'I want to link my Bitcointalk name with BTCJam's. Verification code: 3b93db14-6b58-4c30-9f26-7f8261f701f4'

Avalon ASIC is allegedly in Shenzhen, China. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/engineering-the-bitcoin-gold-rush-an-interview-with-yifu-guo-creator-of-the-first-asic-based-miner

rSNC3wLFnAyygpq5oNMPE3ZavNukPiKXp

How do you feel about the Coinlabs/bitcoin deal? http://bitcoinmagazine.com/coinlab-bringing-bitcoin-to-wall-street-with-mtgox-deal/

The market exuberance is partially due to mining speculation, I am sure Avalon-ASIC taking BTC payments has bumped the trend.

There is a wildcard with the Chinese, they are very close to a bubble burst/economic meltdown from their real estate sector.  I am really curious about acceptance of Bitcoin in the Asian market.  This is totally speculative, but Bitcoin would be an attractive place for savings savvy Chinese to store wealth; so far the returns far exceed inflation.  Bitcoin will also have the advantage of being very fluid in a market driven by export and manufacturing.  Once one site starts accepting Bitcoin on the Chinese mainland it could cause a resurgence.  Probably what is holding back the flood gates is Chinese offshore investment laws.


Again, China.

I am waiting until I can use my bitcoins to pay for practical things.

I have been estimating the future value of bitcoins by scaling the market capitalization against fiat currencies, bitcoins will need to be worth thousands to hundreds of thousands if they are to replace any currency.

Viva Bitcoin!

+1
Glad I mined when the mining was good last spring/summer.  Cannot wait to see what happens when the ASICs hit the wild, there will be plenty of hashing power for all the newcomers.

Viva Bitcoin!

Thanks a lot for that link, I have been looking for that.

Still seems better to invest in an ASIC than attempt a 'DIY' FPGA rig.

I say yes and no.  Which is a terrible answer.

Yes ASIC is worth it if you are interested in promoting Bitcoin and working in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

No, ASIC is not worth the investment if you plan to make a living from it.

Viva Bitcoin.

First you will need an FPGA development kit, with a minimum of a high gate count device like a Spartan 6 LX150T.  You will also need a basic knowledge of VHDL and the ability to load a bit stream (there are a few programs that can do this out of Xilinx ICE - which is over $4000 for high gate count)

Once you have a bitstream figured out and a board reference design, you will need to lay out or obtain a board layout or talk one of the defunct FPGA Mining developers to give you their IP. Since the device that you are soldering to the board is a 484 pin BGA and each chip is worth over $150 you will want to have these built at a reputable PCB assembler (Advanced Circuits is good).

This is the stage that the whole house of cards falls away for me because to get to this point I will have spent $5000+ (probably more like $10k) and I haven't hashed a single block.  The best bitstream in FPGA was 830 MHash/s and more likely on an amateur board would be 400 MHash/s.  When ASICs are fully released in the next month, difficulty will go many times higher than it is right now (100,000,000+) which means you will MAYBE get 1 coin every year with 4 Spartan-6 LX150s running at full speed and that is if they don't burn out (FPGAs are reliable when cool and slow, not good conditions for mining).

If you want to get into mining you need to go to Butterflylabs or Avalon-ASIC and get in line with your $1500 to get a device.  If you order this week you might receive your miner by June or July.

I hope I don't sound too *negative here, this information is based on my experience over the last couple weeks researching FPGA for mining.

EDIT: It is totally noble to want to advance FPGA, it is just really really really hard.

I spent two days looking at FPGAs from a PCB design view and it seems that Altera and XILINX have retreated into their respective caves to build something new.  FPGA is going to be a big black hole until miners get ASICs and start working.  I think in the future ASICs could be replaced by more specialized, high gate count FPGA devices from the big chip houses.

Viva Bitcoin!

Is KorbInvestments.com site down?  Maybe it is a President's Day server issue.

I am interested in reading some docs before my next buy in.

I have made an investment in bitcoin because it solves a number of issues related to payment taking in business transactions.  Weather or not my mining hardware will ride the mining wave and 'make me rich!' is inconsequential because if I have a more economical business success will follow.

The important thing about ASIC hardware is that fewer miners are required to maintain the block chains.  ASIC to me is an improvement over GPUs because they will provide me stability against difficulty/price fluctuations.  Why are there so many haters/chicken little's on these forums?  Sit back, relax, enjoy the ant pile.

Viva bitcoin!

Judging by the forums far and wide we should start seeing some BFL ASICs in the wild in the next few weeks (early March for Q2/3-2012 preorders) and reviews following.

The questions I am asking myself now is how to make a business out of the coins, hording and selling is not an option.

Viva Bitcoin!

I couldn't agree more, why is there so much negativity in this thread?
tipped.

Back to what if BTC took on mainstream fiat:

There are $1.16 trillion USD in circulation (http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm).  In contrast there are roughly 10 million bitcoin in existence(http://blockexplorer.com/q/totalbc).
If nothing changed today (no inflation or growth) a bitcoin would need to be roughly worth one million times more than it already is to replace USD globally.  Of course this is a huge over simplification because in the processes a lot of factors would change.

The bottom line is bitcoin is still in beta and nobody really knows how this game will play out.  The market incentives in my view are pointed towards holding BTC, investing in BTC(to encourage distributed ASIC mining, and BTC business - full disclosure I have holdings), and mining until the difficulty pushes my hardware out of profitability.  Once the fractional value of bitcoin is approximately $1/mBTC I believe the free market will widely adopt BTC, however the oil-dollar has more solid footing now than it ever has; basically BTC will need to be adopted to trade a commodity greater than oil (I think it will be information).  Now please tell me all the ways I am wrong, which seems to be the point of these forums lately.

Great post.  Too bad the world of nuclear moves so slowly, Thorium would have been/would be/will be a great stepping stone from fission/fossil fuel to fusion and solar (solar includes wind, tidal and hydro for me since they are all cycles powered by the sun)

The politicians don't care, as long as they get money to campaign from industries.  If one were to do a kickstarter for a project like this all the funds would end up being spent in Washington DC and Ottawa.  Countries like Iran should have taken on the Thorium dream instead of Uranium, they could take over in energy technology because they would be building a whole system from scratch.


Which conventional power is safe?  Greenhouse emissions aside, I just heard a story about cows being exposed to the exhaust from Coal fired generators can get cancer.  Then when human's eat the cow cancer antibodies and protein (which are not destroyed by cooking) they cause problems.  Anyone who thinks there is such a thing as "safe" power is dreaming.

Agreed, the part the Government takes is nothing compared to the "brokerage fee", but it is much more faster than USPS/Canada Post.  Too bad there are no resellers for BFL in Canada.

This is helpful for figuring out the total cost of some things: http://www.thefinalcost.com/

It may be valuable to note that certain items made in the USA, Mexico, Chile and Costa Rica are not subject to customs tariffs.  I am still reading through the specific schedules to find a reference but here is the documentation and couple places to check out. 

THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO HST/GST - that is a federal sales tax that should be paid on all purchases that are not exempt (like some food items like milk or a cake that serves 6 or more)

Ad supported site that talks about cross boarder shopping: http://www.crossbordershopping.ca/duty-tax-import-guide/duty-tax-tips
Canada Revenue Agency Landing page for Tariffs: http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/trade-commerce/tariff-tarif/2008/01-99/tblmod-1-eng.html
Section of the Tariff schedule that applies to electronics: http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/trade-commerce/tariff-tarif/2008/t2008-01/ch85-eng.pdf

I learned about this last year when I was looking into buying a metal lathe.  Lathes and other metal working equipment can be tariff free if made in the USA, Mexico, Chile or Costa Rica.

@wogaut
I am an engineer not an economist, I will try explain my thoughts more eloquently.
I think what I was trying to say is that BTC is much easier to split and transact than dollars and cents.  I don't see the value of BTC going down relative to real world items(electricity for example), more like the commodities (articles on a news site for example) that are represented by BTC grow quicker than and will drop value at a rate proportional to the growth of the BTC economy.  For example, New York Times charges a 0.001BTC/article when it costs the network 0.0001BTC/transaction.  As the network increases its hashing power, the cost per transaction decreases to say 0.00001BTC/trans., the CPA could drop to 0.0001BTC/article.  Does that make more sense?
The difference here is that there is a limited supply of BTC, so the 'interest' for lack of a better term is actually a reward for supporting the network.  And remember, the greater the Hash/s, the greater the difficulty.
A good way to stop participating is by not taking on more debt.  It has nothing to do with BTC, but everything to do with the broader economic topic.  My apologies if it has distracted this thread.

I think you guys are trying to apply real world economic concepts to a completely virtual structure.  Bitcoins have zero value beyond the BTC Network.  Sure they are exchange traded against currencies like the USD, EUR etc, but it is unlikely that BTC would be used as a replacement for those currencies.  Just try and move some of your coins to pay for your electricity bill, with the fees it suddenly kills your $/kWh.

For me, BTC are valuable in an age where information is the commodity that is constantly traded; open an article on Huffington Post and you are exchanging your impression of a diaper ad for an article on Lady Gaga's meat dress.  That paradigm of advertising to support information has a limited life span (my guess is another 4 to 6 years), beyond that information will need to be directly monetized to its audience and a micro payment structure will be required to handle the transactions.  Right now there is not enough infrastructure to make this viable with BTC (we would need many magnitudes more of hashing power) but it will happen down the road.  Remember, BTC are divisible to 8 powers of ten. That is the smallest fraction of a BTC would be 0.00000001.  Maybe this will be called fractional currency expansion?

Mining with FPGAs will allow people to have an interest paying bank in their back pocket for information purchases.

@Haplo,
I totally agree with your description of the debt/interest cycle.  It is important to remember that our current interest rates are practically below inflation, which in China is diluting their currency against their infrastructure.  Isn't the only way out to stop participating?