I would say the $3600 was free but someone had to code in the secret miners and setup a pool account to pay out the coins. If it had lasted more than a couple weeks though, you can see how the profits would really start to roll in. I'm surprised they thought they could get away with it though, when my card is mining its loud as all fuck.
phantasmagoria wrote:Was reading the other day about some new machines coming (or may already be) out that generate silly amounts of hashes which is going to make generating lots of coin much more difficult for the more casual miners.
Yea there are two major vendors. Butterfly Labs are the main force and have machines from 5, 10, 25, 50, or even 1,500 gigahashes per second. Another company released enough competing products to prevent Butterfly Labs from effectually taking control of the entire bitcoin network (network is controlled by the distributed processing power, if one person controls 51% or more they could roll out fake bitcoins) and presumably recoup the costs. The cool thing about the butterfly labs devices is that you can change the firmware to do other computation tasks with it, if you have something that could benefit from the instruction set.
They achieved such insane performance by designing custom 32nm processors (wafer printed and all that jazz) that do nothing but process SHA256 hashes. To compare the performance, some of the most powerful single GPU systems top out around 700 (1200 if you count the mutli-cards like a 7990) megahashes per second. So where it would take me over 1 year to process a block of 25 bitcoins, it would take these machines a matter of days or even hours.
Another option available to the more average Joe's and companies are custom FPGA setups. Field programmable gate array. Alone these don't push out many hashes but with lower power cost and size you can cluster them up like crazy. But these new ASIC machines basically kill the FPGA market.
