Honestly, I'm against a split for now.  Friedcat & co are beyond busy with deployment, sales, and USB-stick development.  They do not and should not have time to worry about this stuff.  I'm also against a split because I like Berkshire's philosophies and do not like weak-hand investors.

That said, it would be trivially easy for someone to set up a split-passthrough.  They could split 1/100 and have 100 of their shares be worth 1 AM share, and divide the dividends accordingly.  They could even make it possible to convert 100 of their shares to 1 AM-PT share on either bitfunder or btct.co.  Better yet, if they charge a reasonably small fee(0.5% or less), it would be profitable for them.

So someone should read this message and go set it up right now.

For those scanning but not clicking links- New auction up, 50 blades this time for a total of 0.5TH/s.

48 hour auction.

Get ready for a wild ride.

Friedcat & co own more of AM than all of us put together.  They have all the motivation in the world to deploy as fast as is safely possible.  You and everyone else here armchair-speculating about their activities and second-guessing the roadblocks and speed they have helps NO ONE.

It is pretty obvious that Friedcat believes that 7.5 TH/s is a reasonable estimate for the fastest they can possibly deploy.  If he could go faster, do you not think that he would?  7.5 TH/s is *750* hashing boards that have to be mounted, powered up, firmware-flashed, pointed to the pool and debugged.  If the racks aren't fully in place, that's ~37 racks that have to be built.  And that isn't even talking about cooling.  At least one in 100 is going to have a short that requires diagnostics.  "Plan for more next week?"  lol.  Give him a fucking break.  I highly doubt any of them plan to do anything except 15 hour days 7 days a week for the next MONTH.  Honestly I'd rather them slow it down a little bit as needed because tired people make mistakes, and mistakes could cost thousands.

As far as the other people asking what happened to the other ~5.8 TH/s from the original 12, they ran into power issues.  Powering 750 hashing boards is no easy feat.  They had timed the expansion of their power capacity with the delivery of the next 50 TH/s, rather perfectly I might add.  So now they both have more power and they have the 50TH/s.  So theoretically they can bring online 55.7 TH/s now, although we are selling so it won't be quite that much.

/rant

I'm sure this is not official.  That said, it is a great resource to aggregate this monster thread.

That is a *lot* of work for John.  He volunteers his time to do this.  Managing an auction of 10 items is much easier than an auction of 300 items.

And worse, it doesn't scale.  We are potentially going to want to sell thousands of Honeybees miners.  It is very easy for a website/database to keep track of bids, and even potentially to unwind bids in the case of non-payment, as was a concern in the last process.

Note, I don't think 5 days is an auction- I think 5 days is the completion of some sample boards that will be used for internal testing.  After internal testing checks out(I would guess 1.5 weeks) I think they will be producing and then auctioning 300 of them.

I can't imagine how an auction for 300 of these will work.  Sounds like someone needs to create a website to manage the auction.

Not sure how you got that.  Using those numbers I get that a Blade pays for itself in 148 days.  Obviously unrealistic since everyone knows that more TH is going to come online everywhere.

The problem also comes down to scale.  If AM could sell all of its chips at 71 BTC/blade, every single blade, that would be pretty cool.  But you're not going to be able to find a buyer that will drop 450,000 BTC to buy AM hardware.  Or even 1000 buyers at 450 BTC each- Not a lot of them will pay 71 BTC/blade.  We could, however, be able to mine with as much as we want.

I think we should sell a moderate percentage of the units as long as buying prices remain higher than some value that Friedcat & co(or perhaps the board) will need to calculate that represents what we can get from the blade ourselves, minus the opportunity cost of not having the cash on hand immediately.  There is definitely a formula that can be worked out to maximize profit here.

Honestly an 80% voting ratio is actually a pretty amazingly high ratio.  In most companies the vast majority of shareholders do not vote, even large shareholders.  I would recommend contacting those who did not vote in the last poll and asking them to select "abstain from polls" if they do not intend to vote.  (Or making a poll to make that the new default for people who have never voted, and for people who haven't voted in the last ~7 polls...)

The cutoff will be "has the dividend been paid yet?"  If not, cutoff has not been passed.  These exchanges and runners are not advanced enough to do ex-dividend date or any such stuff(And they probably shouldn't, as this won't become a big deal for awhile).

TBH, if they do send out sample boards, they should only be sent out many months from now when the price/board is not 70btc.  You don't just give someone something worth $10,000, shareholder(or board member) or not.

I think requiring a deposit from unknown members(to John) to show that they mean business is a good idea.

Not that I like weexchange, but I was able to fund it and buy within 1.5 hours.

Hm, strange that bitfunder has both a lot more depth and is at a much lower price, yet the price rises on btct.co

I believe that these will be shipped anywhere worldwide(but will be subject to customs delays... Not sure what can be done about that).

The auction price will not become the normal price.  Auctioners are paying for the first-mover advantage of immediate shipping.

The Asicminer updates from Friedcat indicate that these ship immediately.  I'm sure he will confirm again here.

Asicminer has released specs and their first auction.... these ship immediately.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178275.0

Might be profitable for Nasty given the delays of BFL and Avalon?

Because we are shareholders, and for shareholders, auction is better.

Can't be that untenable... we're already rising again at $111.  This could be really, really big.

The difference between Asicminer and BFL is that Asicminer will only sell units that are ready to ship, and ship them immediately.  The price will be much much higher, but you know the hashrate will be reasonable by the time you receive your product.