The ASIC based system is much more power efficient than GPU/PC systems. It's even better than FPGA based systems which are (~10-20x) more power efficient than GPU/PC systems.
If Bitcoin mining economics are able to sustain ASIC production, it will probably render FPGA based systems uneconomical.
Even with just two viable ASIC production runs, I suspect that GPU/PC mining is dead.
Ok I doublechecked and you're right that hardware is the dominant cost with these ASICs. But power accounts for about a quarter of the cost at $0.12/kWh, according to this calculator: http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/
Thanks for the link, that's pretty cool...wish my utility did that.
I think you may not be reading it correctly. I get much better numbers even with more conservative parameters. I more than doubled difficulty, since this is definitely going to change soon due to the effect of the ASIC machines. I need to figure out how to figure out a real number for that.
Parameters that I changed:
Difficulty 6,968,775 (I don't really think it's likely to double)
Hash Rate 50,000 (since 100% uptime is unicorns)
Electricity rate (USD/kWh) 0.12 (my current rate)
Power consumption (W) 600
Results:
Coins per 24h at these conditions 3.6083 BTC (~3.6*20)
Power cost per 24h 1.73 USD
Revenue per day 71.70 USD (Gross)
Revenue Less power costs 69.97 USD (net)
It still looks very good to me, am I mistaken?
PS, I wish I could take advantage of the free nights, unfortunately, I expect that if this night time load-shedding problem persists for any length of time (a few years), someone will step in and find a way to arb it out, and any big investment in doing that on my part may be lost.
