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Bitcoin ASIC mining profitability and applicability to other decryption
In April, 2013 there was a calculation of the estimated profit from being an ASIC bitcoin miner.
ASIC devices is Avalon, who sell a machine capable of 85 gigahashes for 101.14 BTC (approx $11,000 – they don’t take “cash”). It uses around 600 Watts of power. The $11,000 purchase could make $50,000 within 5 months (difficulty increasing at 20%/m and BTC-AUD rate at 2c/day). Over the course of it’s useful life (around 31 months until it difficulty gets too hard for it and it costs more for power), it will make about $117,000. Which is insane. Of course you can’t resell the ASIC device once it gets to this point, but who cares – it made you a heap of money. That is of course, if there isn’t a flood of ASICs and difficulty doesn’t skyrocket 40% or 50% per month.
ASICs are optimized for bitcoin mining. Not just Sha256(Sha256(x)) hashing, but very specifically bitcoin mining. You can't even use them for the Sha256(Sha256(x)) hashing in the rest of the bitcoin system, like hashing transactions.
The ASICs are made for hashing 80 bytes, where you give them the midstate from hashing the first chunk (64 bytes), and 12 bytes from the second chunk. They then try all variations of the last 4 bytes to try and find a hash that starts with 4 zero-bytes. Only values that result in the 4 zero-bytes are reported at all. That's basically what mining is.
Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2013/12/bitcoin-asic-mining-profitability-and.html
