Bitcoin miners, we understand your envy.

Wired has taken possession of a 5-Gigahash per second Bitcoin Miner, built by Butterfly Labs — a.k.a. our very own digital money printing press. Or something like that.

We’ve powered up the miner and can confirm that its little red light turns on, that it burns hot, and that it makes the sound of a toy hair dryer. Whether it will melt or make you rich or not remains to be seen.

Bitcoin mining is a bit of a zero-sum game. The Bitcoin peer-to-peer network produces 25 bitcoins every 10 minutes. That’s a constant. But people who have more cryptographic processing power have a better chance of winning those 25 bitcoins, and these days, there’s an ongoing race to up the compute power on the network.

Butterfly Labs is one of a handful of companies that has taken this race to the next level, producing custom processing machines that are designed to radically up your Bitcoin mining capacity.

The problem is that Butterfly has had a hard time delivering its systems. A really hard time. And to make matters worse, its customers started paying for these systems on pre-order back in June. Butterfly says it has thousands of orders on the books, but to date, it has only delivered 35 to 40 of them, according to Josh Zerlan, chief operating officer of Butterfly Labs.

So most of the people who shelled out the $274 it costs for one of these systems back in June are still waiting. And they’re mad.

@bobmcmillan I ordered and paid for my unit 14 months ago. Congrats on getting one randomly without having to place an order. — CoinURL (@coinurl) April 25, 2013

They’re mad, because other companies — most notably Avalon Asics — have shipped hundreds of their own custom-chip machines. That’s already made the Bitcoin mining game harder than it used to be. One miner said that he was generating more than 15 Bitcoins per day with a 67-Gigahash-per-second Avalon rig he set up in late January. As of this week, his daily production had dropped to 4 Bitcoins.

And Avalon expects to put another 1,200 systems into the Bitcoin network in the next month or so.

Meanwhile, Butterfly Labs is nowhere near full production capacity. The company says that its systems will continue to trickle out, with another 75 to 150 shipping in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about the Butterfly Labs machine, send us an email.