Bitcoin mining hardware

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Not long ago, mining Bitcoin was territory for serious nerds and hardware freaks who were willing to horde GPUs and Frankenstein them into hulking digital drills that devoured electricity and spit out cryptocurrency and garbage heat. Now, all you have to do is buy a little black box on Walmart.com.

If you want to buy Bitcoin hardware through Walmart, your options are limited. That is to say, you can buy a 10GH/s Butterfly Labs miner (on sale!) for $300. Sweet deal right? Not so much. With the difficultly of mining Bitcoin increasing exponentially—by design—miner machines have to increase in power to keep up. 10GH/s, at this stage in the game, is nothing. So if you see fit to invest in this little sucker, you can expect to break even in around 30 years, given the current exchange rate and the average cost of electricity.

It's basically a little black hole for your money.

Now granted, this product isn't on the shelves at your local superstore or anything (yet). Instead, the miner on Walmart's site is coming through TigerDirect. Still, to have Bitcoin mining hardware that you can just add to your cart while checking out rollback prices is pretty wild. Now if only it was hardware that was worth a damn. [Walmart via Mustafa Al-Bassam]