Bitcoin Forum

I don't seem to be able to pay using BTC, the only option is a credit card (which I don't have nor want).

Is there any reason they don't accept BTC?

If you had a golden goose, would you sell it for a few scraps of gold?

ASICs don't make any sense, if they exist and are profitable, no one in their right mind would be selling them.

What a lot of crap.  Just because mining with ASICs may be profitable (given certain conditions) doesn't mean that selling ASICs isn't going to be more profitable.

Without selling them, ASICs designers would not have enough capital to have them manufactured in the first place.
Therefore they must sell pre-orders (or shares in a mining operation), in order to make them.

Of course ASICs do exist, there are literally thousands of ASIC manufacturers in the world.

There are only a handful of Bitcoin ASIC manufactureres though, but Bitcoin ASICs are entirely possible & they would definitely  be more efficient than GPU's.

ASICminer are doing exactly what you're saying as well, they're planning on self-mining.

Anyways, I'm not here to argue that, was just curious why they wouldn't accept BTC, especially when all of their competition do.

They did accept BTC at one time, as I paid via BTC, though that was with their old site at BTCFPGA. I believe both Tom and Dave have acknowledged intermittent issues with their BTC processor on bitcoinasic.net. Maybe send a PM or email to buzzdave at https://www.btcfpga.com/forum/index.php and see if he can help.

^ This - and be aware that Dave is out of town until Tuesday (I think that's the day?) so his replies will be delayed.

So what you're saying is this: Someone buying an ASIC will pay more than the value of what the ASIC will mine.

Doesn't that sound stupid to you?

The only ASICs that will get to an end user will be, at best, an obsolete generation. The whole ASIC lovefest here
just reeks of scam.

Where on earth did I say that?  I would expect that the majority of miners will recover their initial hardware investment but the amount of time that takes will increase as more and more power ASIC power is thrown at the network, so miners will either need to buy additional hardware to mine a given amount of Bitcoins each month or see the amount of Bitcoins they mine each month diminish if they don't invest in more hardware.

By contrast, once their R&D costs have been recovered, those selling the shovels (ASICs) are making a known amount of profit on every unit they sell and making that profit instantly.  If they're half-way competent, they know exactly at what point the market will be saturated and they'll need to drop prices to stimulate further sales, but miners themselves are going to need to go on purchasing additional hardware just to tread water for as long as the overall amount of network power continues to increase.

In a sense, every computing technology which hits the market is already obsolete in that plans are usually already in place for the next generation.  It's not a field in which you rest on your laurels for a few years and then think about designing something new after your product is no longer adequate for its intended purpose.  I seem to recall Josh saying he expects that people will still be able to use their BFL ASICs in 5 years but that doesn't mean an individual ASIC will be bringing in a return which covers its power costs at that point - 5 years is a very long time when it comes to technology.  

Hell, in the 18 months I've been on this forum we've gone from people being able to mine using the CPU on pretty much any computer they already owned to the development of ASICs - it would be foolish to try to predict where Bitcoin mining will be in 18 months time, let alone 5 years, but one thing you can be certain of is that there'll always be a demand for new shovels.

@repentance

(psssssst, it's a troll. tempt it into the designated trolling thread, I'm hanging the troll wrangling hat up for now)

Its seems people prefer to call "troll" whenever they are too lazy or stupid to make a valid counter-arguement.... or are trying to
 bury an "inconvenient view".

I've made a valid point: why should ASIC vendors sell ASIC's rather than mine with them? The only reply I got was a long-winded
waffle that strung several half-arguements together.

Basic economics states: The only time an ASIC manufacturer would deliver is when the sale value of the ASIC is more
 than the value of the Bitcoins the ASIC can be expected to mine.

Well, you may notice all the vendors are taking pre-orders. The reason they do this is to get capital for the cost of the design of the chips (approx. $250,000-$500,000). You may also notice that the Bitcoin network difficulty & exchange rate are both very volatile & that new mining technology comes out very often, so there is no guarantee that anyone buying these chips will pay off their investment (they are a very risky investment in fact).

The reason most ASIC vendors sell their chips rather than self-mine, is because of a lack of capital & the fact that selling the ASIC's is a much safer business model than taking all the risks involved in mining.

True, but the question is once they have taken money for pre-orders is it in the manufacturers interst to not deliver the goods for an extended period while mining themselves?

If they have the facilities to host & run the ASIC's and staff to keep them running smoothly, then yes, up until people start cancelling their pre-orders because they've been waiting so long. I don't see any 20-40x increase in network difficulty (which is what I would expect to see once ASIC mining starts), so I don't think this is the case.

Thank you for a reasoned reply. From what I've read, pre-orders can't be cancelled (I may be wrong) and I'm not sure about the 20-40x difficulty increase. Though block reward and halved with no difficulty decrease, so that is pretty much a 2x increase in a matter of days.

Why would an ASIC vendor want to mine? What would an ASIC vendor want with BTC in the first place?

Note how none of them sell their gear for BTC? "But BFL does." No, they don't. They get filthy fiat dollars from Bitpay.

Why in heaven's name would they accept BTC or mine for them when you can't easily get rid of them and can't buy anything for them? Ok, drugs maybe, but I don't see much of a need for even more drugs. Some *cough* Inaba *cough* seem as hopped up as possible already.

Are you taking anything for that cough? Some here may be in position to sell you what may need, but be forewarned, it will involve an onion.

I've got tears in my eyes due to your solicitude.

Or maybe that's the onion.

lolz!

Nice rply buddy!

No, several people have explained this to you, in several different ways, and you still don't get it. Whether you physically can't understand, or you're just too damn stubborn remains to be seen.

Point 1) All manufacturers have stated that they will not, under any circumstances, mine with their hardware before the hardware gets shipped to customers.

Point 2) If BFL brings online 150TH, they would be >80% of the network. This is the exact opposite of the decentralization that makes the network secure. If one party owned 80% of the network, even for a brief period, faith in the network would crash. Sure, they could mine for a month straight at 80% of the network hashrate to mine the 75,000 coins it would take just to equal the $1million in preorders (at today's prices), but by the end of the month there would be no Bitcoin network outside of BFL, and those coins would be useless - literally worth pennies, if anything.

Point 3) Even if BFL only brings online 10TH/s to avoid total network domination, it still doesn't make much sense. Sure, they'd be mining ~1000 BTC/day, but that's only ~$13,000. Compare that to the $1million+ in preorders, and it still doesn't make sense to mine.

Point 4) The first manufacturer to start shipping ASICs, and proove that they can deliver a product within advertised specs, will get a lot more pre-orders from those who are caution or even doubters. They actually have a monetary interest in being the first manufacturer to ship.

Other people have made other points on top of these, but you refuse to listen. Just because you can't see past your goose-and-the-golden-egg analogy, doesn't mean it makes sense in the real world.

+1.

Another one to add to the ignore list, I guess.  Some people just can't look past their own nose to see the world around them.

Calm down, if you don't like my questions just follow all the other children, stamp your feet and click the ignore button.

Point 1: They could be lying, a common practice in business I've heard.
Point 2: They could be hiding their activity. Entirely possible
Point 3: Negated by Point 2 above
Point 4: Half true. They have a monetary interest in shipping, but also an interest in delaying this as long as possible.

Hiding how? The difficulty would skyrocket if they bring some bASIC to active work.
Your lack of statement is the reason why some many of them click on the Ignore button.

I'm just pointing out possibilities here. As I mentioned, since the reward rate halved and difficulty is still up,
there has been a doubling in hash rate in a very short time. This could even be seen as evidence of ASIC mining.

Just throwing ideas out there, I can cope with critical answers though, ignore buttons are inexcusable.

Let's say that they stole lot of money, and just builded half of what they were capable of.
On their site it says "800+", lets keep 400.
400 * 27GH(their "worst" ASIC model) / 1024 = 10.54TH/s

I can't access the graphs here, but I believe that 10TH/s is a lot for the actual hashrate.

I'm sorry, but I just had to LOL at this. You don't even know what you're talking about, and you're spewing "facts" with no basis. No, it's not a possibility. You can't just "hide" a massive percentage of the network. If ASICs are mining in any significant amount, it would be blatantly visible.

I think you are very confused about how Bitcoin works. I'll try to keep it simple for you. The reward half is/was an independent phenomenon that does not affect the difficulty. The hashrate affects the difficulty. The higher the hashrate, the more blocks are found. The more blocks are found, the higher the diff gets recalculated at the end of a 2016 block period. The difficulty is recalculated so that the network should find a block at an average of 10 minutes / block. The reward half means that each block now grants 25 BTC, not 50BTC. Again, reward half and difficulty have nothing to do with each other. If the network hashrate had doubled at the same time as the reward half, then the difficulty would have doubled within 7 days of the reward half. This has not happened, and the network is roughly the same as it was before the reward half, even a little bit lower.


Point 1) They could be lying, but they would be quickly discovered.
Point 2) It is not at all possible.
Point 3) See point 2 and point 1. It's not possible to hide their activity, and they would be quickly discovered.
Point 4) They do not have an interest to delay as long as possible. Did you even read my point?

*sigh*

Posting blatant factual inaccuracies is hardly the most subtle trolling technique, you're all wasting your time trying to "educate" someone who is using your predictable irritation with their apparent ignorance, purely to amuse themselves/fearmonger. The clue is often in the username and their avatar picture: who in their right mind would pick such a name/avatar combination to actually represent themselves and what they really think? Do yourselves a favour and don't even hit ignore, actually ignore it instead

You're over thinking this, it's not that crazy.  A lot of people expected— for good reasons! the hash-rate to drop like a rock around the time of the subsidy halving, after all— the return just halved and anyone paying higher electrical prices went from making a small amount to losing money. But it didn't drop, it _went_ up a bit.

Someone running an asic farm could be happily monitoring the network hashrate minus themselves and slowly increasing their rate over time so that the network rate just increases gradually, with most of their power coming online as GPUs go offline due to declining profitability.

I'm not saying it's proven... but it's possible. And for all the people who were insisting the hashrate would tank it's a viable competing theory.

I'm well aware that this is a possibility. I just want to ask whether all the pre-order cancellations and loss of potential sales would be worth it?

Yes, everyone thought the hashrate would dip lower than it did. But judging from the general consensus from people here on the forums, not a lot of people actually shut off. Most people thought everyone else would shut off, but kept mining themselves until it's no longer profitable.

Latest update on bASIC website.



Looks like someone needed a couple of drinks before posting that.

https://www.bitcoinasic.net/

Ummm... Except ASCIMINER right?  I think they are ONLY mining in-house with their ASICs until investors are paid off then they are shipping hardware.  I think - if I have the story right.

People haven't really included them in the "Big 3" because they won't be selling hardware to start, yes. IIRC, their plan was to sell shares to fund the production of ~50TH/s worth of ASICs, and pay back investors with the earnings from those ASICs.

This is such an utterly vacuous reply.

Any self-mining ASIC company would indeed slowly increase hash rate and could easily disguise their activity.
There would be no mass pre-order cancellation, due to the mass denial and self-delusion
characteristic of many posters on this forum.

Again: What would an ASIC vendor want with the boatloads of BTC they would be getting? They can't sell them without crashing the economy and you can't feed your family on rig exhaust dried strawberries and honey glazed nuts alone.

Well, actually, that's not quite right. A berry and nut based diet is physiologically perfectly viable as long as you supplement cobalamin and creatine, but it would be awfully boring and incredibly expensive.

I think it's safe to assume there will be rigorous prototype/beta testing before finalizing the ASIC based products for release.