Alpha Technology, the British company who announced in November it would be one of the first to bring ASIC mining devices for litecoin and similar cryptocurrencies to market in 2014, this week announced it would begin taking pre-orders for 30% deposits.Customers may now register their interest on the website.There will be two devices available, both employing stacked Viper Boards: one 5MH/s device for £1,350 (about $2,225) and a 25MH/s device for £5,450 (about $8,980), plus VAT for UK customers.Alpha Technology said both the hashing rates and delivery times quoted were deliberately conservative estimates, and actual shipping should be well underway by Q2-Q3 of 2014.The prices quoted on the product page are the deposit amounts.The machines are standalone, with no need for a host PC.They feature a LCD panel on the enclosure and can be configured with WebGUI via a desktop or mobile device, bringing access to alt-coin mining to less experienced users.While all serious bitcoin mining these days is performed with specially-designed ASIC and FPGA-based chipsets, such technology has eluded other currencies using the scrypt algorithm so far.

This is mainly due to the choice of scrypt to deliberately resist these chips due to its intensive use of more expensive memory, keeping mining in the hands of enthusiasts with consumer grade GPU mining hardware for longer.If Alpha Technology and others can deliver their new designs, that could be about to change, though the hashing power required to mine litecoin remains substantially lower than bitcoin.Its devices could also be used to mine any other cryptocurrencies using the same scrypt algorithm that were gaining popularity, such as Novacoin, Feathercoin, and even Dogecoin.To produce the devices the company has partnered with Indian engineering firm Dexcel Designs, who have been involved with large scale embedded product engineering for 13 years and worked with international companies like Intel, Texas Instruments, Altera, Xilinx, and Analog Devices.Dexcel Designs were handling all development and quality assurance, while Alpha Technology supplied its expertise in cryptocurrencies and mining specific issues.

Alpha Technology's CEO Mohammed Akram said reputation was important, and has stressed a need for transparency and reliability throughout the development process.bitcoin farming wikiSome companies in the bitcoin mining realm struggled with credibility issues in 2013 bringing cutting-edge equipment to market on time and on price.foxconn bitcoinThis is the reason Alpha Technology will be accepting only 30% deposits on orders, with the remaining 70% required two months before shipping.bitcoin car decalAkram said deposits are refundable (with penalties and conditions depending on timing) if orders are canceled.bitcoin backup wallet"The 30% deposit is something no ASIC company has done before.bitcoin math mining

This is due to the confidence we have in our development and planning ahead, engineering work from Dexcel Designs has been great and we will be working with Global Foundries for our chip fabrication."bitcoin what the heck is itIt would supply "Kickstarter style" regular updates with videos of its progress as a way of keeping in close contact with those who ordered."The live updates we are proposing should give in depths into what we are doing on a daily basis with videos, images and specifications.Customers are paying and while they wait they deserve to know what is going on, we will be giving as much transparency as possible."On its website, the company called the listed hashing estimates of 5MH/s and 25 MH/s a "worst-case scenario" with the final shipping devices expected to beat those estimates.Akram said the majority of the litecoin network's hashing power would remain GPU-based for much of 2014, and would not see any significant rises during that time.

After that, ASICs would offer advantages not only in hashing power but would be more energy (and thus cost) efficient than GPU rigs.Though still worth substantially less, litecoin is the world's second most valuable cryptocurrency and its price has shadowed that of bitcoin as it rose, fell, and rose over the past couple of months.After hitting a lowly 0.0075 BTC as recently as 18th November, it rocketed up to 0.051 BTC within 10 days.1 LTC is currently trading for 0.0309 BTC on the BTC-e exchange, or $25.Its current total market cap is just over $600m.This article should not be viewed as an endorsement of Alpha Technology, please do your own research before considering sending any funds to this company.Numerous ASIC Scrypt Miners have already been purchased and their shipping dates are fast appropriating, but are these powerful mining machines worth their cost?By now there’s a good chance you’ve already looked at purchasing yourself one or two asic scrypt miners to replace your CPU or GPU mining rig.

If you haven’t you can learn more about them here.They’re less expensive, don’t take up near as much space and won’t send your power bill through the roof, but is it profitable?With the expected increase in difficulty for many of the altcoins out there, can you realistically expect any return on investment or will you end up with an expensive paperweight?Are you better off purchasing altcoins rather than mining them?What does Litecoins stagnating price yet increase in difficulty mean for miners?There are several questions you should ask yourself before purchasing your asic miner.The first two questions are easy to calculate.Using a mining calculators – this one., a website that has useful features including a mining calculator and currency converter.If you plan on using a multipool you can expect slightly better numbers, but this is still a good place to being.Using these tools you should be able to calculate the amount of coins you expect to mine, and if you can expect a positive ROI.

Assume you have $20,000 to invest in an asic scrypt miner and here are your specs.What are some of the variables you should consider?While you can’t know the answer to these questions, that doesn’t mean we can’t make some educated guesses and calculate estimated ROIs in several different scenarios.Using excel combined with a mining calculator I was able to produce these projections.If you haven’t turned a profit in four months, there is little chance you are ever going to.Setting the difficulty at 21772 gives time for your asic to be shipped, arrived and set up as many asics are still only preorders with promised shipping dates.Looking at this chart, we can see that the mining difficulty will greatly determine how many coins you are able to mine, and so the question of ROI is that of difficulty increment and Litecoins value.In short, the graph confirms what we already know, but gives us some numbers to work.What can possible miners hope for then?Can you make money mining?Looking back on history, we can see that when asic mining came out for Bitcoin, there was a huge leap in the difficulty for awhile before leveling back out.

The truth of the matter is that the difficulty can double, but it takes an equal amount of hasing power to be added for this to happen.It would take double the hasing power to increase for the difficulty to increase by double.The current network hash rate for Litecoin is 400,792 MH/s, or 400.792Gh/s and the entire scrypt base network hash rate is 1.573+ Th/s as of June 29th, 2014.A miner with 1.2G/h mining power would only represent a .0029% increase in difficulty for Litecoin, but a hundred of these units would be nearly a 30% increase in hashing power and a thousand of them would be near 300% increase.It’s not crazy to think the entire network hashrate will double, and with multipools we can expect to see this hash rate divided among the most popular coins, with Litecoin taking a large portion of this – right now Litecoin makes up 25.477% of the total network hashrate.Yes, you can turn a profit, but with the imminent increase in difficulty, your profit is more than likely too small to make the risk worth it.