Custom Chips Could Be the Shovels in a #Bitcoin Gold Rush as Enthusiasts Design ASICs to Mine the Cryptocurrency Faster | MIT Technology Review
▻http://www.technologyreview.com/news/508061/custom-chips-could-be-the-shovels-in-a-bitcoin-gold-rush
some in [the Bitcoin] community are taking the expensive step of creating custom silicon chips dedicated to running the software that carries out that process.
“It’s a business opportunity, and also because we believe in Bitcoin and what it can do,” says Josh Zerlan, COO of Butterfly Labs, a Kansas City company that is waiting for its first batch of custom chips to come back from an Asian manufacturer. These chips will be resold to Bitcoin enthusiasts in a line of products that plug into a computer via USB and supercharge its efforts to mine the currency. They range in price from $149 to $29,899, and in early 2013 they will start shipping to over a thousand customers who placed advance orders.
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Having an ASIC fabricated is a highly technical and expensive proposition, typically beginning at the low hundreds of thousands of dollars.