At present there are three startup companies that are promising delivery of litecoin scrypt ASIC miners in mid 2014: Fibonacci, Alpha Technology and Flower Technology. ASIC miners for litecoin promise significant advantages in power consumption but are not faster than GPU miners at this stage of development. That will probably change later in 2014.
Do not discount the significant advantage in lower electricity costs promised by litecoin ASIC miners: for many the lower power costs add greatly to the bottom line, and make a miner much easier to live with.
Fibonacci is generally regarded as most likely to ship first judging from posts and history on the Litecoin and Bitcoin forums. The developer has stated Fibonacci expects to be able to sell hosted miners in April 2014 for immediate mining. Preorders will start earlier. Any of the miners can be used for all scrypt based coins. This is a significant advantage over bitcoin mining, as your miner can be easily switched to other scrypt coins if they happen to be more profitable than litecoin based on current % profitability shown at CoinChoose.
The least expensive Fibonacci miner will be the single chip 960 kH/sec Recursion miner that will cost $384 paid with bitcoin or $346 paid with litecoin. Fibonacci has announced that CACHeCoin will also be accepted as payment for their scrypt ASIC miners.
We expect CACHeCoin prices to soar once Fibonacci is selling miners, so smart investors will buy CACHeCoin now, then use to buy Fibonacci miners at a discount as CACHeCoin prices rise. At present CACHeCoin can only be bought at the Poloniex exchange (symbol: CACH) by exchanging bitcoin for CACHeCoin.
For perspective, if you built your own 2000 kH/sec GPU mining rig you could reasonable expect to pay $1500 for the video cards, power supply, motherboard, and other parts. Two Fibonacci Recursion miners would mine at 1920 kH/sec and cost $700 – $770, half the cost of building your own GPU mining rig. Don’t forget power consumption of the Fibonacci miner would only be 10 watts versus 900 watts for the GPU rig!
Here is a breakdown of cost per kH/sec for the three miners from published specs:
- Fibonacci – $0.40 per kH/sec ($0.36 per kH/sec if paid by litecoin) – available April 2014 per developer
- Alpha Technology – $0.45 per kH/sec – available sometime Q2/Q3 2014 per website
- Flower Technology – $0.19 per kH/sec – available August 2014 per developer
If you missed getting in on the ground floor of ASIC mining for bitcoin you may want to buy ASIC miners for litecoin as soon as they are ready to ship. For more information you can visit the Fibonacci SCRYPT ASIC miner or Alpha Technology Litecoin ASIC miner and Flower Technology threads at the Litecoin Forum.
Fibonacci website – http://www.fibonacci.io/ – to register an account to buy shares use https://fibonacci.io
Alpha Technology website – https://alpha-t.net/
Flower Technology website – http://flowertechnology.com/