Spending real resources (electricity/CO2) to produce money, then destroying the money, reducing the eventual money supply of this currency <i>permanently</i>, doesn't seem like the best way to handle any worries of journalistic integrity. They could've donated it just as easily.
I'd never considered that there would be journalistic ethics issues around making money during the course of a story.<p>The solution of effectively destroying the earned money is pretty funny, given that that's an occasionally expressed concern.
How are people getting such huge variances in the wattage drawn for the 5GH/s miners? Wired measured it to be 43W-44W, Ars measured it as 50W [1], while David from Coding In My Sleep [2] measured it to be 30W.<p>[1] <a href="http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/weve-got-a-butterfly-labs-bitcoin-miner-and-its-pretty-darn-fast/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/weve-got-a-butterfly-...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://codinginmysleep.com/bfl-jalapeno-unboxing-and-demo/" rel="nofollow">http://codinginmysleep.com/bfl-jalapeno-unboxing-and-demo/</a> (see 7:33)
Uh, the bitcoin minor that they linked to costs $2,400. So, at the same rate it will take more than 20 weeks for ROI.<p>[EDIT] They linked to the wrong one. The one they are using does cost $274. Not bad ROI.
Sorry for my ignorance, but can anybody explain what makes the Butterfly Labs machine special?<p>What kind of propitiatory knowledge do they have that there are these long waiting lines for the machine?<p>What is they key issue that makes these boxes so hard to replicate?
If I understand their graph, they are generating about 0.29 BTC / day with this. Current BTC exchange is $118, so $34.22 revenue / day. At 44W, they'll spend ~1kW/day on power so only around $0.10 or so depending on where their power is coming from. So their break even point is somewhere around 8 days if I have everything correct.<p>It seems that if these devices can be produced at scale, the marginal cost of mining 1 BTC will be only about $0.30 for now, thereby possibly pushing down the market price for BTC significantly.
Pretty awesome watching the technological innovation around Bitcoin. I personally don't have any, but just from following the progress and learning, I am starting to dabble with technologies (FPGAs, for example) in my research that I completely did not anticipate getting familiar with. Great hardware opportunities today for those traditionally limited to software (like me!).