Update: Fibonacci.io website is now offline and the Scrypt ASIC Miners do not appear to be forthcoming.
That’s right. Scrypt ASIC miners are coming soon. Out of all the companies promising to deliver scrypt ASICs by mid 2014 (Alpha Technology , Flower Technology , and Fibonacci ), Fibonacci Inc. is considered the most likely to ship first based on its CEO Jasin Hudgins ‘ (alias jasinlee) posts and reputation on Bitcointalk and Litecointalk . The team has been working on their ASIC for a little over a year now. Just recently, Fibonacci’s official website went online.
The website seems to be in its very early stages. Some elements don’t work, several pages have “Coming Soon” messages, and there are quite a bit of typos here and there. However, the site still provides some important facts.
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Fibonacci will let customers invest in profit shares and hardware shares and will also let customers purchase miners. There are three miners to choose from with hashrates ranging from 960 Kh/s to 35 Mh/s. However, Fibonacci will initially only sell hosted mining.
“Once we have viable competition we will begin to ship the units to the public. This will help slow the advancement of companies reverse engineering designs such as ours. Around this time we will likely be done with our gen 2 or 3 chips and have to clear out the hosted units anyway.”
Prices are estimated to be $0.65 per Kh/s and $0.58 per Kh/s if paid in LTC. The miners can mine any scrypt-based coin such as Litecoin. Units will ship from Fibonacci’s engineering team in Germany, and the cost of shipping is included in the price.
With scrypt ASICs on the horizon, does that mean that GPU mining is dead? Not really. Not yet, anyway. These scrypt ASICs aren’t massively faster than GPUs. They’re also more expensive than GPUs in terms of price per Kh/s. The real benefit is the significantly lower energy usage. The 960 Kh/s “Recursion” miner uses only 3.5 – 5.0 Watts. So while a scrypt ASIC might be more expensive initially, the extremely low power usage will make up for that in the long run.
Scrypt ASICs were bound to show up sooner or later. It’s likely that by late 2014 to early 2015, they will become even faster and will potentially render GPU scrypt mining obsolete. For more information about Fibonacci, check out the threads on Bitcointalk and Litecointalk , or contact them at [email protected] .
(Headline image: Soft Fibonacci Spiral v1 by fractalfiend on deviantART)
