I never said that was the floor. I said I expect that this year. Avalon is selling their chips at this price today, and I guarantee you that is not at a loss. I also expect coincraft chips to become economically obsolete way before the bigger chips that provide 100s of GH per chip and cost ~$30 to produce.


Are you kidding? You can buy 1000W PSU's in retail for $100.

Sure it may be a bit inefficient or even total crap, but its also the price end users pay when ordering one unit through amazon and it cant possibly be worse than the PSU's BFL bundles with its miners (let alone worse than KnC or Monarch PSU's, since they dont come with any). Now just how much do you think a half decent unit costs if an OEM orders a few 1000 directly from china?


Again you are way off. A rasberry Pi costs $35 (retail) and is overkill, its not like you need HDMI, audio, video decoding etc. You can buy complete ATX cases with fans, drive bays, USB sockets and everything for $10 on amazon, which is probably 5x more than KnC "cases" would cost in volume. And Ive linked prices of way more complicated PCBs for highend videocards earlier and they never exceed $10.

Here is a shocker for you: the most expensive part of the miner may well be the heatsink, even if its an off the shelve aircooled unit similar to what KnC uses.

Its not a scam, but Ive heard the promises of improving the site and customer support for over a year now. IM not holding my breath.

FWIW, I did a withdrawal to one of my bitcurex visa cards recently while the card was over the limit, so the transaction would have been bounced. I did the same from Kraken. Kraken credited my euro balance within 3 days without me even asking. On bitcurex, the money is "gone".  Ive made the same mistake a year or so ago, and bitcurex did credit it after opening a ticket and waiting 3 weeks.  I again opened a ticket with bitcurex and expect to get it credited at some point, but who knows when. Ill update when it happens - or if it doesnt.

You are wrong

Comparisons with GPU's are invalid. People dont buy $500 GPU's because they are profitable (miners aside, but they are a tiny minority). Nor do they stop buying GPU's because they no longer "profitable", so prices and margins are mostly determined by the competition. This is 100% different with bitcoin asics. The first asics could be sold their weight in pure gold, literally (the chips), because they were operationally immensely profitable. Even today bitcoin asics generate FAR more in mining revenue than they cost to operate (ie, electricity/hosting costs). WHich is why you see insane high marginal profits. Thats not going to last.

Price per GH will roughly follow price per bitcon / difficulty until you approach marginal cost. Assuming the price of bitcoin doesnt explode next year like it did in the past year, the cost of these asics will collapse just as fast as difficulty goes up. No one will want to pay $3 per GH if difficulty is 50B and estimated break even on the purchase is measured in decades rather than months. So vendors wil have a choice: reduce prices or hardly sell anything at all. Considering right now, these asics command a gross margin thats in the region of 10000%, which do you think is most likely? That they will stop selling, or sell for "only" 5000% margin, until one day, "only" 100% margin? Keep in mind even intel doesnt get 100% gross margins on average. Older bitcoin asics like avalon can already be bought for $5 per chip. These chips are not that much cheaper to produce than 28nm ones.  You will be able to buy coincraft A1"s for that price this year.

+1 to everything you said, except for the logging in. I can log in fine with my email address, FWIW.

At the risk of derailing this thread, but since no AMT news is being posted anyway, I could not possibly disagree more with the above statement. These asics carry a very high NRE, but cost peanuts to produce, the only reason you are paying $3/GH is because the market can bear that price and there is a huge shortage.

This wont last. As demand dries up (due to exploding difficulty), and manufacturers get their act together, prices will tumble until at some point they approach marginal production cost. And that is around one order of magnitude lower than what you see today.

FYI, a 300mm 28nm wafer costs ~$2500 in volume, possibly as "much" as $4000 with smaller volumes currently. One wafer holds somewhere between 50 and 100TH worth of chip candidates.  Thats $0.04 per GH in silicon production cost. Add a few dollar per chip for packaging, yield etc and a 400GH HF chip will cost on the order of $30. If that.  PCBs are fairly cheap too (probably around $20-$30 for a HF or BFL Monarch board), KnC style cases cost just a few bucks, what remains is cooling and PSU's.


remains to be seen. Like most others, I suspect KnC is heavily sandbagging on their specs.  20nm finfet ought to provide a very substantial efficiency boost. However, I will only believe they can deliver before June when I see it.


Only as long as there is a production shortage. My guess is that wont last very long.

All the ones you didnt list. For obvious reasons, Id rather not link them, but to name just one of countless, remove spaces:
www.a s i c-t e c h n o l o g i e s.com

You say that based on what? Where did the funds go to according to you?  Either Ukyo abused them for personal gain and then a lawsuit is pretty much the ONLY way you could ever hope to see anything back at all. Or (my guess) the funds still exist, but are seized by some three letter agency, in which case they may or may not be reimbursed at some point;  a (civil) lawsuit against Ukyo may not help a lot in that case, but it is not going to damage your odds of getting them back either.

As for jail time; individuals can only bring a civil case to court, there is no jail time penalty for civil cases. Only for criminal cases which can be brought by government agencies. ITs a safe bet a criminal case is already under investigation, whatever the result of that, a civil case wont change that outcome.

I used to believe you were acting in good faith, but got "interference" from  authorities who would also have seized assets and apparently gave you a gag order.

Now Im not so sure. Claiming not to have a lawyer when you boasted earlier of having 3 law firms in 3 countries, and trying to scare people from sueing you by saying it would force you in to bankruptcy.. Here is a reminder of what bankruptcy is: "Bankruptcy is a legal status of a person or other entity that cannot repay the debts it owes to creditors." Whats there to be afraid off? By that definition, Weexchange / BF *IS* bankrupt. What more harm could it do for a court to freeze any assets there might still be, if any, so they can be returned to your creditors?  

BTW, if somehow you think avoiding bankruptcy would allow you to repay your creditors over time, make your case for a judge and file for Chapter 11.

This is uncalled for. Biomech didnt ask a thing, and got offered a free miner. No one should be expected to refuse that based on a hunch this might be a scam.

I would however, be careful not to put too much weight on the results. Not that i have reason to suspect Biomech from being untruthful, its just that the ability of anyone to cram a few off the shelve technobit boards in a standard mATX case was never in question.

You want us to believe to you hired legal firms across the globe for bitfunder, a pure bitcoin business,  and didnt think it a good idea to look in to a legal ramifications of operating an international money exchange business?

BTW, I think this is where I get to say: "I told you so".

Really. Not so long ago I questioned you about the legality of your businesses, and you replied this:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=263445.msg3216254#msg3216254

Now you are saying you dont have a lawyer?

And you believe him? Just the fact that he says "I believe" is enough to dismiss it. As if he wouldnt know how many they sold...
Its also kinda hard to rhyme this statement with another statement he made a while ago, claiming they would be able to assemble 1K Monarchs per day. If they really sold only 10K, thats ~10 days. Why would that take until April by his own always-incorrect forecast-not-a-promise?

Sure, but have a look at thermal image of a cpu:



Almost all of that 130W is consumed in an area that is is maybe 10mm². A bitcoin asic would be much more uniform. Silicon is a decent thermal conductor, but not as good as the aluminium heatspreader.

AMT team is too busy to answer customer questions.



Last Active:   December 26, 2013, 07:10:18 AM
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=152891

Not sure what makes you say that. 442W/332mm²= ~1.3W/mm². Thats not enormous. A typical highend AMD or Intel desktop CPU has comparable thermal density, and in fact, for an x86 chip most of that power is concentrated in a few hotspots that are just a few mm². Not that 75+C should be a problem anyway.

I do find it funny they claim measurements of their PSU would somehow be "subjective".

Keep in mind Im estimating the "end game". If you just look at the PH range Im getting, bitcoin asics will be a big market, arguably as big as many high end gaming card manufacturers. 500 PH = over 1 million "Golden nonce" chips or 20 million Bitmine A1s. Thats high enough volume to get you the discounts that matter.

About the packaging.. 500-700 MHz isnt that much these days. ARM mobile chips do a lot more than that, and they still cost only ~$5 in volume. Die + packaging + odm margin. Sure, they are low power, but they also have far more complicated IO requirements. A bitcoin asic needs next to no IO. Look at bitmine's chip design, just a handful of (large) pads.

As for the OEM margins; what choice will they have? They can keep prices as high as they want, but if these chips are no longer operationally profitable to mine with, they wont sell any. If they are only barely operationally profitable, miners wont be interested in investing something that wont ROI in 10 years. This is not like GPU or CPU market. bitcoin OEMs will have to keep dropping prices, following difficulty (divided by bitcoin price)  or at some point, close their doors. So their BOM is a good indication of how low prices will eventually fall. Its not because these vendors currently can charge phenomenal prices that it has anything to do with cost. Its just because these chips are for now, phenomenally "profitable". Obviously that wont last.

You are off by orders of magnitude. AMD sells less than 1M high end (game grade) videocards per quarter. And thats AMD, consider the bazillion OEM's that sell cards that are price competitive, yet are much lower volume, probably in same ballpark if not below some bitcoin asic manufacturers 6 months from here. Sure, AMD and nVidia will have a volume pricing advantage, but its not going to matter for this comparison, and its not going to be anywhere near a factor 2x.


Packaging is priced per ball typically. The bitcoin asics arent that high pin count, there is no way it would cost more than $10 per chip. More likely $2-5 in volume. FWIW, I calculated using $10 in packaging cost, though I think $2 is probably closer once they achieve volume's of 100K's.

As for MCM's. If it were more expensive to package 4 dies in a chip than doing 4 chips, why would they?  You might argue for watercooling that the cooling is significantly cheaper, but even KnC is using MCM's with off the shelve air cooling.


Its not going to suck for everyone all the time, which is what matters. And yield shouldnt be a problem, considering these chips have dozens of "cores" that can be disabled if defective. They should achieve very near 100% yield if you allow a few bad cores per chip. Anyway, I assumed 90% yields, which is probably low for these chips.


Monarch doesnt have a PSU. SHould miners include that in their ROI calculation? Yeah. WIll they? Doubtful.  Many still have piles of PSU's. And even if you dont, a PSU doesnt become worthless after one year or when mining is no longer profitable. As for case, look at KnC. Just 2 sheets of plied aluminum. Cant cost more than $10 in volume, if that. You can buy full ATX cases with fans for that much.

BTW, chip cooling is included in that BOM. In fact, its about the most expensive part of the videocard.


I dont think so.


Yes there has to be a profit margin to pay the overhead. Im calculating BOM. In most businesses a 10% margin is what it takes to operate. Put it at 20% if you want. But keep in mind, once difficulty has gone up that much that market prices approach marginal cost, the alternative for those asic vendors is shutting their doors.


Lets check back in 24 months.

Has to be said: amazingly fast chip bring-up.

My bad, I hadnt even noticed they had such plan. They seem to have hidden it on their site, for those who didnt see it either:
http://advancedminers.com/miner-protection-plan/
(pro tip for actual customers: grab some screenshots)

A few comments; first of all,  strictly speaking, if your miner mines only one satoshi in 6 months, it will have achieved "ROI". Read the last sentence "ROI is defined as “a return on investment”. One satoshi is a return, even if it works out to -99.9999%. They dont say a positive ROI.

Secondly, the protection program does absolutely nothing to protect you from late shipments. "where your mining cannot meet ROI from the suggested shipment date". Thats right, if they ship 12 months late, and you might have "ROIed" if they had shipped on time, its still your loss. I guess that gives them even more incentive to blattantly lie about "suggested shipment dates".

Lastly, the whole thing is formulated so amateurishly, it boggles the mind. Frankly, it reads like something a scammer would write on a fake website without thinking it through longer than 10 seconds.

Prices will drop that low and much lower. Lets take BFL monarch as a baseline for a second. I've  linked this table before, that shows the BOM of highend video cards:

source: Mercury Research

If you eliminate the components you dont need on a miner (mostly GPU and VRAM) you end up with $47 for a 6970. A card which has comparable power draw and size as a Monarch (but which also includes a ton or irrelevant components and connectors like crossfire, DVI, HDMI, audio, PCIe 16x, ..  and a far more complicated 14+ layer PCB to accommodate the ultra high clockspeeds and bandwidth of the VRAM).

Which leaves one to estimate the cost of the ASICs. With a per 28nm wafer price of $4000 (50% above high volume prices), a 400GH hashfast golden nonce chip would cost somewhere on the order of $30 after packaging and yield. I assume BFL and most other vendors will be in the same ballpark, order of magnitude of $100 per TH for the chips.

Combine both, and add some minimum operating margin and you will see that $1000 per TH provides these vendors with gross margins that would make intel and nvidia green with envy. In high volumes, a 600GH Monarch probably costs BFL barely over $100 in marginal production cost.