The basic assertion isn´t wrong, as there is a limit at which nobody gains ROI in the network, atleast not with new equipment.

This debate is a joke.

Basically, mining is a hedged investment on Bitcoin, and your profit is lower but your risk is also lower than purely investing in Bitcoin.

Furthermore, you help stabilize and secure the network aswell as verify transactions.

Buy and hold is nice, and many miners also do this, but the positive impact on the Bitcoin system is very limited.

Process node advantages can only be compared to power advantages when basically the same mining implementation is used (specifically when optimisation on the same node is already maxed out)

Otherwise you could claim 55nm as superior to 28nm, as Bitfury had 0.8W/GH on 55nm vs 1.2W/GH on KnC 28nm.

You could always manually adjust the share difficulty to get lower variances afaik.

Last i heard this wasn´t the difficulty discussion thread

However, if spondoolies next chip (I mean the 2nd 28nm chip) should hit the market with a power consumption of 0.2W/GH and low overhead cost when deploying together,
you could very well get massive difficulty increases.

Does anyone per chance know the window for 16nm chip availability?

16nm should allow (much) more than double the transistor density and lower leakage, while also using lower voltage, so the chips should again be more than 2* more efficient and much cheaper per GH.


If this comes to play together with a possible bitcoin price increase (let´s say to 1500$ by April 2015) it isn´t too unlikely that those high difficulty numbers could be reached.

DataTank hasn´t comitted to any ASIC manufacturer yet, afaik.

They only did a calculation of hardware cost IF they deployed now, and they mentioned AM as an example.

They would be dumb to commit to a chip with atleast 50% higher power consumption compared to the competition.

They also cannot judge how the chip / device market will look like at their time of deployment, as this is atleast 3 months in the future.


However, they will be releasing an update soon, so let´s wait for that.
To all the AM fanboys: please don´t feel discouraged in buying DataTank shares by this, as obviously they have to give themselves the best chance of success,
using high efficiency and cheap hardware at the date of deployment.

It isn´t too far off to think AM is selling their chips at virtually no profit.

Their chip is simply outdated and they thereby hope to recover atleast some of their cost by selling the wafers they had produced.

It is hard to reach 0.7W/GH at the wall with them, even when undervolting.

Ah yeah, i thought i had missed something.

Looks like we are all going down then

Lets see how many chips they need at such low voltage, but low manufacturing costs should more than make up for it.

Looks like good progress.

If it is indeed true that China is more in it for quantity than quality (which doesn´t seem too unusual) their manufacturers will most likely not get beyond the 0.7W/GH efficiency mark (atleast not too soon).

This means that Spondoolies has a real chance to massively expand business by chip sales / cooperative development of immersion cooled units etc.

It should come as a very welcome business opportunity, as spondoolies is still quite a small player (by sold GH) compared to the Chinese top three.


However, spondoolies should have a very good lead in terms of efficiency in July / August (0.7 compared to 0.5W/GH is a ~30% advantage).

@Guy

Is there any chance you could find out how much big Chinese ASIC deployments pay for their power?

I heard it is very hard to get below 10ct/kWh in China, but with certain connections you might get it very low?

Would like to get some more information on the Chinese market, too.

Please share some of it when you get the time.

Hope you have a friendly, informative and fun convention.

I think we shouldn´t speculate about this, as it lies to far in the future.

Maybe AM will come up with their next chip design, available in 4 months, then we have a whole new set of parameters.
There are so many factors in this decision that we simply can´t predict which chip DataTank will use by the time of full deployment.


@DataTank
Looking forward to your announcement.

Please remember to also post updates to havelock investestments, as not everybody is watching this thread.

This is irrelevant.

The produced unit isn´t above 50V, hence this directive does not apply.

Equipment is operating at 12V, which is below 50V....

This directive does not apply.

This is a common misconception.

Profitability isn´t influenced by pool size, only variance is.

p2pool has long PPLNS rounds though, so every share is counted when paying.

In fact, you can get more out of p2pool than any other pool, when you have a low reject share rate.

I really hope PetaMine will start running fully on p2pool by Friday, as it would give a huge boost to p2pool users, as variance should get considerably lower.

Why is everyone so focused on AM on this thread?

While AM is a viable solution today, the tanks will be ready in 3-6 months.

DataTank will then decide which chip is most efficient to deploy within that timeframe, and it might be a completely different one, as nobody can tell what chip will be best by then.

Is Jimmothy shilling for Asicminer? Does he have so much money tied up there?

I hope he does realise that DataTank didn´t limit themselves to one chip producer.

They calculated the example on a basis of known factors today, but ultimately when the Tanks are ready, they will go with the cheapest and most power efficient hardware available.

Whether that will be Asicminer, remains to be seen.

They don´t care because it isn´t usually checked within the EU.
Customs usually only checks incoming parcels from outside, and only some of them.

As the ce marking is a selfdeclaration anyway, it doesn´t necessarily mean the product doesn´t comply with the standard, they just didn´t print the logo.

IF you want to, you can try and take them to court over it, but i doubt there would be any payment awarded to you, as there is no damage from it (if it doesn´t burn your EU house down, that is)

It should be, as it is produced in the EU....

Also there is no inspection of the parcel by customs, as it is shipped within the EU, so it doesn´t really matter.

It is quite easy really,

if you think it will ROI then buy it.

If you don´t, then don´t.

Nobody can predict any financial market (especially not BTC) or difficulty development in the future, or else he would be a rich man.

Spondoolies has to make some profit aswell, as its investors want to see a return on their investment (the initially loaned money aswell as their contractually agreed share of the profit)

They also need to recover the not at all trivial NRE that went into these projects.


Also, prices are (more or less) dictated by supply and demand. As long as spondoolies sells all produced units, the price is right.