Pot, cook

The eternal dream of “doing nothing and getting money for it” has finally become available not only to deputies.

The world of bitcoin with powerful jerks seize super-specialized mining devices - ASIC miners.
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Today, ASIC miners are able to bring super-profits 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 technology is a sharp increase in complexity (and as a result, the decline in the specific profitability of mining).



The increase in complexity is caused by the “Great Relocation of GPU Miners” - a huge part of the mining community that uses ATI's top graphics cards for mining, migrates to alternative cryptocurrencies, for which the development of specialized mining chips is not yet economically efficient. This develops the cryptocurrency market in breadth, and whether the bitcoin will remain the cryptocurrency of the future or will be replaced over time with bitcoin 2.0 - this is not yet known to anyone.

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

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

At the beginning of 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 pre-order was quite a risky event.

The following TTX ready devices were announced:
Performance - 120 Ghash / s
Consumption: 0.75 W per Gh
Delivery times: August - October 2013
Cost - $ 2160 (or a similar amount in bitcoin).

Deliveries of ready-made devices should begin literally this week, but their performance characteristics will differ slightly from those stated - 106 Ghash / s performance, the finished device will consume about 280 W (that is, 2.8 Watts per Gigashash).

[Update] according to new data, the device is eating 170 watts (1.6 watts per gigashash).



Chips are designed in Ukraine, printed in China. Boards produced and assembled in Russia. There are 8 bitfury chips on each board. The total capacity of 1 board is 20-24 Gigaxhesh / s, which is equivalent to about 30 Radeon 7970 video cards. The finished device can have from 5 to 15 boards.



Interesting design boards. The radiator is attached on the back side of the board, since the heat sink on the chip is on the bottom.

Raspberry Pi with modified cgminer distribution is used as a control card. In general, the software is still damp, but the distribution is flooded on GitHub and the community will eventually be brought to mind.

The device is completely autonomous, requires only ethernet and 220V. You can monitor the progress of mining through the web interface on the strawberry.

To date, the ASIC miner will bring about 17 coins per month (this is 65 thousand rubles at the current exchange rate), but it is worth considering that the complexity grows by an average of 30% per month, and the yield of the device will drop significantly by the end of the year (if the rate does not start grow).

In general, of course, it is very pleasant that having degraded all polymers / semiconductors, the former union manages to keep in line with the American (ButterFlyLabs) and Chinese (Avalon) miners.