Do Butterfly Labs ASIC miners pay for themselves?

I have finally received my ASIC Bitcoin mining rig from Butterfly labs and the biggest question on my mind was, will this little box pay for itself? Of course when I purchased the unit it would have easily paid for itself in a matter of days but now with difficulty up so high its a question I wanted to find the answer to. Most of us pre purchased our ASIC rigs from Butterfly labs almost a year ago when it made sense and now that we are getting them it seems everyone has one already. You may also even regret ever purchasing the ASIC rig but I will keep mine and see what it makes me in the first month giving an idea of its time to pay off.

The ASIC rig I purchased is just the small 5GH version that actually mines at around 5.4GH using cgminer with my current setup. At this rate we will see how long it takes to pay itself off. Of course what the device makes will slowly change as the difficulty continues to grow as well as the change in bitcoins value.

UPDATE: After the first 10 days I have mined just over .06 BTC for a total value of $49.50 at todays value of $825 per Bitcoin meaning that at this rate it will take me around a month and a half to pay off the cost of the unit.

UPDATE 2: Now its been another 10 days and I have mined an additional .049 BTC for a total of $48.80 at the current Bitcoin price of $996 per coin. If the value of Bitcoin keeps rising like this then we may see a faster payoff than was expected. Although this being said we are at a total of $98.30 after 20 days of mining with the unit.

UPDATE 3: 10 days later it seems that the value of Bitcoin keeps going up at a crazy rate so it has been nice. This cycle of 10 days we mined .057 BTC which is valued at $64.07 with Bitcoin being $1124 each. I’m getting pretty excited that the value has increased as it has. This puts us after 1 month of mining with our 5GH ASIC at a total of $162.37. We only need to make about another $108 to actually pay this unit off which is good news indeed. We actually have’t sold any of the coins we have made so far so our actual total without selling each cycle is $186.58 but we will continue to show the earnings as if you sell each cycle to be sure you get the cash and Bitcoin doesn’t crash on you.

UPDATE 4: its been another 10 days and Bitcoins seem to have leveled off around the $1000 – $1100 mark which is still high enough to get this ASIC to pay for itself.  Our total for this 10 day cycle is .047 BTC with a current value of $51.42 with coins right now at $1094 each.  This brings the total to $213.79 selling each 10 days or $233.02 holding them as we are.

Our current totals after 40 days are $233.02 still holding all coins mined and $213.79 if selling after each 10 day cycle.

Please stay tuned for the next update.

We can go ahead and state with some certainty that the unit will pay for itself but don’t look to get rich from it :).