Bitcoin Forum

Now here's an idea.

friedcat/ASICMINER: if you really are serious about Bitcoin and decentralization of the network, now would be the perfect time to show that. Forget those way overpriced USB toys which, when people actually do the ROI calculations, look like a blatant BTC grab. Instead start selling your ASIC chips with specifications so other people can design and build competing devices.

At the moment I understand you have to withhold quite a bit of your hashing power. If you powered it all on, you would probably "own" the network if not now, then quite soon (in a few weeks?). I recall friedcat saying that your competitors' delays have upset your plans already.

So this is my proposition: let other people design and build a competing project around AM chips, just like people are already doing with Avalon. IF (and this is a big if) Avalon fails to deliver their chip orders and/or batch 2/3, then what? You still can't deploy extra hashing power in any big quantity since we get back to the "too large" problem, and crashing BTC price would also hurt your profits.

Should you agree in some way with this plan, please price your chips competitively. Not this "2 BTC for 300 MHash/s" nonsense. You will cut into your profits somewhat, but I would hazard a guess that dip is less than upsetting BTC price completely by being too large and causing a panic sell and the corresponding mess.

While the new units built according to AM's specifications would come online, AM could then bring their extra units to bear gradually to compensate. This looks like a win-win since AM gets to sell their chips, and be able to actually use their extra units as well. They probably have a second generation ASIC in the pipeline, so they could keep selling the older chips for profit for quite a bit longer while deploying newer hardware themselves.

Discuss, please... this was just my 0.002BTC

Avalon Guys are have Open source mind they are great :).

They already are selling their chips; just suck 'em off the sticks!  :P

expanding the asic field would be great. Its all a bit of a lotto at the moment

As far as I understand, the main goal for selling mining hardware is outsourcing of certain bottleneck parts of the process to the buyers.

Asicminer couldn't deploy the boards quickly enough, so they started selling part of them. Avalon had (and still have as one can see from batch 2&3 delays) problems with PCB production, so they started selling chips.

So if at some point, AM has lots of chips which due to some reasons cannot be assembled into boards quickly enough, they will sell it. Until then, there's just no point in it.

And you never know in advance, where exactly the bottleneck will be.

friedcat/AM never said they are serious about decentralization. AM only sells surplus of hashing power (over 50% of network) for obvious reasons, while maximizing profits. AM is pure capitalism, nothing less, nothing more.

If they sell their chips, they'll make money won't they? I'm sure they can think of something profitable. So either people buy their chips, or people buy their shares.