Hacker News Reader

Indeed. I've found a 1024 Core manycore manufacturer, but idk. it's price per unit. However, ASICSs that support scrypt are not available yet and even if, you can't use an ASIC for anything else than Bitcoin mining, which is pretty bad, because in 1 year the best ASIC will be outdated and an investment of several thousand dollars is wasted. Would be better if those ASICs worked like a Co-Processor or something..

View on HN

That is essentially the FPGA value proposition. While they are more expensive than an ASIC because they are re-programmable, you don't have a huge up front investment in masks and wafers. So a decent FPGA set up would probably set you back $10K but you could re-design at will into different sort of 'coin' miners. The book 'Cracking DES'[1] talks about building an array of FPGAs to brute force DES keys. If you are at all interested in ASIC/FPGA based crypto 'mining' you should have and read that book.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Des-Encryption-Research-Polit...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com