Quote from: Syke on May 22, 2011, 01:40:25 AM

Quote from: cypherf0x on May 19, 2011, 06:32:48 PM

Quote from: de4l on May 19, 2011, 01:45:24 AM

based on the huge difficulty jump today.... I think someone has succeeded in fpga/asic bitcoin flooding Sad

*bell ring*
We have a winner!

Two FPGA clusters went live.

Let me toss out some rough numbers. Please correct me if I'm too far off.

You have about 300 chips doing 200 MHash/s? That's 60 GHash/s you brought online? While that probably puts you in as one of the top miners, that's not a significant cause for the recent network growth.

For someone without piles of existing fpgas sitting around idle: If purchased new, that's $250k in hardware costs bringing in $10k per week in bitcoin value. Half a year to pay off the initial investment (assuming price/difficulty growth remains steady). GPUs would break even in less than half that time.

Don't forget, that was two clusters out of an unknown larger number of them, for which the hardware was already paid for capital. Those fpga clusters that he speaks of were paid for by other projects, and would otherwise sit idle earning nothing between major projects if not for Bitcoin. And they are way more energy efficient at hashing than even a GPU, which is way more energy efficient at hashing than a CPU.