Some of you may remember the "anyone want to risk-pool a BFL miner?"
thread I started in June.
The biggest question mark in all of this was the delivery time, as BFL
had a big back log. Time is very much money with crypto coin mining as
its a race to the bottom -- more people chasing the same coins.
BFL finally caught up to June orders, and as it turns out, caught up
with every order since June
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/blogs/bfl_jody/382-thanksgiving-blog.html
So, Ian's pre-order in December (2012) worked out great for Skullspace,
but looks to have been meaningless to the hypothetical June order club.
People placing their orders (no longer "pre") now are going to get them
at about the same time.
As the prophets Parker and Stone said in volume 17, chapter 7:
"""Pre-order doesn't mean shit, mmkay? When you pre-order a game you're
just committing to paying for something that some assholes in California
haven't even finished working on yet."""
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDQz-R210ow&t=18m10s
(NSFW)
Though, BFL is saying out of stock for the 5.0GH/s unit at the moment,
so perhaps many months of pre-order would have gotten you a few weeks edge.
With the way the price of bitcoin has moved relative to the mining
difficulty (at least so far), we can see with mining calculators that
receiving of one of these units now may have worked out all right.
(future price growth [if any] and future mining difficulty growth are
hard to guess of course though)
Buying and holding the currency, even in a smaller amount would have
been better. Mining is competitive enough that the only way to
outperform buy and hold is to have a long period of price stagnation
that slows down the growth of other mining gear coming online. That's
one scenario, the losing scenarios are having price stagnation or
dropping combined with continued ramp up of other miners or severe
enough long term price drops where the smaller competition from other
people turning their miners off doesn't make up for how little you make.
------------
I don't recommend it, but you can can pre-order the next generation. One
nifty thing they're offering with the next-gen equipment is a year of
1GH/s hosting contract for $11.
https://products.butterflylabs.com/homepage-new-products/1-gh-cloud-hosted-bitcoin-hashing-power.html
Certainly a cheaper way to get a taste of mining for the hell of it vs
risk-pooling with others with equipment in hand to keep running.
I'm certainly happy in terms of getting a taste: thanks to Ian, WTCR.ca,
and Jeremy I got handle this equipment without any cost. It will be
interesting to see several years from now if we're kicking ourselves for
liquidating those late July through mid November mining revenues.
And I've still got one USB miner sitting idle -- need somewhere to
co-locate it and don't want someone to waste a lot of energy setting up
a PC just for that, would be best if it were attached to a machine
that's always up 24/7 anyway.
(The Skullspace workstation #1 has been suggested, but I really think we
should shut that sucker down when not using)
Expanding the existing operation with a powered USB hub would be best.
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