Ken, what a useless update. As if we were waiting for you to tell us what you think BTC exchange rate will do or as if we didnt know difficulty was going to continue exploding.

What we needed were some simple, clear facts, and you gave virtually none. You still leave everyone guessing about the status of the chips. We still have no frigging idea of the timeline. All we got is a buzzword without describing what it is. And a vague statement that implies a delay, without quantifying it and while pretending we should think thats good. Whatever the 20% boost is, its not a gamechanger, its 20%. Difficulty goes up by 20% every 1-2 weeks, so if this caused a delay thats bigger than that, it was a dumb idea.

Because the big investors didnt lose money, they made money off Pirate's scheme.

A BFL prototype that may consume 350W but produces zero hashes per second.

So thats 280TH per day, or 5-6 PH per month for HF alone.
Senseless, try redoing your math if CT, BFL  and all the others combined, each manage the same, so 20-25PH per month instead of your estimated 1-2 PH.

You really dont get it. A miner produces BTC, not dollar. So of course you have to calculate the profit in BTC. If you calculate it in dollar, the outcome is 100% dependent on future BTC exchange rate, exactly like when buying BTC. Buying mining gear is exactly like buying BTC spread over time.

Of course Im not surprised you dont get this. You dont seem to understand the basic concepts behind mining otherwise you wouldnt be calculating silly things like mining cost per BTC and thinking it somehow impacts btc exchange rate.

So they are charging about 3 BTC for them. You realize most people paid  25 - 100 BTC for one, right?

I dont see why this is relevant, but if you are curious, I dont have a target price, I have a target date. Ive been selling small amounts of my stash over the past 2 years and I will continue to sell ever smaller amounts over the next 3 years at which point I intend to still hold about 50% of my original stash. The size of that is not your concern.

Exactly. But they will claim its a dollar investment that returns dollar, without acknowledging their ROI is almost 100% dependent on bitcoin exchange rate, just like a direct investment in bitcoin which has been infinitely more profitable. Maybe if BTC exchange rate crashes they will get it?

Why would you assume that? Thats less than a single 25 wafer batch. Surely the fabs are not that constrained, they do 100s of thousands of wafer starts per month.
As for the rest of the production, while I hesitate to use them as benchmark, Josh claimed they expect to be able to easily produce over 1000 Monarchs per day, thats >10PH per month. And have you seen HF's contract builder?

The reason we are only seeing this kind of low volume today is that we have only a single vendor shipping meaningful quantities. One that grossly underestimated demand and/or doesnt have the capacity (yet) to produce more. And thats understandable, wafer production has to be ordered and planned a long time ahead, and they didnt expect the current price explosion. Its possible all the other vendors made the same mistake, although they ordered later and would have had a better view of the market, but either way, its not going to take them all a full year to ramp production to catch up with demand.


BTW, why are you only counting 5 vendors? There is HF, KnC, CT, BFL, Bitmine, ActMiner, Black Arrow, AsicMiner, and probably Bitfury, Avalon. Thats 10; and i may be forgetting some or not knowing about them.

Your link provides no evidence that cointerra will be late, just that their customer support is at least as poor as almost any bitcoin related company. Tape out was late though, so its certainly possible they wont hit december, but from there to being beaten by KnC's 20nm product is quite a stretch. Same actually goes for HF, but I'll grant you BFL .

BTW, I want to go on record predicting KnC will turn in to another Avalon, with general praise for their first batch/gen being roughly on time and more profitable than hoped for, yet failing to deliver on the next batch/gen in time for any chance of profit. The fact they again take preorders when they couldnt possibly need the money, for a product based on a technology node no one else has shipping products for, Im not even aware of any announced products (not just bitcoin, I mean any asic) , should make you think twice. Im not saying 20nm isnt possible, it certainly is, but its not a mature, tested and well understood process like 28nm and I would take any timetable with a bucket of salt. Its not gonna happen in Q1 and most likely not before the end of Q2. And it wont be profitable (btc denominated).

That was to be expected just by looking at it. Like I mentioned earlier, try ducting the airflow. Use some cardboard, cellophane, whatever to close the top and bottom of the unit so the air is forced over the entire length of the unit and cooler. My guess is that will significantly improve cooling, thereby likely reducing the noise level.

Personal question for Doc; are you a namecoin kabillionaire now? Back in the day when the pool was still free and without donation option, I remember many of us donated most or all mined namecoins, they were almost worthless anyway and I even questioned the wisdom of bothering with merged mining. Since then, as we hoped, BTC rate has gone through the roof but namecoins doing even better and now selling for $10 each is something I would never have believed. I can get my head around $1000 per BTC, even $100K one day. I still cant get my head around namecoins being worth more than almost nothing .

Anyway, did you have the foresight (or plain luck) to sit on them, or did you sell/trade most of them?

Cant tell for sure if thats carpet or concrete, but either way, put a smoke alarm in there. IT may not be a bomb, but it can catch fire and those alarms cost next to nothing.

In june $4000 would have gotten you ~33BTC. How many BTC  did you end up making on those jupiters?

Guys, think about it; why are they preselling these? For the first batch of asics it could be argued they simply needed the money. KnC doesnt need the money to pay for a 20nm development anymore, they almost made enough money to buy TSMC (okay, slight hyperbole). They could easily develop the 20nm chip and sell it from stock the moment its there.

The only reason they are again selling preorders is the same reason why BFL (who doesnt need the money either) sells Monarch preorders, is  that it locks in the price at whats most likely a much too high level. I pretty much predicted this:


Many of you got lucky with the first batch of KnC's 28nm miners; they arrived pretty much on schedule, bitcoin price exploded and most importantly, the competition collectively fucked up keeping difficulty much lower than it would have been otherwise. You really think you will get this lucky again? With such a new and not yet mature 20nm process?  Or even luckier, because on batch 1 and certainly 2, probably not everyone is going to achieve a bitcoin denominated positive ROI, perhaps not even a dollar denominated one if the price collapses.

BTW, if I had one, I would try a makeshift case for it for better airflow. Judging by the pics, its unlikely the air from the fan will travel well across the entire device and cooler. Make a shroud from cardboard or even cellophane to force the air to travel across the length of the entire device, and I suspect the fan will be able to run at lower speed.

I wouldnt use "perfect":
Date Registered:   November 21, 2013, 06:34:21 AM

Dont get me wrong, I dont think this is a scam (if it is, its by far the best one so far), but thought Id point it out anyway.

Anyone else getting a deja vue when reading those chatlogs?
Sounds an awful lot like pirate before admitting insolvency.

You get nervous easily. Take hashast, it was supposed to ship last month, yet the only photo's to date are from a bog standard ATX case and the CEO holding somehing under wraps that presumably is a wafer. The first real pictures of KnC Ive seen was 2 or so days before they shipped.

I mean, feel free to get nervous for a variety of reasons, but there not being photo's 3 months before the announced shipping date shouldnt be on the top of your list.

FWIW,  I just did 2 BTC withdraws and they happened instantly. A euro withdraw went through just fine 2 days ago. I doubt they are hacked, but for sure it would be nice if customer support was a bit faster.