NSA doesnt have 10nm. No one does. Not that you need it, 28nm would work just fine. ~100TH per wafer, just order a few 100 wafers at less than $4000 each, thats hardly the problem.

BFL are infamous for overpromising, Im not going to bet on when they will deliver, I would never order from them, but the reality is also that its now a 100+ employee company (Knc is what, 10 employees?) that has been raking in preorders for an eternity now and have been shipping close to 1000 miners per day recently. Miners that are more complex to manufacture and assemble than Monarch. Considering they have not yet dropped their price one penny, I suspect they are not short on orders.

As for the combined network hashrate, IMO a better way to estimate it is simply looking at the profitability. As long as mining is substantially more profitable than it costs in electricity, the hashrate will go up as fast as all vendors combined can deliver. At todays BTC price, and assuming ~$0.1-0.2/KWH that means a race towards 500- 1000 PH. Anyone who thinks we will be at 20PH next July is smoking some weird stuff.

Here is a chart:

Many of your numbers are way too low.
First of all, AFAIK cointerra is making batches of >2PH each. At least their first, december batch was 2PH and I would expect subsequent batches to be larger, not smaller.

600 Monarchs per month is laughably low. BFL being BFL, its anyone's guess when they will ship, but when they do, their volumes are likely  >10x that.  Josh is on record saying they expect to be able to assemble over 1000 Monarchs per day. If their order books only had 2 or 3 days worth of production, do you really think they wouldnt drop prices? Just from undelivered 65nm orders that were converted in to Monarchs or cloudhosting I would expect several thousand units at the very least.

Anyway, while I appreciate the effort, the result isnt going to be worth the effort. These companies arent telling us how much they will produce, because those numbers hurt their sales. Expect them to understate their capacity if they even say anything at all.

You probably read the deal Apple made with Samsung and TSMC for 14nm chips. But you missed the date, that process is not expected to be online before mid 2015.

Lol? Intel is miles ahead of everyone else. While TSMC is still busy ordering 20nm production equipment (good luck KnC Neptune customers), Globalfoundries apparently stuck at 28nm,  intel has been producing 14nm chips for some time. Not sure they started selling these chips, they did have yield issues, but that doesnt mean they are somehow behind.

/OT

Quite a bold prediction. I thought I was the resident pessimist lol.


I understood friedcat (or whomever he hired) were doing similar hand optimizations. Now I happen to agree with you that was a strategic blunder. The time wasted doing that will cost far more than it will ever return. Paying a higher NRE for a smaller process node to get similar performance to market faster, KnC style, would have been my obvious choice. But thats water under the bridge, and now tape out is close, if not already behind us now? If they can indeed come up with a chip that uses on the order of 0.2W/J in the next 2 or 3 months, it doesnt really matter if thats achieved on 40 or 20nm. They will have a design thats going to be more than competitive for the foreseeable future (granted,  in bitcoin world, that isnt very long ).

Its not a matter of familiarity. Its a matter of usability. I can already pay for my mobile phone invoice,  pizza and spaceflights in bitcoin. Those vendors already have the system in place, but they wont take my junkcoins. So Im more likely to obtain bitcoins because they are more useful.  And the opposite is even more true, if you are a vendor and you want to experiment with crypto currencies, which one will you implement? Unless you come up with a very good reason, you are going to pick the one most of your customers are likely to have, ie, the most popular one. Which will only help making the most popular coin even more popular.

Since bitcoin is still so small, Im not saying this is insurmountable, but whatever coin is going to challenge bitcoin will have to provide a tangible benefit.

It will be a while before that is the case. By the time power consumption will become the major factor, prices and margins will have tumbled enormously. I have no doubt that will happen, but not in Q1 and not before the network is over ~100PH.

Besides, current 28nm designs dont seem to pay particular attention to power efficiency. Its clear the focus was on time to market. Testatement to that is that 55nm bitfury's are in the same ball park as 28nm chips.  A similarly well optimized 40nm chip should be competitive with existing and upcoming 28nm chips.  I seem to remember Friedcat estimating 0.2J/GH ? If he manages that, he is better than any announced 28nm chip and probably better than KnC's future 20nm chip, which Im not expecting anytime soon.

TL;DR. The clock is ticking rapidly, but there is still time to extract a nice profit.

Altavista  and Netscape are bad examples, there is no network effect there. If someone builds a better browser than Firefox (chrome, whatever) ,  there is no reason they couldnt grab marketshare, even today.  But try to get people to sign up to yet another social network where none of their friends are on, while Facebook and twitter have them all; thats a different story. So the Myspace comparison is much more apt. And I agree, its far from certain bitcoin will be the winner in the end. The market is still young. Something better might come along, but it will have an uphill fight against the current market leader. Simply because it is the market leader.

Yes you are. Do you call it a lie when a judge orders you to keep something secret, and the only way to achieve that is omit information and/or lie?


I never said anything was benign. Im suggesting Ukyo may not have a choice in the matter.
As for Danny's claims, they can be perfectly reasonable and honest based on the information he has.


Its one of many possibilities I pointed out. And yes, its plausible, its quite possible the gag order restricts Ukyo from making certain information public, but it may not restrict him in talking to any lawyer, be it his own, or one more versed in the subject that Ukyo may or may not have hired as his own. It may not even restrict him from talking about it to Danny, provided Danny doesnt make this info public.  Ukyo may have obtained permission to talk to neobee about it in order to come to a resolution.

They wouldnt have been able to squash competition regardless. Not with 110nm chips and not when the market was so frigging large. Moreover, a lot of companies already presold their gear anyway, how were they going to stop BFL ?


I mostly agree, but last I checked they held the equivalent of 10K BTC. Thats not chump change, even in this industry. Its enough to pay for a few failures. Of course the real problem with failures is that meanwhile the opportunity is evaporating. AM already lost far too much time. But having cash reserves cant be a negative in my book, which is why I responded to that.


I fully agree. And I also think that AM may turn out as a one trick pony.

Sigh. This is becoming semantics. A gag order pretty much forces you to lie.  If Ukyo's gag order did not allow him to speak to Danny about some NSL, and Ukyo did abide by it,  but Ukyo did tell Danny about troubles with the SEC, would you expect Danny to say anything other than claiming to have full understanding of the situation? Similarly if Ukyo violated his gag order, would you expect Danny to make that public?


We dont know whats in the gag order, if there is one. They can be extremely broad or narrow in scope.

Actually, most of the fabs are not. TSMC is in Taiwan, Globalfoundries is in Germany. China also has smaller fabs, but no 28nm that Im aware off. The reference to CHina was most likely in relation to some smaller chinese players, like Bitmain, and wasnt BTCgarden supposed to be deploying around now?

But I doubt they are responsible for the increase. Its most likely bitfury based gear. Could be private mines (cloudhashing and the like), could be bitfury themselves. Technobit is also still shipping, on their site I see 1100+ bitfury based boards in stock and avalon gear as well.

Maybe he didnt tell Danny everything, explaining also why there seems to be a disagreement between them in what can be revealed. Maybe he told Neobee legal counsel which might not be a violation of the gag order. Maybe the gag order is limited to public and press, and Ukyo is allowed to talk to Danny. Im neither psychic nor a lawyer, but this seems a far more probable line of thought than this being a straight scam.

Crypto currency market is a "winner takes all" market. The reason one will become or remain dominant is that the value of the system correlates directly with the number of users. Sure, I can make a Puppetcoin, but if no one accepts it (and no one mines it), its worthless.

Just think of facebook or twitter. Any half competent web developer could design something quite similar to facebook or twitter in a few weeks. Possibly even something e little better. But facebook is worth >$100B and that facebook copy, little more than nothing. Why? Because the true value of facebook is the fact its used by a billion users. Its a network. Thats the barrier to entry, just ask Google+. Likewise, bitcoin is not only a currency, its a network of users, and it derives most of its usefulness and ultimately value from the size of the network. And the bigger it is, the easier it is to grow it further. Quite the opposite of any new challenger.

PS bitcoin is still small enough, and cyrpto currency still new enough I think its entirely plausible in the end its not actually bitcoin that wins. Something better might come along. Time will tell, but there will be a single winner.

Gold is actually a worse conductor of electricity than copper. It does have the advantage of not corroding, but a clean copper connector would be better than a gold plated one .

Trap and trace could have been installed a long time ago, potentially long before the closure of BF/WE or even SR. You wouldnt have known, thats why they invented gag orders. Also, the transactions could have been done ages ago, but some funds might still be on BF or can be tracked indirectly to accounts currently on BF/WE. Feds would be interested in trying to obtain their users identity.


Possibly its a matter of interpretation what Ukyo is allowed to say and what he is not. As an example, he would almost certainly not be allowed to speak of a silk road related T&T, but it might be less clear if he is allowed to speak of a SEC or FinCEN investigation/seizure relating to his own activities. Perhaps Neobee thinks he can do that, while Ukyo doesnt dare. National security letters are no joke. Keep in mind that afaik burnside never explicitly said SEC or FBI had anything to do with the closure of his site, while reading between the lines, this was fairly obvious.


Authorities would likely consider BF and WE two separate entities conducting a separate kind of business. Burnside was allowed to refund his customers and just cease operations orderly. Likewise its not unthinkable BF is allowed to dissolve orderly and the funds that are being attributed to BF are allowed to be refunded, while WE is not permitted to do any money transmission activities and/or its funds are seized. Another possibility is that funds are being cleared by authorities once its established they are not related to SR or whatever it is they are investigating, or once the identity of the owner has been confirmed. Although admittedly, the latter would make a pro rata refunding rather bizarre.


Tell that to SR customers. Or bitcoin-24 customers for that matter. Of course funds and bitcoins can be seized during an investigation. Doesnt mean they will never be released back, but God knows how long that can take.


If my hypothesis is correct, Ukyo wouldnt know himself. NSL's have an open-ended, lifelong gag order. Basically you are not allowed to even say you got one until the FBI tells you that you can.

ANyone ever seen a resume that reads like this:


WTF lol? My 10 year old nephew could probably write a more convincing fake CV.

Also the focus on some cooling/noise aspects while completely ignoring the single most important aspect of a bitcoin miner (the ASIC), sounds familiar. I cant remember the name of that scam, but it was some good looking website offering asic miners with some weird cooling/noise suppression system that was explained in great detail (yet found to be pretty much impossible). Does anyone remember what Im alluding to?

With zero fees (allegedly, not sure if true), and paying out tx fees, just how is he making mad money on his pool?


Id say the opposite is true; setting up a zero fee pool is a relatively small investment to potentially gain control over the network. Im not saying I suspect ghash.io has nefarious intentions, but no one should risk bitcoin's integrity to the intentions of one single person. For bitcoins sake, point your miners to one of the smaller pools.

I know its rhetorical question, but allow me to answer this one nonetheless


The awesome thing they did was being the first (and for quite some time, only) industrial bitcoin mining operation producing their own asics, at a time when almost no such chips existed. That is something no one will ever be able to do again.

Also, I would put this:

Firmly in the "pro" list, rather than with the "cons". AM has a huge stockpile of money, thats a serious advantage in any industry. They dont have to worry about finding funding or taking in enough preorders to pay for some NRE. THey can just do what they think makes sense and if need be, think big. They even have enough money to develop several alternatives (be it chip designs or whatever) in parallel, if they think that makes sense. I dont see how that is a negative.