I think you're making too much of an apples and oranges comparison, it might be more accurately stated: Bitcoin is the Holy Lance of Saint Longinus while Litecoin is Jesus' surfboard.

I bought during the sale, so if it comes at pretty much any time before Dec 1st I'll still ROI. *shrug*

I think HashFast's goal is to get everything out before then so they have no liabilities with the MPP, and get to keep the piles of money that everyone gave them for it (at which point maybe people will start complaining about that).  They sound pretty confident about the "Before Dec 31" for batch one.

^^ Slight aside, but I'm in Canada and I pay $0.15 / kWh.  The rates are technically pretty low, but after taxes and nebulous fees I end up paying that much.

Well, that's true, I didn't spend most of the coins I mined with GPUs either, but I meant more of that being a possible example of how the spending of coins mined might affect price.

Since we have actual data, I suppose an interesting thing to do would be to track how coins are spent after being mined in a block, and then see if we can use this to predict historical BTC prices.  I suspect this might be difficult because of the way pools are setup, but it's a neat idea.

Because if you don't sell the coins, you constrict the supply entering exchanges, thereby disrupting supply-demand equilibrium and pushing price up?  The volume of coins traded daily on an exchange is small compared to the total supply of coins.

Uh...? You don't think the boom in the beginning of the year had anything to do at all with ASICminer and Avalon suddenly controlling almost all of the newly generated BTC supply?

Well, people mining BTC may see it differently, though, as they are only putting a little work and investment into obtaining BTC with current hardware and can easily trade this BTC for comparatively more difficult to generate LTC.

Well, this is going to end pretty soon.  SHA256 ASICs went from a 110 nm process to a 28 nm process within 10 months, whereas lately we tend to get stuck on process nodes for a year or two.  We'll probably wall for a while at 1-2 GH/s per watt, and from that point onward we would expect ASIC hardware to devalue at a rate similar to GPUs.

The price is always the result of supply and demand equilibrium -- but you don't think the cost of production plays into the quantities of a commodity that people are willing to sell for a given price (supply)?

I've been playing around with a few metrics to try to determine how to value LTC versus BTC; these are:
1. Return in USD per day per USD invested
2. Cost of electricity to produce 1 USD

Let's start with 1.

BTC: KnC 275 GH/s @ $3,000
$200.00 per coin
0.3485 coins/day at difficulty 391m
or 69.70 USD/day after electicity (300 watts), 1.5% fee, 0.15 cents/kWh
0.0232333 USD day ^-1 USD invested^-1

LTC: 40x 7950 (+PSU/mobo/memory/HDD valued at $4000) @ $12,000
$2.40 per coin
23.8434 coins/day at difficulty 1080
or $27.632 USD/day after electicity (9600 watts), 1.5% fee, 0.15 cents/kWh
0.002302666 USD day^-1 USD invested^-1

How does this look if we chart it out, with BTC difficulty inflating at a rate of 25% every two weeks and LTC difficulty inflating at a rate of 2% every two weeks, given constant prices for both currencies?



Well, that's pretty interesting.  In order to hit the same USD return per day per investment dollar, BTC difficulty needs to increase at the same rate (25% per two weeks) for 22 weeks, or almost half a year.

How about 2, cost of electricity to produce 1 USD for both currencies?

With BTC at $200 USD and LTC at $2.40 USD, the equivalent of 1 USD is 0.005 BTC and 0.41666 LTC respectively.
How much power is used to produce this 1 USD?  The calculations should be pretty straightforward, so I won't detail them here, but you should be able to plug this into allchains.info and see it for yourself.

BTC
KnC Saturn @ 275 GH/s, 300 W at the wall, 1.5% pool fee, difficulty 391M
0.0154949785 cents per USD

LTC
7970 @ 630 KH/s, 225 W at the wall (my own measurements from one of my rigs), 1.5% pool fee, difficulty 1080
0.5887987788 cents per USD

That's a 40 fold greater cost of electricity to produce 1 USD in LTC as compared to BTC!  Of course, over time and progressive difficulty increases this will continued to come down, but unless there are massive price swings in the near future or ultra efficient LTC FPGAs/ASICs come out, the cost of production of 1 USD with Litecoin will continue to be many fold that of Bitcoin.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that LTC block reward will undergo halving in less than 2 years time, while Bitcoin is looking at 3.5 years from the current date.

Feel free to point out any stupid oversights or assumptions, but these have been my thoughts over the past week or so, especially as BTC price continues to rise.

14x14x7mm aluminium with thermal tape on back

People who bought before August 15th and are looking to obtain a refund, HashFast has told me that there is internal arbitration going on for this matter and that a decision about whether or not you will be able to refund your purchase will be made by Monday.

I'll ask them this tomorrow with my next listing of questions

I have 200 aluminium heatsinks waiting to slap all over my boards :X

Is it safe to just stick them on the back?  It won't short anything, there's a second layer or it's coated?

I'll be checking my e-mail compulsively

They won't give me any information on where the fudge ups occurred beyond, "It was entirely the fault of our company," so we may never know

I sent another e-mail asking about this again, and also asking for board/case dimensions as I'm getting lots of requests for these

As I said before, HF is only telling me "Batch one will definitely be out before or on Dec 31, 2013."  I wish I could provide you guys with something more solid, but that's all I've been told.

Also: I can confirm that fiat purchases with MPP will still use BTC as the metric for giving additional hardware, based on the value of BTC on the day of purchase.

I'll send another email

Sorry I've been deadly sick with something

Buying BTC is good advice if BTC doesn't tank to 5% of its value like it did over the course of 2011-2012.

Everyone here is really excited by the prospect of buying BTC because the price has gone up lately, and seem to be amnesic about when it spent forever tanking.  But the same thing goes for any commodities market, the traders are often bipolar and impulsive.

I'll stop mining when mining stops being profitable -- but so far over the past 3 years of mining and saving half and spending the rest on more miners, I've been making a killing.  The crazy thing about mining is that it's still profitable even when BTC/LTC is imploding.

The people who think that bitcoin's rise in price will continually destroy other equities and commodities markets month over month and year over year are probably the ones who will be in for the biggest shocks in the future.

Batch 1 will ship by Dec 31 2013
Batch 2 will probably ship by Dec 31 2013
HF isn't saying anything else

They haven't given me solid details, but you'll be the first to receive a product for sure.

The company rep said that she forwarded this complaint to the higher ups after I told them that this was unfair and that you guys should be allowed refunds.  I'll let you know more about it as soon as I do.