Archive for the ‘Mining Hardware’ Category

Alpha Technology Shows Their First Produced Viper ASIC Chips

13, Oct 2014

alpha-technology-viper-chip

Alpha Technology has promised their customers that they will ship this month, October, after the company was unable to deliver by the end of September already. Today the pictures of the first produced Viper ASIC chips have been posted by the company and now they need to start assembling them into the Scrypt miners. And although no date is yet mentioned when they will be able to start shipping Viper Scrypt ASIC miners, it now seems realistic to believe that there is a chance that the first units may start shipping before the end of the month. Alpha Technology has also promised to “also be quickly releasing a video demonstrating our chips hashing as an update to the community”, so we are now waiting to see the first actual Viper unit in action.

Specifications wise the smaller 50 MHS Viper Scrypt ASIC miner and the bigger 250 MHS Viper Scrypt ASIC still look OK compared to other mining hardware already available on the market, though at the prices that they were originally sold you can already buy more powerful hardware in terms of hashrate. The situation with the time required for the Vipers to ROI is very similar to that of the situation with KnCMiner Titan miners – not very likely that it will ever happen, unless the price of LTC does increase quite a bit over the current level. So it will be very interesting to see what will happen with the company if/after it ships all of the pre-ordered miners – will they reduce the prices and continue making and selling the Vipers to new customers, will they be working on new generation of chips or…

What is Going on With Mining Asics Technologies

10, Oct 2014

mat-scrypt-asic-mining

Now, if you are thinking that the situation with Alpha Technology and their Viper Scrypt ASCI miners still not shipping, what should you think about the situation MAT (Mining Asics Technologies). According to the new information released by the company they have received their first ASIC chips at the beginning of August and by the end of the month and early September they were already releasing videos of some of their products hashing. On the company’s website we’ve seen an estimated shipping date announced as 15.09.2014 for the smaller Scrypt ASIC miners and “estimated shipments Q3 of Year 2014” for the first batch of devices from the more powerful units.

On 19.09.2014 MAT has released a news update stating that the after some delays the “shipping for our first customers will start on 26.09.2014”. On 08.10.2014 there was another news update saying that the company has already started shipping the previous week, however they have apparently found a software bug that they need to fix and are stopping the shipments meanwhile with a promise to maybe start shipping again next week. Now, why would they need to stop shipping if it is a software bug, it has been a while since all of the more serious ASIC crypto miners can be software (firmware) updated by the user. Furthermore how and why they find a software bug after a bit over a month of testing that they should have already been done since they got their first miners working. It all seems like they are buying some time as nobody has yet reported of receiving a miner from them, and if somebody did get a unit if it had a serious problem that needed manual intervention from MAT that would mean the device need to be sent back to them for a fix.

As you would expect from an ASIC manufacturer the communication with customers is lacking, we are used to seeing this, even though this is clearly not the right way to go and treat your customers that have paid you thousands up front. No wonder that people are not happy, but then again we are seeing a similar situation with other companies such as Alpha Technologies or even KnCMiner, not to mention BFL. Clearly if companies in this business want to keep their customers happy and returning for more they need to be more open and responsive to customer questions, not to mention that they should not give promises that they might not be able to keep. Keeping your customers in the dark, not keeping promises and delaying your hardware without a detailed and on time explanation is clearly not the right way to do business in the crypto currency world.

Bitcoin Mining Getting Harder and Harder for Miners

9, Oct 2014

bitcrane-bitcoin-asic-miner

Have you looked at the specifications of the currently available generation of Bitcoin ASICs lately while considering getting a miner in order to get some coins at home? As Bitcoin network difficulty is progressively increasing every ~13 days, the hardware manufacturers are already hitting the limits of the 28nm production technology and the BTC exchange rate stays at low levels things are not looking good. We have checked what you can expect to earn with some of the SHA-256 ASIC miners for Bitcoin and have done some calculations that you can see below using the current network difficulty as a base.


SHA-256 ASIC Miners for Bitcoin:

Rockminer R3 Box – 450 GHS @ 450W – $185 USD
BitMain AntMiner S3+ – 453 GHS @ 355W – $215 USD
Rockminer T1 BOX – 800 GHS @ 1000W – $349 USD
BitCrane T-110 – 1.1 THS @ 1100W – $1299 USD
Spondoolies-Tech SP20 Jackson – 1.7 THS @ 1100W – $1190 USD
BitMain AntMiner S4 – 2 THS @ 2000W – $1250 USD

Looking at the list of miners above you can see that they are actually not that many options available that you are currently able to order and get very soon in your own hands. There are some miners available for pre-order with next month shipping or Q1 2015 expected availability for example but we have not included these. KnCMiner’s Neptune is also not included as these are not being sold at the moment and even if they did at the last listed price nobody would be buying them anyway. We have not listed some other miners from companies that are supposed to be shipping, but we have not found a single trustworthy review or confirmation from anyone that actually received a product from them.


Expected daily mined BTC with the current network difficulty:

Rockminer R3 Box – 0.006466 daily, 0.04526 weekly, 0.194 monthly
BitMain AntMiner S3+ – 0.006509 daily, 0.04556 weekly, 0.1953 monthly
Rockminer T1 BOX – 0.01149 daily, 0.08043 weekly, 0.3447 monthly
BitCrane T-110 – 0.0158 daily, 0.1106 weekly, 0.474 monthly
Spondoolies-Tech SP20 Jackson – 0.02443 daily, 0.171 weekly, 0.7329 monthly
BitMain AntMiner S4 – 0.02874 daily, 0.2012 weekly, 0.8623 monthly

Do note that the above numbers represent what you can earn with the hashrate that the specific ASIC miner provides with a Bitcoin network difficulty remaining at 35,002,482,026 for the duration of the whole specified period. Also these numbers represent the mined coins and you would need to subtract the costs for the electricity from them based on the power usage for the miner and your electricity prices per kWh in order to get an actual profit you will get. As you can see even 2 THS are already not that much and you are going to mine less than 1 BTC per month with this hashrate and with the current sub $400 USD price for Bitcoin when you subtract the electricity fee (can get to half the mined coins) things do not look promising. So for small time miners Bitcoin mining with ASIC miners is not very interesting anymore and even for larger farms things might not be that bright as you might think, so it is no surprise that some of these are selling their hashrate in the form of cloud services. The only thing that could make Bitcoin mining attractive to normal users again is a significant increase in the price of BTC, so you can be mining now and keeping the mined coins waiting for that to happen…


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