Do You think that we are going to see the miner done ?
When I was given the chance to be refunded last month I took the refund.
I was afraid of no software support.
Sad so sad.
You said word for word what I did and thought/think
I think that was foolish, especially at the acorns low price. The I understand the $5000+ ones but those are more general bitstreams. The early bird gets the worm in the world of mining and Philip knows this, a few hundred is a low risk for an fpga that can easily be reprogramed to new algorithms.
Acorn does not "have a low price". It is currently at least 50% more expensive than RX580 and will not earn more (even with the low power usage) than this GPU. GPUs can be sold and I have my doubts about Acorn. I am done with GPU mining and mentally out of mining all together. I do not believe in this illusive big rebound of crypto. There will be more and POS coins and centralization will creep in.
You have obviously not been into buying mining gear for a long enough time. I remember the big first Asics costing ~3500 and at the time that was 70 bitcoins. Scrypt Titans were $10k a pop. We aren't talking cheap GPUs, this is fucking cheap when it's new to mining. The fpga cards are $5000 and that's still not bad at all because the way they will hold their value and can go for any algorithm with the correct bitstream. Just because you aren't used to high price mining means nothing.
You are also comparing a single alpha bitstream by a Random user to a fully developed and optimized GPU. That's just faulty logic, solo mining isn't even the main reason for this being made.
Your vast experience aside, what is the main benefit of Acorn, in your mind? I mean gains of course. Is there even a concept of ROI for Acorn or ROI is only for newbies?
The main benefit is to lower the electricity use which is as we all know the biggest thing against roi (if you had free power you'd be mining on wildly inefficient miners) it also increases hashrate which might (MIGHT) allow you to stay profitable in the upcoming era of FPGA miners all over the main algorithms. This means those who don't use fpga or fpga optimized GPU will be all pushed to unprofitability and have to mine GPU only algorithms which will be crowded with other unoptimized GPU farms, meaning more difficulty and lower profitability.
To hedge against this a few hundred dollars isn't bad even for a handful, if this goes great the supply won't be there. The issue on Chinese clones (which will appear if this works well) will be incompatible bitstreams meaning first mover Advantage is huge.
Perhaps you should look at what GPUHoarder was saying on sqrl-acorn Discord starting at 6:52 pm on Dec 4 (today)