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Production Backlogs

So, the current state is like this:
If you ordered a $145 miner in January like me, you're still waiting for ~60 days worth of orders to ship before yours.

If you ordered a $1200-$30000 item pretty much any time between a year ago August and now, ... then f*ck you because you're going to take away most of my money in the long run even if your order isn't delivered for another 180 days after mine.

Can these devices be used for anything else like password cracking? A No, their function is limited to high speed encryption validation in the specific double step sha256 protocol. It's not useful for any purpose related to rainbow tables or password recovery.

http://www.butterflylabs.com/bitforce-sc-faq/

Thanks for taking the time to reply,

While there is a huge backorder, BFL is shipping products.

They are catching up on backorder fairly quickly.
(About 9 months off now)
The current trend every week and a half, they catch up on a month. The current delay is in actual power brick availability and they are contacting people asking if they want to wait or get it shipped without a power supply and the owner can provide their own.
BFL Judy posts every few days on shipment updates.
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/blogs/bfl_jody/

As for the actual chips, they are rated at 4GH/s and have a delivery term of 100 days. However, the actual chips shipped will be of mixed grade, meaning they will have at least 12 working engines in them and up to 16 working engines. I would say about .25 GH/s per engine, so we are looking at 3-4GH/s no matter the chip grade. With stale shares in mining pools and the speed of these chips, my previous guestimate of 2.5GH/s each would probably be the expected output of a D grade chip.

The new ASIC miners coming out will make GPU mining pointless, CPU mining already is. http://www.butterflylabs.com/

Bitcoins earned: 1.00
Value today: $133.58
Total time: 14.5 days
Rigs operating: 2-3

Towards the end of the run I was getting impatient and ExtremeTechâ(TM)s Joel Hruska helped me sprint to the finish by giving me access to some of his machines...

The era of Bitcoin mining with off-the-shelf hardware is over. The serious people are already using FPGAs, and if the people advertising ASIC hardware actually ship working product in quantity, even that will be obsolete. Like most Bitcoin-related businesses, the people selling ASIC mining hardware are flakes.

Bitcoin mining becomes exponentially harder as the 21 million Bitcoin limit is approached. Over 11 million Bitcoins have already been found, so this is already more than half over. All miners are in competition. The rate of Bitcoin discovery is fixed, so the more people mining, the less each miner makes.

FPGAs are now out of date. ASIC mining is here now: http://launch.avalon-asics.com/ with more coming: http://www.butterflylabs.com/

This viewpoint of Bitcoin mining being too high MW/h is a little near-sighted. The current nascent phase (GPU Bitcoin mining) will soon be succeeded by ASIC Bitcoin mining and those miners who utilize GPUs will realize that their current setup will be so far behind ASICs, their hashrates will be magnitudes less than ASICs and will use FAR more electricity that they will switch over to the new ASICs. For example, Butterfly Labs will be shipping a low-end 5GH/s ASIC miner for $274. To reach the same 5GH/s hashrate with GPUs, you would have to invest thousands of dollars in PC equipment in addition to possibly hundreds of dollars per month in electricity costs; now contrast with the low-end 5GH/s BFL ASIC miner in the above link which was previously quoted@5 watts (BFL recently removed the wattage information from their website). Problem is they keep pushing back the shipping date on their products, we may not know the final specs until they have a shipping product which they said would be shipping last year.

https://products.butterflylabs.com/

Though I'd note it looks like they raised the price of their cheapest unit. It's US$274 now for a 5000MH/S unit.

Multiple errors in your post.

The Bitcoin difficulty has never been bumped up by ASICs, because ASICs have not yet been released. They should come out in December/January.

Mining is still profitable today. I am still making money with GPUs (a little), and with FPGAs (a lot). Even after the halving due tomorrow, my GPUs will still make money. It is all about electrical costs. If you pay less than $0.20/kWh, a HD 7970 can still make money. Worldwide average is $0.10/kWh.

ASICs are not expensive at all. The most power efficient ASIC vendor, Butterfly Labs, have ASICs starting at $149: http://www.butterflylabs.com/products/

People started thinking that they could build silicon to do things even faster, and thus the ASIC market started to emerge and take off.

Well, maybe. Like much in the Bitcoin world, some of this is a scam. At least one of the "ASIC" products turned out to be an FPGA. As of right now, it's not clear that anyone is actually shipping an ASIC-based Bitcoin mining device. Suckers can pre-order from either of two vendors. Payment is in US dollars, not Bitcoins.

I think you're really missing the point of Bitcoin mining. It's like gold mining, in an economy using Gold as a currency; you'd never expect the majority of economic effort being involved in digging the stuff out of the ground. Rather a small segment of society does that, and the rest of society does whatever they do in the economy, buying gold from other people as needed.

Bitcoin mining was *never* meant to be the way that the majority of people would get their Bitcoins. Rather it's a way of securing the network, namely in that Bitcoin essentially consists of an accounting system, where value is exchanged by writing public key crypto signed messages saying things like "Alice gives 10 bitcoins to Bob". Mining is required because there needs to be some canonical way of ordering those transactions in time. That's done by saying that whatever at least 51% of the computing power in the network thinks is true, is. So long as no one party ever controls that 51%, you can determine if coins have been spent to another party before you decide to accept them.

Look at the pool hashrate diagram. Each of those pie slices is a group of dozens to hundreds of users, each with at least a few hundred dollars worth of mining hardware, securing the network. Do I care if they are making more in Bitcoins than their rigs are costing them? Heck no. I just want a secure network so when I receive some Bitcoins I can know that they haven't been spent before. FPGAs and the upcoming ASICs are good for that, because they perform so much faster than off-the-shelf CPU's that any attacker would have a hard time getting enough computing power to attack the network.

Besides, if I did want to become a miner, all I'd have to do is spend about $600 on a Butterfly Labs fpga platform and I'd gradually have Bitcoins trickle in. But it's a lot faster to just buy them from someone else, just like it's a lot faster to buy gold from someone than mine it.