Bitcoin Forum

What incentive does Bitmain have to sell their miners instead of mining ltc with them?  With the difficulty so low right now, they could get so much more profit by running the miners themselves rather than selling them for at a premium..

Thanks for your input.

No one really knows? Talk about a red flag......

Nobody bothers to answer.  :P It is simple. If they would use all their hardware themselves they would dominate the network, LTC would crash and everyone looses.

They most likely have a lot of litecoins and bitcoins already. When you have a lot its more important more people use and profit to get attention to litecoin than mine yourself because the price of something won't increase with just a few majority holders. That's my guess. They want to see cryptos much higher, and more mooning.

Could they not create other pools, or direct hash elswhere to make it look like a totally separate entity is mining not under bitmains control?

Does anyone know the NM of the chip. One would think that they would have labeled it 1487 to coincide with 14nm of s9. S9 chip is bm1387. So more than likely they mining with better machines like they always have in the past. Sell us last years stuff all whilst mining with the good stuff. That my thoughts on it

BR

I am glad you asked the question.

The Truth is Bitmain built the L3+ back in October of 2016 they have been mining them almost 1000-1500Gh/s level for Litecoin for last 6 months.

If you don't believe me look at the 9 months difficulty chart here:

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty

You will notice from October to March Hash Rate was rising roughly 1000 gh/s my initial calculation taking in account for existing Litecoin Hardware A2, A4 and a lot of other Asics including KNC cubes showed me that a lot of LTC miners were not profitable or marginally profitable so you noticed the hash rate stabilizing.

At that point Bitmain added L3+ to network and mined LTC they were collecting around 175-230k Litecoin per month and did so over 6 months Bitmain create a horde of over 1.2 Million Litecoin if they were to sell them at that point it would have crashed the market and they would have devalued there own hardware. Once they reached 3000gh/s (50% of network rate ) they started selling L3+ in batches 1st Batch shipping April 15th second on May 15th and 3rd on July.

At that point they already made 5x ROI by collecting 1.3 million LTC and now they will sell close 1200 L3+ at $1300 per piece collecting additional $1.5 million + $11 million in LTC they currently hold which they will slowly release back in the market covert it to BTC or (additional Alt currencies).

Do keep in mind that the analysis is speculative in nature and very far fetch to believe but the truth is all one has to look at is Actual number and its clear as day.

On a second note I have some contact in Chengdu that confirmed the fact that Bitmain have been expanding mining operation since october not sure if they were related to Bitcoin or Litecoin.

Bitmains L3+ which they are selling now is a used or new miner? Doesnt say at the Bitmain page if what you are buying is used or new... Quess we will find out when 1st batch is shipped.

They already have, its called LTC1BTC. This is why the only non segwit signaling pools are Antpool and LTC1BTC...

over the years they have done both.  So I expect some will be new and some will be used.

I like the tin foil hat theory advanced in the other thread that they actually pushed the price of LTC up themselves just before they started offering these to the public.  The timing is very coincidental.  Also, they had announced the original L3 a long, long time ago but then basically cancelled them.  So if they followed through on making them back then and then used them for themselves instead of selling them, they will have been mining with them for quite a long time now.

Also, I have stated elsewhere that I believe part of the price support for BTC comes from the cost of miners.  People who invest a million dollars in a mine do not sell the coins mined for peanuts.  If there are millions invested in scrypt mining gear it will help to prop up the price of LTC and other scrypt coins.

Also if any users complained that the machines are used they just slap it as part of Quality Assurances where they wanted to make sure unit is functional and was stress tested.

I agree with that assessment a lot miners would rather hold the Coins than sell it for cheap.

All they really have to do is replace the fans and blow the dust out, no one will really know that it is used.

It is pretty well known that these companys will mine themselves on these miners before releasing them to the pubic. 

It's china so anything goes.

to be fair - if its been used / "stress-tested" and still working, it will probably continue to work fine for its entire lifespan. most problems in bitmain gear occurs in the first month.

the biggest issue is any EXCESSIVE dust buildup and/or some wear on the fans, which IMO isnt a big deal unless you have a totally spotless datacenter

regarding self-mining; they probably are/were with the first protoype and small-scale batchs, but are now producing hundreds/thousands at a time and cant really install/operate them at such a rate. plus, they are profitable and will sell for the best price NOW as opposed to after the difficulty rises

Definately used.  I think all companies do a "test period" with their miners.  Roi on the manufacturing costs then sell them at 100% profit.  Hardware companies will always win the mining game.