested to know what 66 Gh/s means in practical terms too!

Just found this site, that calculates your profit http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

Edit: This makes me wonder, why would you release this technology to the public.

I would say it's a safe bet that the developers of the machine has been running it for quite a while themselves and have meticulously calculated exactly the breaking point at which these machines will drive up the difficulty enough that it's more profitable selling them than it is running them for BTC.

If Avalon was running 20 TH/s somewhere, it would show up (considering that the entire Bitcoin network is only 25 TH/s).

My 7970, the fastest single GPU for mining, does 675mh/s overclocked to 1125mhz. Thats about 1/100th the speed of an Avalon.

Ah, nothing like a good old duplicate Bitcoin mining 101 thread. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5142021

Once they become prevalent, they'll make money at the same rate GPUs make now, or CPUs made before, or etc. etc.

There are a lot more miners now, so each miner makes less money. Actually the reward was cut in half a couple of months ago, so even in aggregate, they'll make money at half the rate CPU's used to.

It all depends how you define money. The reward halving seems to be correlated with a price spike in the Bitcoin exchange rate, so although fewer Bitcoins are being mined per block, their total value is actually about the same today as it was before the reward halving.

I do agree that there are more miners now, which lowers profits for individual miners.

right now, like ~8 days. It's really impossible to tell though when these things hit mainstream as they will affect the current difficulty so much.

So it's basically a money making machine. Why would you ever sell such a machine for a one-time profit?

The difficulty in mining will increase dramatically once people start using them.

To use the analogy I've been seeing everywhere, during the 19th century gold rush would you rather have been a miner or the guy selling pickaxes?

Suppose gold is evenly distributed everywhere and you are the only one with a pickaxe and everyone else has spoons?

Consider the fact that these pickaxes cost half a million dollars to make and only come in batches of 1000. Also, there is nothing to stop some other folks from building a similar batch of pickaxes.

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