Quote from: dirtycat on October 09, 2012, 12:24:38 AM

Quote from: legolouman on October 08, 2012, 08:55:23 PM

This is true, however, I anticipate that after ASIC's are about and hashing publicly, the difficulty will rise so high that owning a Jalepeno will be like using a X750 or X770 ATi card.

Agreed. Its interesting to see the people who are buying 2 or 3 of these devices think they are gonna make millions.. they aren't thinking about the difficulty increase

On a long enough timeline you're correct (of course) - I believe they'll be slightly better return than the same money spent on a video card initially. I project the difficulty will stabalize at a point where an SC single makes between 3 and 4 times what an fpga single makes right now.

Something to recall is the ASICs will have a much lower power consumption and that (at least in the USA) should drop operating costs for most miners. I don't know about everywhere else, but here we have a percentage based rate... in my area it's 11 cent up to 625kwh then 13 cent @ 110% and 15 cent @ 120% then jumps to 35 cent over 130%. Which frankly is a moot point for me since I've offset most of my electric with solar panels. But that will affect some folks at least.

Of course in another year, instead of 5x or 10x difficulty we'll see 20x or 30x and then it's a race 40x as peoples initial re-investments get paid off and everyone starts scaling up.

At 40x difficulty - an FPGA single would take a loss for mining if paying 13 cent per kwh. And SC singles will still be hitting ROI in under a year.