Pot, cook

The eternal dream of "doing nothing and getting paid for it" finally became available not only to deputies.

The world of bitcoin with powerful jerks is captured by super specialized mining devices - ASIC miners.

Today, ASIC miners are able to bring superprofits to their owners, but it is extremely difficult to purchase these devices - you have to invest money with significant risk in various pre-orders, often without any guarantees.

The flip side of the rapid development of mining technologies is a sharp increase in complexity (and as a result, a decrease in the specific profitability of mining).



Increasing complexity is caused by the “Great Relocation of GPU Miners” - a huge part of the community of miners that use top-end ATI graphics cards to migrate to alternative cryptocurrencies, for which the development of specialized chips for mining is (yet) cost-effective. This is developing the cryptocurrency market in breadth, and whether bitcoin will remain the cryptocurrency of the future or will be replaced with bitcoin 2.0 over time - this is still unknown to anyone.

Currently, ASIC chips are manufactured using 55nm-65nm technology in the USA and China. However, several companies have already announced 28nm chips, which will be ready at the end of this year or early next. This will increase the power of ASIC devices by hundreds and thousands of times, so you can safely stock up on popcorn - the year 2014 will be spectacular.

<further it will be about the domestic ASIC miner BitFury from Metabank>

In early June, an announcement about open pre-order for devices for mining on bitfury chips appeared on the bitcointalk.com forum . The chips themselves did not exist by that time, so participation in the pre-order was quite a risky event.

The following performance
characteristics of the finished devices were announced: Productivity - 120 Gh / s
Consumption: 0.75 W per Gh
Delivery: August - October 2013
Cost - $ 2160 (Or a similar amount in bitcoin).

Literally this week, deliveries of finished devices should begin, but their performance characteristics will be slightly different from the declared ones - performance 106 Ghash / s, the finished device will consume about 280 W (that is, 2.8 watts per gigahash).

[Update] According to new data, the device eats 170 watts (1.6 watts per gigacheh).



Chips are designed in Ukraine, printed in China. The boards are made and assembled in Russia. Each board has 8 bitfury chips. The total power of 1 board is 20-24 Gigaches / s, which is equivalent to about 30 Radeon 7970 video cards. In the finished device, 5 to 15 boards can be located.



The design of the boards is interesting. The heatsink is attached to the back of the board, since the heat sink is on the chip at the bottom.

As a control board, a Raspberry Pi with a modified cgminer distribution is used. In general, the software is still damp, but the distribution is uploaded to GitHub and the community will eventually bring it to mind.

The device is completely autonomous, only ethernet and 220V are required. The progress of mining can be monitored via the strawberry web interface.

Today, ASIC miner will bring about 17 coins per month (this is 65 thousand rubles at today's rate), but it is worth considering that the complexity is growing by 30% per month on average, and the device’s profitability will drop significantly by the end of the year (if the rate does not start grow).

In general, of course, it’s very nice that after all the polymers / semiconductors are cured, the former union manages to stay in line with the American (ButterFlyLabs) and Chinese (Avalon) miners.