The New Generation of Bitcoin Mining: ASIC.

Bitcoin mining is getting more difficult everyday. At first miners were using CPU power to process shares of Bitcoin and now their GPU. After so many people upgrade to GPUs the difficulty of the network skyrocketed which made a market for FPGAs, low power miners. FPGAs did not hit the market very hard because they were too expensive. It is time for a new generation of miners, ASICs.

Butterfly Labs are currently producing 4 diffident ACIS products:

• BitForce Jalapeno | 4.5 GH/s for only $149.
  
• BitForce ‘Little’ Single SC | 30 GH/s for only $649.
• BitForce Single ‘SC’ | 60 GH/s for only $1,299.
• BitForce Mini Rig ‘SC’ | 1,500 GH/s for only $29,899.

These products are like FPGAs, but their costs is low and hash rate is high. The only problem is the demand. They are manually assembling every little chip on these parts and thousands of orders have been placed. They keep a blog  where Jodi keeps customers updated on the status of the orders, so far none have been shipped.

I bought 3 Jalapenos and I am upgrading to one Little Single soon. If you get in early it will only take around 10 days to get your full investment back. Soon after the majority of the miners receive the ASICs, the difficulty will hit an all time high making each block take longer to mine. The block reward is soon to half, so instead of receiving 50 BTC, only 25 will be rewarded.

So what are people going to do with their old GPU powered rigs? I am going to mine Litecoin with all 3 of mine. I believe that the price of LTC will rise once people mine and sell more. Most will, if not already, sell off their rigs to buy ASICs, but I believe mining LTC will be of more value than selling the entire rig.

If you have not used Bitcoin yet, you need to give it a try. You will need a wallet, a miner, a pool, and some free coins! I will make a post explaining how to set everything up soon. Thanks for reading!