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Topic
Board Hardware
Re: Official Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner (Just Released!)
by
gusti
on 20/05/2011, 16:09:20 UTC
Sorry, I do not see your point that power over capital investment cost changes with difficult. Can you please ellaborate or give a practical example ?

Today, you buy $2000 worth of hardware.   Your hash rate is 1500 MH/s.  You draw 1200 watts.  A  bitcoin is worth $7.  Electricity is $0.10/kWh.  You gross $1228 a month and your electricity cost is $86 a month.  Your electricity cost is just noise.

Imagine that a year from now, the difficulty is tenfold.

At this point a FPGA rig is going to have a fraction of your power consumption.  At that point:
Your hash rate is 1500 MH/s.  You draw 1200 watts.  You gross $123 a month and your electricity cost is $86 a month.  Your net profit is $37/month.  Your electricity cost consumes most of your gross.

The guy with the FPGA array has the same hash rate of 1500 MH/s.  He draws 300 watts.  He grosses $123 a month and his electricity cost is $21 a month.  His net profit is $102 a month.

Will difficulty rise tenfold?  Will bitcoins continue to be worth $7?  Will 1500MH/s of hashing power only draw 300 watts in FPGAs?  Who knows?  I'm just pointing out the scenario where the FPGA guy can have a huge advantage.



In your example, you are overriding the initial FPGA costs. At this moment, for a 1500 Mhps FPGA array, you need 18.7 x 80 Mhps FPGA, or $ 11100.- Same 1500 Mhps is achieved with $2000 worth GPU's. So, assuming a profit gain for FPGA's of 102-37 = 65 a month, you still need almost 12 years to recover initial FPGA investment.