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Friedcat, CEO of ASIC Miner, continues to be the most reliable producer of bitcoin mining hardware in the world. He teased about creating a USB-powered miner earlier this year, and has just announced experimental versions of the hardware. Pricing is 1.99 BTC per 300 MH/s, with a minimum order size of 300 devices.
At current mining difficulty, this device would return approximately 0.01 BTC per day. Given that most of these will probably not reach retail computers for another month, the return will likely be significantly smaller. The pricing of these devices seems aggressive, given that the break-even price will probably not be reached for over a year (exclusive of electricity costs).
Although it is powered by a USB port, he cautions that it is currently running at 560mA which is over the USB power spec of 500mA. The first batch is currently being produced, with an expected lead time of 15-20 days. He does mention several areas he is working on refining:
Changes and Improvements
Color of PCB changed to blue
Adding a LED which blinks when a share is found
Fixing the cgminer compatibility problem
Reducing the heat generated and the current to <500mA
It is clear that the demand for ASIC mining hardware remains strong. ASIC Miner recently auctioned 50 ASIC blades running at 10 TH/s for 50-65 BTC each. This news comes after Friedcat successfully doubled ASICMiner’s hashing speed from 7 TH/s to 14 TH/s over the last couple weeks.
I wonder if this could be used to generate LiteCoin.
If so, it would likely be more profitable.
Nope. Litecoin uses scrypt where as Bitcoin uses Double SHA256. ASICs advantage is in how the instructions are burned directly into the chip so it is highly optimized to do one thing and one thing only with low power requirements (unlike FPGAs or GPUs). Additionally the scrypt algorithm was chosen specifically for its fast memory access and large memory pool requirements which makes it less than ideal for FPGAs and ASICs, but ideally suited to GPUs and to a lesser degree, CPUs. I suspect that eventually there will be FPGAs and ASICs that can tackle scrypt, but not in the immediate future.