it may be fake, but the latest development at gox (trading halted, site gone, twitter gone, the combined press release by other bitcoin actors, ..) makes me think its probably not.

As for who wrote it; assuming its legit, it reads like something that a major shareholder or otherwise stake holder might write. Someone at the bitcoin foundation?
 
Sure does explain the $100 price at gox though, someone with deep pockets knew. And that was always my fear, that the low price at gox wasnt caused by panic due to whats known publicly (made no sense) but by someone with big wallet and inside info.

This is also what I find too hard to swallow. Nothing is easier than checking the balance of cold wallets. How could they possibly not have known?

AT last, a picture!

Keep dreaming!
No one is gong to shut down an asic that earns more in mining than it costs in electricity and we are not nearly there yet.
Most asics are somewhere between 1 and 2W per GH at the wall. Even with residential electricity prices, say $0.2/KWH, thats $0.0072 per day per GH.
At current difficulty a GH yields 0.00016069 BTC per day. $0.0072/0.00016069 = ~$44. Thats the point the least efficient miners are no longer operationally profitable (note: no chance of ever earning back your investement then, but a miner wouldnt turn off his gear he already paid for).

OF course the bulk of the hashrate lives in datacenters with far lower electricity costs.  Up to 10x lower:
http://bitcoinasichosting.com/pricing/

So those asics will not be turned off before bitcoin drops below $4. Or difficulty goes up ~100x at todays price.

TO be clear, I said the asics were almost on time. They showed working asics at the end of december, which was later than anticipated, but not that much compared to most other vendors. The delay in getting miners out of the door is more inline with the competition .

Funny excuse that.

That aside, I dont see too many parallels. I understand Bitmine customers are nervous, but from where I sit, Bitmine delivered a working asic almost on schedule and fully on spec. Almost unheard of in this industry. As for the miners, while they are late, there is a quite decent protection program that should guarantee customers significant higher hashrate or if need be, a 110% refund . Again, thats unheard off in this industry.

AMT otoh, is a shadowy marketeer who Im betting, is just throwing someone else's boards and chips in an overpriced and unsuitable case and sells that along with a pack of lies.

AFAIK, that would have been correct up until a few days ago, Cryptx apparently is in possession of several Bitmine rigs.
Also, nitpicking, but you could argue technobit doesnt deliver miners, just bare boards.


Yep, its impressive what Technobit did, although to be fair, it does appear that Bitmine's problems were a manufacturing/logistics one, not a technical one. They have had a working design for some time, around the same time as technobit IIRC.

Bollocks.

What is true is that Bert of Cryptx planned and probably did go to Switzerland to accept their miners, rather than send them by courier.

Your logic is completely flawed, but thats only because you are not attempting logic, but just trying to spam your affiliate link.

In reality, if mining is profitable with typical consumer electricity prices, then it will be far more profitable for large mining enterprises that only pay a fraction of our electricity cost, as low as $0.01 per KwH. The logical conclusion from that is that such entities will continue piling on the hashrate until its no longer lucrative for them, and as a result completely pointless for anyone paying "normal" electricity rates.

Reality check: if they are using bitmine manufactured boards, then they are (once again) lying through their teeth. If they are using bitmine or some other design and have it manufactured locally, then the bitmine delay (which was a PCB manufacturing issue) should have zero relevance.

I never heard or read that. I read about contractors to assemble the PCBs. But if this were true, and they outsourced an original board design, they wouldnt or shouldnt have been promising shipping "next week or two" since last year. The only reason those false promises could be somewhat acceptable is if *they* were promised functional and tested mining boards so early, and the only credible sources for that would have been Technobit and Bitmine. Some third party who's never done a bitcoin board, would have had access to the chips well after bitmine (and probably technobit) are not going to be ready with a working, shipping PCB and firmware before both bitmine and technobit. If you believe otherwise, I got a bridge to sell. Up to you to decide if you think AMT are either that clueless, or that dishonest. (My money is on both).


Yeah, thats why you calculate it in your timetables and you dont promise shipping in volume pretty much the same week you receive your first chips. At least anyone who knows the business, listening to Josh's video and reading his posts, he seems to have about as much knowledge about IC design and development as my gardener,  and less even than that other clueless serial liar with the same first name, and he couldnt tell a flipchip package from a potatochip package when he started.

I dont believe for a second AMT would be producing their own design PCB. Nothing Ive seen so far suggests they have the capability, and they would be the only bitcoin asic vendor ever to be shipping custom miners without ever even posting a picture of their original PCB at any point during development.

I too expected them to licence technobit design. If its not technobit, it will be Bitmine's design, possibly even Bitmine's production.

Biomech, I know you didnt ask to be a reviewer, so Im cutting you all the slack I can manage, dont take this personal, but really, you didnt review the AMT unit, you reviewed OpenWRT + cgminer. Just about nothing you tested is unique to AMT, somehow you managed a review without even looking at the box. No word on noise levels, build quality, size/weight, power consumption (!), no look under the hood whats actually in there, what PSU did they use, what boards, what router/host, etc, etc.

Regarding AMT's "miner protection program"; Im quite aware there used to be one, thats why I said "useful" protection program. For those interested, and especially those considering legal steps, here is a copy:
http://web.archive.org/web/20140102235509/http://advancedminers.com/miner-protection-plan/

I ridiculed it at the time, and for good reason; its so vague and ambiguous, its a (bad) joke. It doesnt mention if ROI is expressed in dollar or BTC, its clear as mud as to what timeframe is to be used (the example mentions the "suggested shipment date" as baseline, rather than the actual shipping date), what the upgrade consists off, etc etc. Any 12 year old could have written something more professional than that.

However, in most places, ambiguity is interpreted in favor of the consumer. And there is enough ambiguity in there to get AMT in some serious trouble. By all means show it to your lawyers.

What makes you think they're happy? Didnt it take them a year to charge Trendon Shavers? Quite a simple case by comparison.

While what you say is true, there are very important differences worth pointing out; bitmine have demonstrated a working machine, have shown piles and piles of components (not just a few trays of chips), have known and trustworthy people working with them, there is no mystery about their incorporation or their funding (which is very significant),  there are no questions about their technical ability seeing that their self developed chip and PCB actually works (achieving that is quite something else than gluing a few third party PCB's in to an mATX case), etc, etc.

Also not unimportant, Bitmine published specs and they actually seem to have hit them dead on (a first ever for bitcoin asics?), while AMT deliberately misrepresented the specs of those very same chips. Bitmine missed their timing, but unlike AMT, its reasonable to assume they did not expect to, and unlike AMT (and HF, CT, shall we mention BFL?) they actually have a useful miner protection program that guarantees its customers a significant hashrate increase and/or refund policy, going as far as refunding 10% on top of the purchase price.

In short,  Bitmine customers that where promised delivery first week of January should receive ~50% more hashrate than they ordered, some even double their order, and apparently at the promised power efficiency. AMT customers will receive at best the nominal hashrate, at less than half the promised power efficiency and my guess is, long after Bitmine's customers. That is, if AMT customers receive anything at all.

Nope. Only on those pages where an ASIC manufacturer (promises to) financially reward fake shill accounts

Anyway, assessment time. Two months ago, I basically made 3 allegations, and took a lot of shit for doing so.

1) Highly suspicious influx of "newbie" posters shilling for AMT.
2) based on Bitmine's official spec: impossible power consumption projections
3) based on Bitmine's public roadmap and information: impossible delivery projections.

1: was pretty much proven once we saw AMT's official shill reward program:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=304605.msg3893935#msg3893935

2:
Originally AMT's website claimed 300-600W, and  people (some of whom are now rewiring their electricity) actually believed that.

Website currently states 900-1200W, and that still may prove an under"estimate".

3:

Nearing the end of February and not even a picture of their 1.2TH has been shown. 3 out of 3.
To quote myself:


So Ill continue to be annoying - to those people who find logic and truth annoying.

The ones with the most efficient chips. Too early to call those, few companies have seriously tried to maximize power efficiency, time to market is still king today. Based on current (paper) specs, AM will be head and shoulders above the rest, but Id very surprised if that remained so.

He preordered it. Delivery in "2-4 weeks" ®© .

Considering bitstamp temporarily halted withdrawals for the very same reason, Im not sure why you would doubt that.

Where I sit, there are roughly two possibilities; One, Gox is saying the truth, are dealing with a technical problem that is confirmed to exist and once they fixed it, BTC withdrawals will resume and anyone who sold their coins for less than 50% of market price is going to feel silly, especially after you realized you converted your bitcoins into gox dollars that are infinitely harder to actually withdraw.

Two; somehow Gox, a company that by my guestimate reeks in between 500 and 1000 BTC in trading fees per day, and has been doing so for more than 4 years, became insolvent. Problem is that I really cant imagine how. EVen if some hacker exploited the malleability bug to empty Gox' hot wallet, that wallet would not have contained more than a tiny fraction of the bitcoins (or corresponding dollars)  Gox has accumulated over the years. Do the math; ~0.5% trading fees, x2 for each side of the trade. Even on a black day as today, that is 1% of 60000 BTC or 600 BTC in fees. x365 = ~220000 BTC per year.

BUt lets assume those windfall profits have been paid out as dividends to shareholders and Gox keeps next to nothing in reserve, and due to some hack, they are now insolvent. What is more likely, that its shareholders will let it go bust, or that they will inject the needed cash/coins  to keep their 200K BTC per year cash cow in business?

As for it being a scam; I will not vouch for Karpeles, but even if he is stupid, evil and untrustworthy it makes no sense to scam when you can legally make this kind of money, especially not when you are already in crosshairs of just about every major financial regulator in the world.  It does not compute.