Bitpay Breaks Daily Volume Record with Butterfly ASIC mining release

BitPay has processed its largest ever single transaction - $1m for bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer Butterfly Labs. This means that, at the current price of $192 per bitcoin, Butterfly Labs received an order for around 5,208 BTC-worth of mining equipment. BitPay then processed this order, depositing the equivalent in fiat currency in Butterfly Labs' bank account. Despite the size of the order, the cryptocurrency payment processor processed it in their usual one-business-day timeframe. Tony Gallippi, co-founder and CEO of BitPay, said: "The speed, reliability, and certainty of payments....

The ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) wars are heating up. Butterfly Labs -- the US-based company that has been promising a low-powered, low-cost ASIC mining rig for months now -- has finally shipped one to a US blogger and bitcoin specialist. David Perry, who owns the technology blog Coding in My Sleep, took delivery of a Jalapeno ASIC mining rig from Butterfly Labs on April 20, and filmed an"un-boxing" video, along with a short review. Perry measured the unit hashing at 5 Ghashes/sec, with an energy consumption rate of 30 watts when working ... which is in line with....

CoinDesk's Daniel Cawrey recently visited and toured the facilities at Butterfly Labs, one of the most prominent and written about producers of bitcoin mining technology. In this second part of this series, he reports on the factors involved in the bitcoin mining arms race. Now that Butterfly Labs is shipping ASIC bitcoin miners at a steady pace, their production plus that of Avalon and mining pools like ASICMiner are causing the mining difficulty to go up quite quickly. What this means is that it takes more computational power to complete proof of work algorithms. It means that a race is....

Butterfly Labs has announced it will begin selling bulk ASIC chips for bitcoin mining starting this month. While some Bitcoiners on Butterfly Labs' forum welcomed the news, many others are expressing skepticism or frustration in light of the Kansas-based company's lengthy delays in fulfilling orders for ASIC mining devices. Butterfly Labs announced late last month that it was starting to ship its ASIC products, which were originally announced in June of 2012. Following Butterfly Labs' latest announcement about bulk sales of chips, a number of commenters have taken to reddit and the Bitcoin....

About three months ago, Butterfly Labs was the first to announce a specialized Bitcoin mining device based on a technology with the potential to massively increase the computing power of the Bitcoin network per unit power and cost: the ASIC. ASIC, or application specific integrated circuit, is a technology taking specialization to a whole new level. Although FPGAs, or "field-programmable gate arrays", are already used for Bitcoin mining, ASICs offer even greater improvements because they come specialized for one specific task right out of the factory. The process to create ASICs is hardly....