Motherboard’s Alec Liu (@sfnuop) interviews Yifu Guo, creator of the Avalon ASIC — one of two reasons Bitcoin mining capacity has been coming online at a faster pace than ever. Excerpts:

“And quietly in the background, a company called Avalon shipped the first ASIC-based bitcoin miners, custom-built rigs with specially-designed chips for efficiently printing the market’s hottest commodity, ushering in what can be considered the internet’s first gold rush. (Someone recently paid $20,000 for a $1,500 miner from batch two on eBay. At the time of this writing, another auction has a batch two Avalon miner going for over $19,000.)”
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“After opening up its third batch of 600 miners for sale yesterday, customers from around the world from countries like Argentina, the UK, and even Egypt (although the majority of orders came from the big three of the U.S., Russia, and China) made sure Avalon’s units sold out in fifteen minutes. We had the chance to sit down with Avalon’s founder, Yifu Guo to talk bitcoin, mining, and the future.”

“If bitcoin is a $1 billion market, and it only takes less than $1 million to secure the network right now, that’s not a lot of money for someone to try and take over the mining scene. The faster the technology progresses, the more secure the network is, because it will be that much harder for a malevolent entity to mess with the system. We want to [improve performance …] The sooner the better so we’ll never again have this scenario where one company like Avalon essentially controls more theoretical computing power than the entire network’s hash rate. This will never happen again.”

 - http://bit.ly/14lT6cd
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=159125.0 (Further discussion of the article)

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