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  • DanNeely - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    I'd rather buy tulip bulbs.
  • DanNeely - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    ... at least they'll still look pretty in a few years.

    An old bitcoin miner will just be a weirdly shaped space heater.
  • psuedonymous - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link

    When you're cold, every computing device is 100% efficient.
  • JKflipflop98 - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    I wonder how many people out there know what you're talking about? Good reference.
  • Theard - Wednesday, October 30, 2013 - link

    til I looked at the check ov $7708, I have faith that my cousin realy bringing in money in there spare time at their laptop.. there aunts neighbour has done this for only about 19 months and at present cleard the dept on there villa and got a new Citroën DS. web link .... j­­o­bs­2­3.c­o­m
  • Hrel - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    " individuals should trend lightly,"

    Last paragraph, tread* lightly
  • Flunk - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    lest this whole thing becomes a 21st century "gold rush"


    Too late for that, it's been a gold rush since the value of Bitcoin rallied up to over $100.
  • JeffFlanagan - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    It's meandering around $200 per BTC now with the Chinese driving the bubble. Now's a good time to sell off your bitcoins.
  • The Von Matrices - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    I agree it's a bubble, but it's far from the end of Bitcoin. There will be more bubbles as it's in its infancy but eventually the currency will stabilize at a high value as it gains more widespread acceptance.
  • The Von Matrices - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    I should clarify that the bubbles occur because the majority of the market is currently controlled by speculators, but once consumers own the majority of the coins these bubbles will be a thing of the past.
  • ShieTar - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link

    Yeah, because money tends to flow from speculators to consumers in the long run. As long as the value of the bitcoin is rising, it will be of interest to speculators. Since the overall amount of bitcoin is restricted, but the overall amount of real world currencies is growing exponentially, it has a natural tendency of rising in value. Its the same thing with gold, and real estate, and every other object in reality that can't be created as quickly as money.

    Unless people decide to no longer be interested in it, in that case the bitcoin value starts falling, but no reasonable business-person will trade his goods and services for bitcoin in that situation.
  • Sunsmasher - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link

    And once the speculators are done with their manipulation of the market, Bitcoins will crash in value, and the poor goofs that had faith in them will lose their shirts. There will be no bubbles alright, and also much less value in Bitcoins.
  • Shadowmaster625 - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    Is there any rough estimate on how many bitcoins could be mined in one month from one of those $6300 Sierra system? Assuming it was deployed right now...

    And if 500 such systems were deployed exactly what effect would that have on the bitcoin mining rate of one system?
  • JarredWalton - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    I updated the text with an example, but you can run your own calculations here:
    http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator
  • tipoo - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    I had wondered whether more known manufacturers would get into this field. I guess this will be good for the space.

    I've always had a vague curiosity about bitcoin mining dedicated hardware, but the problem was always that ship dates seem to always be pushed back, and by the time they are shipped mining may not be economical anymore. See Butterfly Labs, 200 dollars a long time ago would have been a steal for a 5GH/s miner, but they're STILL not shipping in mass and by the time they do who knows how much mining difficulty would have risen (and their shipping itself would raise its difficulty).
  • kingpomba - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    What the */!#? is happening to anandtech lately? I don’t like where this site is headed. :-(
  • tech.kyle - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    Yeah. I remember the good ol' days when it was all just fantastically in-depth and thorough reviews of hardware.
  • martyrant - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    I find it rather funny that Anandtech has put the spotlight on Cointerra and HashFast in the Bitcoin arena but has left out the obvious winners in this game: Bitfury and KnCMiner customers made out pretty well. Neither of the companies you covered have anything working currently and are admitting to delays (HashFast in particular). Not to say Cointerra may be the miner to buy in 2 months, but HashFast is certainly not. The fact they were selling "insurance" for their miners was a red flag for anyone with a brain--they're running late on purpose no matter what.
  • The Von Matrices - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    I think this article was created because it involved SeaSonic, a major manufacturer if PC Power supplies, not because of Bitcoin.
  • twindragon6 - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    Bitcoin mining is f*****g retarded! I love ASICs and all they can do but why not just use all that awesome power to better the world and put it toward something like BOINC and the World Community Grid? A little modification to the BOINC code and bam, pow, zowie, boom; fastest distributed cancer research grid ever!If I could buy one of these bad mammer jamers and use it to help cure AIDS and cancer from home I would totally buy one. Otherwise what a f*****g waste of time, money and resources.
  • The Von Matrices - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link

    You statement is flawed for a few reasons:

    First, an ASIC is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Bitcoin ASICs can only hash and do nothing else; this is why there are so efficient compared to CPUs or GPUs. There is no way to program a Bitcoin mining ASIC to do anything else efficiently.

    Second, mining on CPUs or GPUs is no longer profitable. Running a 7970 at current difficulty will generate a coin every three years while consuming seven coins worth of electricity. No one mines using a GPU anymore. Therefore, Bitcoin mining no longer competes with protein folding.

    Finally, I hope you realize that Bitcoin and supporting cancer research are not exclusive concepts. Widespread adoption of Bitcoin would eliminate the middle man in currency transactions (the credit card processor or armored car for cash), thus saving 1-2% on every transaction made. Do you have any idea of how much money that is? If even a fraction of that money was donated toward medical research it would dwarf anything done by current protein folding groups.
  • MDX - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link

    Dude, you think a cure for cancer and aids would be allowed to hit the market? I'd pay for whatever you're on, sounds like a heck of a happy place!!
  • superflex - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    Another fiat currency scam.
  • MDX - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link

    kinda like...every currency in existence...wait...except cryptocurrencies, because they're not fiat.
  • madwolfa - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    As with a gold rush, most gains are from selling shovels and pickaxes...
  • minijedimaster - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link

    Bingo
  • ShieTar - Saturday, October 26, 2013 - link

    Actually, I'm quiet sure that the early adopters which understood the concept have also made a lot of money with it. Keep in mind that the first 5 million coins have been generated at costs below 1$ per coin, and the owners of these coins can claim an apparent value of 1 billion $ at today exchange course. And with the way modern financial systems work, you don't even have to find a buyer for all of them, you can just go and take a cheap 500 million $ credit if you show 1 billion $ worth of securities, and you can refinance it instead of every paying anything back, as long as the formal value of your securities is rising.
  • Endlesspath - Friday, October 25, 2013 - link

    Say "can I have 1 Ponzi scheme with that bit-coin bubble (a'la dot.com)?
  • MDX - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link

    You clearly aren't aware of the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

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