Bitfury 400 GH/s Bitcoin Mining Rig Hits US Shores

I&#x27;ve got to commend Bitfury, the Levi&#x27;s of bitcoin.<p>Just as in every gold rush, it is a much more blessed position to be the one selling the blue jeans and shovels than to be the one attempting to sift and mine.<p>I wonder if Bitfury accepts bitcoin as payment. I suspect they do not. EDIT: You can totally pay with bitcoin - <a href="http://www.bitfurystrikesback.com/checkout/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitfurystrikesback.com&#x2F;checkout&#x2F;</a>

According to this calculator [0], in one month, you can expect to earn $20,724.53 dollars (ignoring price changes, difficulty changes, and operating costs). This seems too good to be true, however. Invoking the old adage, &quot;In a gold rush, sell shovels.&quot;<p>I wonder what effect all this has on the Bitcoin economy. If everyone begins doing this, then it will become extremely difficult to mine any Bitcoin without any sort of gear. Feathercoin [1] appears to try and stop this, although I am not sure how effective it is.<p><pre><code> [0] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alloscomp.com&#x2F;bitcoin&#x2F;calculator [1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;feathercoin.com&#x2F;</code></pre>

How does investing engineering effort in designing mining ASICs and spending dollars to purchase what is essentially a currency generating machine help us as a community?<p>I wish we were just as enthusiastic and race to solve other problems too -- like spreading education, finding out ways to purify water, or maximizing agriculture throughput in famine, or predicting when the next hurricane, tsunami, or earthquake is coming our way.

There&#x27;s no technical reason there couldn&#x27;t be a cloud version of this, but of course it makes absolutely no sense as a cloud service, which make me wonder what&#x27;s going on here.<p>An exchange of money for a thing usually means that the buyer wants the thing more than they want the money, and the seller wants the money more than they want the thing, but in this case the seller is selling ... money?<p>Is, uh, the delivery date guaranteed?

I gotta say, am I the only one who see&#x27;s the numbers and then immediately goes to the Bitcoinx calculator to see how much &quot;money&quot; I could make in a day if I bought one of these rigs? On paper it seems like some of these things could pay for themselves in relatively short order if you could actually get your hands on one and run it day and night...and liquidate your mined coins asap at the current prices. A lot of ifs. Has anybody met somebody who&#x27;s managed to pay off a big rig in short order? I&#x27;d really like to see a &quot;success story&quot; with Bitcoin mining.

So how adaptable is something like this to password cracking?

Why don&#x27;t they plug them into their outlets themselves?

I wonder when BitCoin will reach the stage at which mining is not economically viable because the expended electricity is more expensive than the amount of BC gained. It is my understanding that such a point should be eventually reached due to the mathematical nature of BCs.

You know, for $15,000 I&#x27;d expect them to throw in a $200 case.

Just nitpicking, but isnt the unit supposed to be GHz?<p>400 Giga Cycles&#x2F;s makes more sense, unless I am missing something.