Inside Butterfly Labs: The ASIC bitcoin mining arms race
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....
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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....
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....
It's eight months late, but it looks as though Butterfly Labs is finally starting to ship some of its ASIC bitcoin mining equipment to customers. The Kansas-based company has repeatedly delayed customer shipments of its ASIC mining products, which were originally announced last June, and were scheduled to ship starting last October. Customers are getting angry, and the company's representatives aren't helping by trading insults on public forums. On Sunday, though, a Butterfly Labs representative posted on the company's support forum that shipments were beginning. "A few went out Saturday....
After over three months of delays from all major competitors, it seems as though the race to develop the first ASIC-based Bitcoin mining computer is finally drawing to a close. Less than three weeks ago, Avalon ASIC announced a hard shipping deadline for themselves of January 19, and placed a countdown on their website. On December 28, another competitor, ASICMiner, published pictures of fully completed mining chips, and on January 3, their PR representative published a post on the Bitcointalk forums: "The samples passed all functionality tests. The power consumption is also within the....
Butterfly Labs was one of the very first mining firm is now in deep trouble as US Goverment is taking legal actions against them. Butterfly Labs was accused of fraud and misrepresentation. FTC documents say that the companies assets were frozen. The story began with really upset customers who failed to received their pre paid miners. Butterfly Labs has violated Section 5(a) of the FTC Act. BFL were basically engaging in “unfair or deceptive business practices in or affecting commerce”. We have contacted butterfly Labs to get some information regarding the shut down but they said