Bitcoin Forum

The topic explains it all. Vote on the poll!

edit: The poll has been closed due to suspected fraud. "Yes" was winning for several days, and then no started getting a bunch of votes, and then just today 4 votes for "No" just appeared all at once. Now it's at 18 Yes to 20 No. A couple days ago it was more like 16 Yes 10 No.

Difficulty is still going up despite the reward halving. This has baffled a lot of people. Is someone secretly mining with ASICs and adding more power in a carefully regulated way to maintain the difficulty on a constantly but steadily increasing upward line?

Yet another silly poll that means nothing.

BFL has already sold million$ in ASIC's.  So no it would not be in there best interest to not deliver them.

The point the OP may be getting at, and my personal sentiments, are that if ASIC's exist and perform as advertised it should be more profitable for them to keep them all and mine with them vs. sell them. If its not, that means its not in our best interest to buy them.

To take million$ in peoples money to develop and then use the hardware and not deliver said hardware to the rightful owners would be a huge legal risk for a U.S. based company.

Regardless, it is still a silly poll.

well obviously that is the real reason for all the delays :)

Why is everything that questions ASICS automatically designated as silly or troll?

No.

If they mine with the asics, they will control way more than 51% of the network hashing power.  The security of the currency will be undermined, and confidence (and value) will plummet.

Less profit.

^ From their perspective, it won't since they control the >51%. And, nobody will know if the distribute their mining across different proxies, TOR, and mining pools.

Because in the past 5 or 6 months there have been about a billion (+- a billion) topics on just about every aspect of ASICs. Very little truly new thought is coming out on the matter, and most of the rest is just nonsense or people trolling.


The current network size is 25THash, and likely falling as GPUs turn off. If BFL replaced every THash lost, which will happen slooooowly, they could keep the network about even and control 50% in perhaps 5 or 6 months (assuming 50% is made up of marginally profitable GPUs). Or they could just bomb the network and drop 20THash on top of what exists now, but that would be incredibly obvious.

It's fairly impossible to keep secret ASIC coup d'etat for an extended period of time, not to mention that their customers who are already a mix of hopeful optimists, and steely eyed frothing demanding cynics who I doubt would stand for multiple more months of empty apologies about why things continue to not be released. Unless you meant they would slowly begin mining in-time with their shipping of product, in which case this has nothing to do with the OPs question.

In answer to OP, no it would not be more profitable for them not to sell ANY, as mentioned earlier, they would bomb bitcoins value and/or open themselves up to much litigation.

Not at all.  This has been discussed at length, and the bottom line comes to this:  If they tried to mine instead of ship, they would be sued by all of their customers, they would ruin any potential future profit, and they would only be able to viably take about 1/3 of the hashing power without being detected (and even that would be difficult, but I digress), which means a maximum profit of $15k/day.  If they were detected as having 1/3 (and thus being able to easily take over the network if they so should desire), then it would eliminate confidence in Bitcoins, no one would want them, and the price would plummet.  Suddenly, they're making $10/day instead of $15,000.

No.
NO.
NO!

And please stop asking this silly, silly question.

Deepbit already caused the 51% concern and nobody really cared.

BFL just has to coming up with new technical problems and over time people will give up waiting and request to have their deposits refunded, and they will probably get refunded. It seems like that's how it's going already, whether or not any ASICs have actually been made or are in use.

Say what? The forums were deluged with threads proclaiming how terrible it was that deepbit was going to break 51%, plans to DDoS deepbit (it did in fact get DDoS'd a number of times but I'm not sure if that was related), pleas to change miners off deepbit, and by and large it actually worked. In fact now deepbit has fallen to being one of the smaller Tier1 pools, perhaps a victim of its' own success.

That aside, it's complete apples to oranges comparison.
1) Most GPU miners are not members of these forums, at the time there were guides floating all about the internet about how to turn your GPU into a magical money making machine, and most of the guides pointed to deepbit. I would wager that as a conservative guess, 75+% of ASIC buyers are registered here, or the BFL forums. Warning flags would be heeded in much more real-time.

2) Deepbit taking over the network had little adverse effect for people mining on deepbit, they were paying their miners (perhaps better than anywhere else), and people were happy for it. BFL has taken money from customers, and given nothing back, the complete opposite, meaning people are not so happy with status quo.

3) Deepbit was an open, centralized, public end-users choice, while a sneak 51%+ takeover by BFL would again be the opposite, etc.


That said, it is interesting how much of bitcoins fate has relied on the good will of fellow man to not be crushed under heel. Something heartwarming there to help balance out the constant scamming and whatnot.

I'm referring to the poll, whose result really means nothing, as silly.  Aren't you tired of these senseless polls?

The topic of discussion is borderline silly too but I don't really have a problem with that since some have an idea to vent.  But it is a case of beating a dead horse.

AND, more importantly, nothing bad happened as a consequence of reaching 51%.

In the short term they could make a killing by mining inintially, but they would drop the value of bitcoins if they did it.  If they dropped the value and than sold people wouldn't buy.

The best thing I think they could do is give themselves a head start and mine while its in the mail, or during testing, and get the best of both worlds.

Now Yes and No are tied with 17 votes. It was just 17 Yes to 15 No this morning. Originally it started out with Yes as the clear leader. Looks fishy.

Yes, it looks very fishy that 34 people actually thought voting on this poll would have a bearing on anything :)

This statement is total nonsense, You will get much more profit of selling shovels than using them... and where the price will go if they put 100TH in the network... let me tell you 0 and what happens when other manufactures start selling their "shovels".

.. anyway this is pointless discussion

Well if it were me I would at least test some for a little bit before selling. That is actually a totally legitimate practice and would probably be lost in normal variance for a while.

It is not legitimate, as there is a testnet, and they also promised that would not do such a thing. To do so would not be surprising, but it would be unethical at this point.

They must most definitely sell their ASICs or risk getting sued etc as pointed out above, but it is also clearly in their interest to delay delivery  as long as possible if pre-orders are still coming in, because as soon they start delivering, difficulty will skyrocket, forcing them to drop their price so that it continues to seem possible for potential new buyers to make a profit.

I disagree.  As soon as they start delivering, people will cancel their orders with the other ASIC vendors and put that money towards orders with BFL.  The smartest thing for ANY of the ASIC developers to do is to deliver units as soon as possible.

I'm not so sure. BFL will get a lot of orders as soon as they start shipping, but from doubters who are waiting for physical proof. I can't see people canceling orders from the front of the Avalon line just to get into the back of the BFL line. Most of the people who have pre-ordered bASICs or Avalons hate BFL anyways.

I wouldn't worry about BFL products most of the BTC will go to miners that won't necessarily dump them on the market.

ASIC miner will have to sell all the bit coins. And for a brief period (hopefully) they will have all the Bitcoins.

If they kept them all, the network would no longer be distributed.  If one entity had that much processing power it would not be a secure network.  the valus of the BTC would drop and people would move to the next best thing.  So no it would not be more profitable for them to keep the devices and mine.

Thankfully others are developing/shipping ASICs so this problem basically doesn't exist.

Except for those who preordered early on release date promises which were way off and who will probably won't make their investment back.