I'm opposed to buying someone else's pre-order. If a premium is to be paid it should be for hardware that's in hand. If it's at all possible, I'd prefer to drive or fly to their location to inspect and purchase said gear.

Cheers.

Hi CanadianGuy. As you may or may not be aware there has not been an abundance of opportunities to invest in deliverable ASIC mining gear. Many of our competitors have invested the majority of available funds in BFL pre-order hardware which remains undelivered after nearly one year. Doing so locked in an exchange rate at dramatically lower levels and will return far less value to investors when and if they ever receive their gear. In retrospect a larger Avalon batch 2 order would have been ideal, as would an order placed with Avalon's batch 1 pre-order, but there were three competing companies in Q4 of 2012 and Avalon didn't necessarily look like the obvious choice at that time. If Avalon had stuck to their delivery schedule we'd have a minimum of 153Gh/s right now, but like nearly every other ASIC mining gear delivery schedule that didn't happen.

I too am a shareholder in bASIC-MINING. I'd rather see our capital deployed and gear hashing for us, but the delays in tangible ASIC mining hardware and the tremendous delays between ordering/paying and actually receiving hardware have created a situation where prudence is important.

Cheers.

Motion to purchase one or more ASICMiner blades started.

Motion to purchase a secondary market Avalon batch 1 or batch 2 mining unit started.

Cheers.

What bubble?

As soon as you stop valuing things in terms of constantly devalued fiat TP, holding BTC(a vastly superior currency) becomes a no-brainer.

There are many victims of Sonny Vleisides and his merry band of crooks. BFL is just now managing to ship a few Jalapeno v0.5's to people that ordered in June of 2012, despite the numerous assurance that BFL had honest abe "scheduled shipments" several times over the past 11 months. The lies are too numerous to count.

None of these newbie accounts defending BFL are even old enough to have been created back when BFL's COO Inblahblah was attacking Tom of BTCFPGA for being too vague about his power specs and insisting that BFL's were solid. Specs that were obviously never measured as BFL had zero chips, by their own admission. That, like nearly everything else Josh Zerlan says turned out to not be true. That supposedly solid power spec of 1w/Gh/s was just more fairy dust nonsense designed to suck the life out of BFL's legitimate competition and trap pre-order funds into a constantly evolving pyramid scam of orders.

Tom has a scammer tag for failure to deliver & deceit, Josh's is long long overdue.

Sorry Xian, it seems your thread has been taken over by the sockpuppet army.

+1

I find it difficult to believe there are this many people with their heads in the sand. Newbie accounts spring up everyday with nothing but carefully constructed apologies and excuses in hand for BFL's non-performance and outright deceptions.

Hi jmutch. I'm as frustrated with these delays as anyone. Avalon batch 3 was to begin shipping on May 5 and instead batch 2 has only recently begun shipping. That said, I feel that deploying our funds inefficiently now will cost us significantly down the road. 100BTC spent on just 20Gh/s of mining gear would give us 22.1Gh/s or 5.71Mh/s/share. This would result in a daily dividend of approximately .91BTC or 0.00023529BTC/share at current difficulty and this is without re-instating the company's growth fund. We'd also need to invest in a power supply and cooling for the blades.

The equivalent in Avalon gear is paying 335BTC for an already received batch 1 or batch 2 unit, with the added advantage of having less to manage, power supply and cooling already included, as well as stratum support. If we could purchase a unit already in the US we could also avoid possible delays with customs, as batch 1 & 2 Avalons did not include the option to ship without PSU.

I'll start a motion to get a sense of how other shareholders feel about this...better still I will start two motions comparing the two options.

Cheers.


This mirrors my feelings on the subject. While I doubt Avalon chips will be available in bulk as soon as many hope, when they are available a myriad of competitive options will surface, which will drive the price of efficient hardware lower.
  

Confused. The link is to Garr's auction, and I think he's correct, he should not need an escrow agent with his impeccable history of trustworthiness.

Here I thought their entire problem was a lack of integrity. Thanks for clearing that up.

Hey iCEBREAKER. Happen to know if they have a confirmation date on receipt of those chips? Does anyone? This is not btw a rhetorical question. I'd expect Avalon to ship batch 3 prior to shipping their chips or there will likely be some unhappy customers.

I noticed from the pics on VMC's site that they have a standard PC IO on that unit, I wonder how there's room to house chips and cooling in there with a PC board(even mATX) as well. I wonder if there are pics of the unit open available?

Cheers.

Hi malona82. The rising share price is a mechanism by which a shareholder may realize value. As there is sufficient liquidity in the market even at this low a number of outstanding shares(3832), a shareholder need only to sell shares to realize this value. The current bid is .6 which is an 81.8% increase over the initial share price of .33 on 12/17/2012. In addition 35.25368361BTC in dividends have been paid out during this time.

Cheers.

I understand what you're saying, I just don't see a lot of viable alternatives. The "economics of current hardware availability" is the overriding theme with all mining assets at this time and cannot realistically be separated from the discussion. That said, raising the price of shares was done in part to slow the sale of shares and therefore the dilution of assets. This was one of my stated purposes several pages back...and it worked. The recent spike in sales is plainly due to the news that Avalon batch 2 is shipping and yes this is adding to company reserves and future shareholder value.

Keeping the Avalons separate ignores the basic premise of the entire company, but I'll play along. The contract states that we'll bulk purchase ASIC mining hardware. When it was written the company had one ASIC mining product on order and I'd lain the groundwork for large future(bulk) purchases from the very same company, but that company is now extinct and we moved by shareholder vote to another vendor. Our plans changed out of necessity...not design. I very much doubt that shareholder value would've been better protected by locking in a large order with BFL following the collapse of BTCFPGA and that was the only alternative at that time. Again, decisions had to be made with the information available at that time, not the information that's available now. The risk that we'd be unable to add ASIC mining gear in the near term due to lack of availability is precisely why I proposed a modest expansion of the company's GPU hardware several months ago, also accomplished by shareholder vote.

Cheers.

lol

A domain name squatter! Excellent, we're growing!

Hi lunarboy. The contract is correct, there will be no more than 5000 shares outstanding without a majority shareholder vote to increase this number. When I set up the company, prevailing wisdom was to set things up with more shares issued than ever needed so that requests for more shares to be issued would be unnecessary. Shares outstanding are updated daily on the company spreadsheet and in several places on btct.co. When this number reaches 5000, bASIC-MINING will have only it's reserves and growth fund for future expansion as stated in the original contract(OP). Many assets on btct.co are set up this way and yes it is somewhat confusing. I apologize for that.

To be crystal clear...shares in the asset issuer account do not have any rights. They cannot vote and they do not receive dividends.

Cheers.


Essentially correct, though I'd describe the remaining 95k shares in the asset issuer account as issued, but not authorized. At any rate, they'll not be going anywhere without shareholder approval and I've no plans to seek such approval at this time or in the foreseeable future.

Hi carnitastaco, thanks for your perspective. A few things to keep in mind.

First, I fairly recently suggested an increase in dividends paid from company cash on hand. This was met with near unanimous disapproval, so I shelved the idea.

Secondly, the current situation is due to ASIC hardware vendors that offer products they cannot deliver in a timely fashion or at all(BTCFPGA, BFL, and to a lesser extent Avalon). When founded the company was to have received it's first ASIC mining rig within days, this did not happen, and those delays were met with further delays, and then cancellation of the product. There is little any of us can do about this, and the mining companies that chose BFL gear exclusively have fared worse. I like everyone else can only operate on the information available at the time.

If you're not arguing that "asicminer blades are a great investment or that the avalon chips are a must buy", then what are you arguing? Those are the options available at this time and only one of them will result in a viable product in hand in the short term. While it's difficult to find a smart way to deploy capital at this time, I believe that will change in the near future and I'd like bASIC-MINING to be prepared to take full advantage of the opportunities that present. We've all seen how quickly opportunities can be missed, Avalon batch sales, ASICMiner auctions, etc.

I've made the current situation abundantly clear to investors and potential investors alike so that informed decisions could be made. I've tried to update the website daily to keep investors and potential investors informed of exactly what's transpiring. This hardware is expensive and many cannot afford the initial investment so we're pooling resources to help overcome this problem. This is stated on page one of this thread.

Many see bASIC-MINING and it's Avalon pre-orders as a way to diversify their portfolios in addition to ASICMiner, and not necessarily as an us or them scenario.

Cheers.

Gorgeous chart, really nice work. Tip sent.

Edit: Going over the chart reminded me that I'd intended to change my contact email from att.net servers to broadstripe.net servers as att.net has been unreliable of late. I've asked burnside to make this change.

Shareholders, please contact me at creativex@broadstripe.net if you need to reach me or simply PM me here. I'm occasionally slow, particularly on weekends, but I'll get back to you.

OP updated to reflect this change.

Thanks everyone for making bASIC-MINING a success, much appreciated.


To clarify, I don't see ASIC mining technology as disastrous at all(quite the opposite in fact), I merely meant that the bulk of this juggernaut remains below the surface at this time IMO. I believe there's a risk of overpaying for gear at this time when we know from history that the market will seek an equilibrium where mining is again marginally profitable. When this occurs those that overpaid or have above average running costs may or may not see a positive ROI, but the risks should not be underestimated.

As we move toward a time when ASIC mining hardware delivery times are significantly reduced to a more typical customer oriented business model I believe it becomes even more essential to deploy capital wisely. Ironically none have done more to hasten this move than friedcat and the excellent management team at ASICMiner.

Cheers.

FTFY

Not to mention the fact that copper bullion premiums are prohibitively high. That's why so many sort copper pennies in the first place.