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Admitting net is 90% gross (which from the looks of various debts, full teams working etc won't be the case) and admitting that Bitfountain itself gets half that, we could reasonably say that ASICMINER shareholders will be earning back via dividends .1 BTC over the course of the next 8 months.

This is, as best we know, a reasonable estimate. Let's quote from the collected wisdom of this forum:



So basically: it takes ~8 months to "recoup your initial investment", provided that your initial investment is .1

With some basic present-value discounting and some very generous risk assumptions (what happens if some government raids ASICMINER DC and confiscates all gear, sometime between now and December? What happens if the entire wafer has a useful lifetime of 1000 hours under load, and no single chip makes it past that? What happens if a plane accidentally crashes into the building, or there's a shooting and the place becomes a crime scene, or etc?) it would seem the current value per share is somewhere in between 0.03 and 0.07 BTC or so. The lower bound is soft, in the sense that it may be much lower that that, but the upper bound is hard, in the sense that even if nothing bad happens, with MPBOR firmly in the 5 to 10% range .07 BTC now mean .1 BTC in December. So on purely financial terms 0.07 cannot be exceeded.

It would seem to me that all those users who haven't managed to sell out on the bubble started last month are SOL by now.

S.DICE IPOd at 3x and has been trading over 5x for months, making the dividends gains pale in comparison to stock appreciation gains (even as S.DICE has actually paid 64,396 BTC in dividends in the past 8 months).

AM sort-of brokenly IPOd at .65, under my previous lower bound estimate (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=144319.0) (*) and has about 0 chances of ever significantly appreciating in price to compensate. A sad showing, but such is life.

The moral of this story is twofold:

a. Management is the most important part of any venture whatsoever.
b. Mismanagement kills. It does not matter how good a tech team is, without good management they are doomed.

Hopefully this misadventure will be a lesson learned by the next Bitcoin enterprise, thus avoiding becoming the next originally promising but unfortunately blown Bitcoin entreprise. I think it's too late for Asicminer by now.

Sorry for everyone's loss.

(*) By the way, doesn't the mentioned lack of liquidity work wonders? What's the difference between 800 BTC traded in the first week and 10k BTC traded in the first day?

Please stop comparing a gamble coinmixer, where every user will lose in the long run,  with a mining endeavor, that is supporting the network.
Thank you.

Each share earns 1/400,000 of the profits. If the profits are 88,000 BTC, then each share would earn 0.22BTC.
Net is 90% gross - that sounds ok.
But I don't understand why you assume that Bitfountain gets half of your share profits. Bitfountain owns 200,000 shares which is already accounted for.

Your error in the beginning means you are off by 50% through out all your calculations.

Ah, that indeed is a good point. So the correct figure would be more like .05 to .14 rather than the .03 to .07 I proposed. There may in fact be some room for profit for those who bought at original .1 prices.

A few more things to take into consideration as to why the shares are trading at 0.65BTC right now. And why even that might be a steal if things go according to ASICMiner's plan.

1. ASICMiner has already paid 43% of initial investment value of 0.1BTC per share. Thats in less than a month's mining.

2. ASICMiner's second batch is 50TH/s. They say they will have it up and running by end of April. If this is indeed true, then the current share price is really low.

In the month of May, approximately 111,600 bitcoins will be mined.

If ASICMiner gets their total of 60TH/s up by then, they will own anywhere from 25% to 50% of that in the month of May (depending on BFL.) (I doubt they will want to get anywhere close to 50% however.)

Thats 28,000 to 56,000 BTC in profit for the month of May itself.

0.07BTC to 0.14BTC per share in one month.

This number goes down per month from then onwards - until ASICMiner comes up with a third batch to keep up with everyone else.

3. If you think that BFL is going to get delayed even further, the numbers become even sweeter.

I think you're mixing wildeyed speculation with what is intended to be factual.

Consider the quotes above and stop getting excited. 0.07 to .14 as a current share value is, based on what we know, more than reasonable. And is not to be read as "0.14" either, that's an upper bound, nothing more. The lower bound is probably more important.

Please tell me you have ASICMiner shares.
I will buy as many shares as you have for 0.28BTC per share - 2x your upper bound. 4x your lower bound which you think is more important.
Won't you make a killing based on what you consider is "reasonable"?

Because there can be only one good investment in the entire world? ::)

As long as BFL does not significantly ship, ASICMINER will be earning a boatload from the coinbase.

They've paid 0.043BTC in about 3 weeks. And you think 0.07BTC is reasonable.

I understand you're a PR person, but come on.

If you own the shares, I'll buy them from you at 0.28BTC per share.
If you don't own the shares, I'm willing to lend them to you if you want to short them. How about that?

Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?

AM is paying dividend on 200.000 shares only until the initial investment has been paid back....only then their own 200.00 shares will be paid dividend.... That point will be reached before April 1st.... But def before mid April.

Part of the mining profitability depends on if/when BFL starts shipping.... Then of course there is selling Asics and developing next gen chips....

The mining profitability depends on the network difficulty, to which BFL shipping will increase it.

We have a winner  ;)

AM has nothing in common with S.DICE so its like comparing apples with oranges.

It is sort of interesting that MPOE is adopting the carrot-and-stick approach so blatantly.  First they congratulate ASICMINER and subtly hint that coughcough Bitfountain should become an MPOE client.  After Bitfountain refuses and PTs go up on other exchanges, MPOE-PR quickly goes sour!  I suppose "mismanagement" means "fuck you, you didn't host on our exchange."

If MPOE-PR really believes this, let's give them some rope to hang themselves!  I will offer MPOE-PR the ability to short some of my many shares and I am sure we can reach a suitable arrangement.

S.DICE was at .0035 this week

thank goodness AM didn't go to MPOE as an exchange, or their value would have dropped down to .1  
It jumped to over .7 today on BitFunder

G.ASICMINER-PT    ฿0.74900000

Check the volume. But yes, GIGAMINING also IPOd at 1, went to 1.5 or thereabouts and then went nowhere. Maybe this is the general scheme of mining bubbles, go up 50% on the frenzy and then go to nothing. The good news is that there are a lot less BTC in the hands of the easily excitable today than there were last April.

Cool. Get in touch with MP on irc.

Think you're misunderstanding something.  The IPO was on GLBSE at 0.1 per share.  I think the chance of the price falling below that is pretty small and pretty much zero for it falling below that before all shares have received at least 0.1 in dividends.

Based on short-term mining I get a value of around .2-.35 per share : not too far off from your own (once you double yours for you error on the 400k shares and add on .04 for the higher dividends until 0.1 is reached).

Now if that were the only value of the share then the price would obviosuly drop as dividends were paid.  But the ability to produce more batches of the ASICs at minimal cost adds rather a lot more to the long-term value.  And assuming they learn from the various fuck-ups made this time, owning a portion of income from future ASIC development they do has to add some value to the shares as well.  As does the potential to sell units to the public (though I'm dubious whether they'll be in a position to do this before demand drops a load).

As for shorting - I'll be interested to see how that turns out.  I can see scenarios where it'll turn out to be a brilliant move (e.g. the ASICs only have a life-span of a few months) and ones where it could turn out to be a disaster (imagine shorting it then BFL's units only have a life-span of a week).  Keep us all posted on any significant shorts that happen.

Show a calculation tho, can't hurt.


Well, it's not clear what minimal cost is. This original 12Th ish batch cost something like 20k BTC + maybe 100k fiat? (depends how you count those debts exactly) in terms of cash and about nine months in term of time (it's not actually online yet, but let's pretend). If indeed those new batches may be produced, they'd hit next spring at the earliest, and further dampen dividends up to that point through their cost. If things move linearly then 120Th costs 10 times what 12Th costs, and so there will be absolutely no dividends for the entire 9 month interval (but more debt accumulated).


Me too, for that matter. So far INAU seems to have trouble connecting to irc. In any case, MP's shorts always have been publicly reported (as part of a more encompassing policy of his to keep his liabilities public knowledge).

I was talking about more batches of the current ASIC not a newly developed next-gen one  (which WOULD cost significant cash).

From memory friedcat indicated that the cost of further chips was under $1 each - to that has to be added the PCBs, cooling, power supplies, rack-mounts etc.  But the bulk of expenditure to date has been on the actual development of the ASICs not the production of them - and that's a one-off sunk cost (for this design).

That's why you can't compare ASICMINER to other mining companies - as they just can't expand their ASICs for the same low cost ASICMINER can.  We don't have enough information to accurately work out the cost/TH for ASICMINER to produce more hardware - but I'd be shocked if it was anything like as high as 25% of what other miners currently have to pay to get BFL/Avalon hash-power.  I'd actually be surprised if it was much over 10%.  We already know BFL are happy selling their FIRST batch at a 50% discount (in exchange for return of pretty much useless to them FPGAs) - which is the batch in which they need to be making serious inroads into development costs (as price-cutting won't be too far away once the back-log gets cleared).  That indicates that production costs are such that they could sell at half the price and make a good profit (if not, then they're majorly screwed as they'll never recover development costs).  I can't see component/PCB/assembly costs being higher for ASICMINER in China than for BFL in the US.

And do remember that the next 50 TH of chips are already done - with assembly starting soon.

The problem with this is that from memory giga's contract seems to have been perpetual at some point. People who avoid making actual contracts (which means, gpg-signed) usually avoid it for a reason.

That aside, from what I understand the entire AM run was pretty much based on mooching. That is to say, someone knew someone who was able to insert some chips into somebody else's tailrun or such.

This does not scale. It is perfectly true that if you are a normal customer doing a small run, coming back and doing that run 10x will probably cost you 80% less per item (so you get the 10x run for 2x what you paid on the original run). However, if you're a mooch customer you will be asked to actually pay normal rates on your 10x run, which may very well increase your per-item costs. This, obviously, being all speculation, we've not seen for instance a single bill issued to this company and paid by it. (Which is, incidentally, no way to do business if you have a real world side).


You can't compare Avalon to BFL because Avalon just isn't as cool as BFL, says BFL. Unless you have those other companies on the record saying this, I'd exercise some caution.


Not only would I not be shocked at least, but more importantly: AM has failed so far to report their chip blowout rate. We don't know how many chips that were cut out of the wafer had to be discarded at bumping, we do not know how many PCBs had to have chips replaced. Common sense would indicate the former figure is not zero. The evolution of hashing power seems to indicate that the latter figure is also not zero.

This particular tight-lippedness, especially if coupled with the other naive/noobish mistakes they've made to date would seem to suggest we are confronted with yet another run of the "lala company" let's call it. That is, the company which sweeps any sort of trouble under the rug in order to maintain what they misrepresent as "respectability", only to crash spectacularly once the quantity of shit under the rug becomes larger than the rug itself. If you were to believe Tom, everything was fine and they were set to take over the world up until five hours before going bankrupt. If you are to believe Inaba BFL will actually at some point deliver. On it goes, the history of BTC is replete with examples. Of particular concern in this line of reasoning is that the updates they do release become increasingly longer, increasingly content-free (even on an absolute basis, leave alone percentages) and increasingly vague. This circumstance works with the theory admirably well (even though, as you point out elsewhere, it does not constitute proof).


I'd remind you that a. BFL is a horrible company, created by a convicted felon in violation of his parole; b. BFL has a record of lying atrociously about everything, times, prices, specs, you name it; c. BFL burned a wafer just because they could. More generally, this "X is ok because it's better than Y" is a very poor criteria, seeing how pretty much all the ASIC makers are a little cuckoo, so to speak. Certainly more powered by ambition and forum psychosis than actual experience, capital and ability.


I can however see them being lower for Avalon, for instance. Those guys have a history of underpromise and overdeliver. These guys do not, in spite of the community effort to paint pretty colors on it. Moreover, it is my hunch that the major ASIC player has not yet emerged, and by December 2013 we'll all be buying our ASICs there. It's after all how these things usually play out - but in any event, presuming that the players are all known and proceeding deductively from there is fallacious.


How many of them are being used to replace blown first batch chips is a much better question.

You have some valid concerns, but still, a lot of it is pure speculation.

Ah yes, speculation. The mother milk of finance.

Growing into an insatiable monster. (At least in Non-Bitcoinland ;))

Snipped your post to avoid this one being too long (and far too lazy t o quote specific parts).  A few points:

1.  When I talked about comparing to other minign companies that's what I meant.  Mining companies - not ASIC manufacturers who don't mine OR have shares on the market.  You were trying to value ASICMINER as though it were just a mining company - hence I was comparing to those.

2.  Pretty sure (as in certain) friedcat said the yield was around 95%.  I agree there's no info on subsequent failure rate - but unless it's ridiculously high there's little meaning to it yet.

3.  I agree there's been no bills presented yet.  But then I've never seen bills for expenses charged to other companies - e.g. where's the invoice for S.DICE's consultancy this month?  Or S.MPOE's payment for PR?  Whether they were paid in BTC, USD or WOW gold has no real bearing on what quality of accounting is required - as with ASICMINER there's no proof either of those items were ever charged for or paid.  As a (small) shareholder in ASICMINER I'd far rather time was spent getting the rest of the gear mining than preparing accounts right now - though I DO definitely expect them to be prepared in the not too distant future.

4.  Not so convinced about Avalon's under-promise and over-deliver.  Their ordering was barely delivered at all and their claims of "we've shipped" actually meant "we've sent out a few prototype units and the rest will go in a month's time".  They're certainly saints compared to BFL - but, as you pointed out, using BFL as a comparison for ANYONE is setting the bar rather low.

5.  I do agree that the ASIC saga likely has some big twists to come - I don't have much resting on it whichever way it turns out : I'm ahead on ASICMINER now even if they openly defaulted right this instant (i.e. I've already profitted - for my fund - by more than our total remaining exposure to them).  And, of course, I always have very low exposure to all BTC mining 'companies' - there's NO purely mining 'company' I ever hold for longer than it takes to flip it for a quick profit.

6.  The "sweeping problems under the carpet" is likely largely a cultural issue more than anything.  When I lived/worked in that area of the world two massive differences in culture within business were apparent: 

a.  (Very relevant) People would rather bang their heads repeatedly against a brick wall than ask someone with the relevant tools to demolish it.  Admitting to a problem was seen as somehow losing face/demeaning - hence problems remained concealed as long as possible.  i.e. often until the chance to easily remedy them had passed.
b.  (Totally irrelevant) Noone would argue/disagree with their (work) superior in a group setting.  When I did it regularly, other (local) workers spoke to my manager privately about it - concerned that I was showing him disrespect.  He, of course, just laughed and explained that one of the main reasons i was there was BECAUSE I was willing to argue/disagree with him and that when I did so there was nearly always an issue that was better resolved than left unaddressed.

Never underestimate cultural differences when looking for an explanation for behaviour.

I guess this is a valid point, it's not quite clear what asicminer actually does. A synthesis between ASIC producer & vendor and mining company. I guess it's perfectly possible dividends be in the future impacted by gains from selling rigs or costs from producing them, for a positive or negative net.


I must've missed that part. 95% on a good wafer run seems certainly credible. The subsequent failure rate being exceptionally high is one way to account for the dithering apparent output. As someone else said, speculation.


There's perhaps some difference here between purely BTC ventures and fiat-anchored ventures. Either way, it'd seem to me you're moving the discussion from the germane to the not so germane. If you wish to introduce a $1 dollar per chip price point in this discussion, it is not unreasonable for me to wish to see some sort of invoice saying this many dollars for this many chips. That way we can compute the per-chip cost and have an answer. This is not in any way related to the discussion of whether deductions are or aren't appropriate and indeed I imagine it will be quite a long while before such a thing as BTC invoices exist, or BTC incomes are seriously reported by private parties (such as consultants).


Okay well, thinking about it, using "overdeliver" about anyone in ASICs is ridiculous. I retract.

I can appreciate 5., it seems pretty much the only reasonable way to handle this. If indeed we believe a majority of players (at least, of those left with any BTC worth the mention) follow it then my original prediction about price evolution may not be all that far off after all: an inverse tickmark, open at .65, go perhaps as high as 1 (+50%), then go to .1 (or .2, maybe).

As to 6...this is perhaps true, and if it is in fact true it is setting the stages for some very serious problems down the road - not with AM particularly, but in general and across the board. Free entreprise on a global scale may well be thwarted by a shared stereotypism where "they are bad" is well and satisfactorily proven to either side. I guess this is something of a sleeping dragon or somesuch.

Nahh, just your youthuful naivety and eurocentric bias showing. The dragon woke up in the 1980s FYI, when nobody was paying any attention.

How old are you anyway?

funny how i bought 200 asicminer at 0.1, got 20btc in dividends at 70USD each, turned the shares at t ~0.7BTC, making this whole thing a 140BTC PROFIT. even funnier when you take into account that the 20BTC I spent were worth maybe 500USD, when the profit in USD measures up to >11000USD.

pale? my ass.

Seems I've been exactly correct: whatever investors got out by now is all investors get (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg2130624#msg2130624).

predicted profits this week per AM share: ~.04 btc - largest profit per week ever...  

So, it appears we are still gaining, and you were wrong.

OP is still mad that asicminer didn't go with their 'exchange' which is now stuck with badly performing stocks.

MPOPRBS, I must applaud. Job well done. Once more you have managed to demonstrated what petty little narcissistic shit you, Mircea Popescu, actually are. Job well done! 

and this one:

LOL! Really?

Popescu, your favourite insects must be crickets. Every time you (idiot PR clown) writes something, cricket come out.

Here is an idea for your signature:

...CRICKETS...

stupid off-topic question, but are you the guy from newgrounds that made the eskimo bob cartoons or just a fan?

Is this where we point out that S.DICE has been trading under its IPO price, while ASICMINER is still trading at about 15 times its IPO price?

Nothing stupid about your question. I am just a fan :)

A nice blast from the blast, been a while since i saw that little fella :)

Wrong, again

AM dividend this week: .0362 per share.

That's the highest ever.  It also represents about 2.1% (109% APR) of the current share price on Bitfunder.

So is this comparison thread still going on or...?

 I hope not  :-\

/thread
 ::)

Dude, totally. 0.036 aka 2%, you've completely proven me wrong.

People buying past March 9th will make back on average 30% of their investment. The golden section of Bitcoin mining investments.

Book it ye buncha herpderps.

yeah, cause securities with dropping share prices are the new "in" thing...  ;D

maybe one day S.DICE can rise above its IPO price...

 I'm looking to invest in other Bitcoin-related funds and I've heard grumblings in the ASICMiner threads about how this fund has been mismanaged by its owner. Might you be able to bring me up-to-date on why everyone is hating on sdice and evoorhees ? Apologies, and I'll admit I don't have the time to go wading through pages of threads, and hoping you might be able to link to a cliff-notes edition of what is wrong with this fund.

S.DICE doesn't scale as well with increasing bitcoin prices as ASICMINER does.  People are generally only willing to risk a certain amount of $ when gambling.  This is partially offset by the increased interest in BTC that goes along with the price, driving traffic to S.DICE.

There are the same number of bitcoins mined every day regardless of the price, so all the rising exchange rate does is lower ASICMINER's costs.

when's the last time S.Dice paid a 2% weekly dividend?  When's the last time they were up 20X their IPO price?

Necro-bumping for recent developments, discuss.

I think I speak for most of us when I say, "Nope."

S.DICE is no more. AM is running strong.

Okay, that's done.

I gotta requote this just for rubbing it in.