Have the self detaching USB ports been fixed?

Thought Id post this here; DrHaribo is giving away a Jupiter:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321629.0

All you have to do is mine at bitminter and get lucky (the more hashrate you have, the less luck you need).
Since bitminter is lower fee than btcguild (1% vs 3% for PPLNS) and btcguild is getting as big Deepbit once was, this might be a good time to point your miners there.

We already had SD spamming the blockchain and now its the cause of underage gambling addicts making fake accounts spamming this forum with nonsense empty posts (and abusing their signatures for more gambling advertising than can be found in Las Vegas).  Yeah Im really really sorry for your loss SatoshiDICE_PR.

So none of those 4 bitcoin scams perpetrated by Alberto were scams then?
Or where did you think that scanned passport came from?


You are the idiot who keeps falling for it and thereby proving exactly why it works (on some people).

Yeah since fabrizio's name was on the prospectus, Im sure no one would have noticed that. Nor the fact that alberto is his brother in law. Nor the fact that Alessi had been contact with some forum members even before the ipo.

Because not doing so gives (some) people reason to believe he is legit and its an honest failure rather than a scam. In almost all previous scams he acted similarly, paying back some coins for some time and pretending he was really trying very hard to make good on his debt/promise. In the case of bitdaytrade it pretty much took a year before people gave up.

If he actually runs, he has no excuses left and everyone with a vested interest will be contacting police/sec/sfc/hired guns.

Exactly.

For those that dont understand, a mining device generates bitcoins, not dollars. So to calculate ROI you either look at bitcoins in vs bitcoin out, and then its a gigantic loss.
Or, if you insist at looking at dollar in, bitcoin out, then you have to compare it with the more common way of turning dollars in to bitcoin, that is buying them, and compared to that, mining is an equally gigantic loss.

But hey, keep buying those asics, maybe bitcoin will go x10 again in the next year and you can manage to turn that zero effort 1000% gain in to a 10% 'profit'

Nope.
At least 3  4 times:

Kronos.io (4000 BTC)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0#post_toc_49

Bitscalper (1000 BTC)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0#post_bitscalper_scam

Bitdaytrade (9000 BTC)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93445.0

And labcoin, 7000 BTC


But some will still argue he is no scammer, he is just "incompetent".

JohnyBigs investigating labcon, thats alsmost as funny as when Goat was going to hunt down Pirate.

How could prices ever be reasonable on cex.io? They are offering hashrate from bitfury, why would bitfury sell it below what they think its worth, when whatever they dont sell is just hashing for themselves? Makes no sense to me. Just another way to separate suckers from their bitcoins.

The only reason you think you made a profit is because BTC price increased. IN january you spent the equivalent of  (169+50)/16= 13.7 BTC on your jally plus some on electricity. And you mined 1.8 BTC? LOL. What a fantastic deal you got there. Next time you want to invest BTC in something that returns you 10% of your investment, let me know, I may be able to help.

Really? You must have had really low expectations then, because unless I missed something or you were asked not to disclose it, judging by your report alone you were told absolutely nothing and were shown absolutely nothing. Well other than that they are human beings, but I dont think anyone doubted that

i know, but the point is that it doesnt matter. Bitfury sells its chips at whatever price the market can bare and will decide on ordering more wafers solely on their marginal cost vs expected sales or mining revenue. Whatever their NRE was, at this point its irrelevant (unless you are bitfury and you are calculating your overall profits). And what most people dont grasp, assuming constant BTC price, every chip you sell or deploy, directly and proportionally reduces the market value of your next chip (and all already installed chips). So prices *must* come down Thats unlike any other market Im aware off. And also why preordering is so profitable for vendors, since it hides this value reduction.


I dont know if they will all go down that route, but the market dynamics dont change fundamentally whether these companies sell only chips, or if they do everything in house. ITs a trade off between efficiency of specialization/competition and efficiency of scale. Its just that its easier to understand what will happen if you break it down in to pieces and consider asic vendors only selling asics.

Really, the big cost is the mask set. Once you have taped out and gotten your maskset, that is about the best example of a sunk cost I can think off. If that isnt one, I dont know what is.

Now of course these companies want to make a profit on their investments, which is why they will not get started if they dont think they can recoup the NRE, but once they decide they can, they will do what every company does: try to maximize profits. Right now your "$100 asic" can be sold for >$1000 because difficulty is so low and miners so delusional, so that is exactly what they do (and what made them decide to plunge down millions on the tape out). Not because the maskset was so expensive, but because they can.

But fast forward a few months, when difficulty is several billion and sales at the $1000 point dry up. What do you think is best, selling almost nothing or selling $100 chips for $500? You know, those kinds of margins would still even make intel green with envy.  And what when sales dry up at $500? Because they will sooner or later, you cant keep selling and shipping $500 asics without pushing up difficulty and thereby reducing mining profitability. So would you stop producing when you can still sell $100 chips for $250? Or $150? Maybe at $110 or $105 its not worth bothering with anymore, and some vendors may instead quit the business, but thats only when you reached near marginal cost and NRE is long forgotten. What you describe is one of the reasons you cant buy chips anywhere near marginal costs today (except for that batch of avalons, which may have been auctioned well below marginal cost, at $2 per asic for a complete miner), but it says nothing about where the market is headed when difficulty keeps rising.

Other example; lets take Bitfury. The have got their maskset. Lets assume for argument sake they also spent $5M on it and they have no intentions of doing a 28nm shrink. Will they keep ordering new wafers? As long as they can sell these chips, or mine with them for (substantially) more than they cost to produce (lets say $5), why wouldnt they?Why not sell these $5 chips on reels at $20 or even $10 when $20 becomes too much ?  Because the NRE was $5M they would rather not make a profit anymore? That makes no sense. THey may even end up selling below $5 if they ordered too much, just to get rid of the overstock.  $3 per chip is still better than $0. What does NRE have to do with that? What would it change if their maskset had only cost $500K or $50M ? Nothing, except when calculating their net profits. It simply doesnt factor in pricing or production decisions anymore, as its a sunk cost.


These upcoming 28nm chips are most likely the last ones we will see for many years. No one is likely to invest $3-5M on a new maskset 12 months from here, because you would be competing against chips that sold barely above cost and recouping the NRE would be almost impossible. And even if someone would, would they  be charging $1000 for their asic "because their NRE was x million", or will they charge as much as they can, which will only be  a fraction by then?  This is the end game and vendors will keep selling these chips (or deploy them) as long its worth the trouble of doing so. And that can only result in far more than 5-10PH for most of them.

Forever, of course not. But there is a reason growth is exponential.  its no coincidence the network hashrate since the first asics has perfectly followed an exponential curve; as almost always, if you see exponential growth there is a feedback loop. Every GH added to the network increases difficulty. Higher difficulty leads to lower mining profitability per GH, which leads to lower market prices per GH (until we approach vendors marginal profitability), which leads to more GH being added to the network.

So how long will it last? until we hit one of two constraints:
- vendors ability to deliver/deploy ever increasing numbers. If that happens growth will become linear rather than exponential.
- we approach marginal profitability, ie it costs more to produce/sell/deploy asic based miners than they are expected to earn in mining revenue over a reasonable time period (=market price or self mining opportunity).

We are very far way from the latter, literally at least one order of magnitude and potentially almost 2 orders of magnitude at todays BTC exchange rate.
As for the former, that one is hard to judge, but Josh boasting of 1000 units shipped in a day (if a similar volume can one day be achieved for Monarchs that could mean 10+ PH per month for BFL alone) and looking at the assembly plant that Hashfast contracted, I dont think widespread capacity constraints are likely to hit us anytime soon either.


So yeah, exponential growth will inevitably stop, but probably much later than you think. I dont see it happening before 100PH at least.

Did you have a brain seizure between the first (quite accurate) paragraph and the second one where you draw a nonsensical conclusion from it? Indeed the whole point of an asic company is that they can almost arbitrarily up their hashrate at extremely low marginal cost, but that only pays dividends if they actually do that. If they dont, they would end up with the most expensive asic miners imaginable due to the NRE.

More over, its quite obvious labcoin is not an asic provider, they are just buying some off the shelve hardware at the same unprofitable prices as everyone else.


That doesnt matter. Even if we were stuck for eternity at gen1, hashrate would still go up rather dramatically, we were no where near equilibrium between production cost and mining profitability even for 65nm hardware

$5M is at the high end of my estimates, keep in mind a bitcoin asic in all likelihood is much simpler than typical soc's/gpu's/etc and requires only a minimum number of layers/masks,  but generally I agree and you are in the right ballpark. But so what? We were talking about marginal production cost, NRE by definition isnt part of that. NRE is a sunk cost, and therefore doesnt matter to pricing during the 'end game", when miners margins have dropped so low that vendors will have a choice between not selling anything, or selling something above marginal cost. If there is no longer a reasonable operational profit margin to be had, vendors may call it quits, but as long there is a profit margin to be had, they will sell (or self mine),  NRE be damned.  IOW  NRE will be a key factor determining if vendors end up making a profit or not (and IM pretty sure they all will), but its not a factor in pricing.

Yeah, and those are fair and honest comparisons per TH when asicminer needs 1200x more chips per TH than Hashfast. Im sure that has no impact on cost per TH whatsoever.

SO instead of pointless comparisons per TH with incomparable hardware, lets compare a 300GH Monarch to high end GPU's. High end GPU's have same form factor, similar powerdraw, similar cooling requirements, much more complex PCBs (14+ layers), loads of connectors, IO and non core functionality (DVI, HDMI, DP, PCIe, audio, Crossfire, etc..). This table is from Mercury research:


Take a look at the 6970. Eliminate the GPU and GDDR, and whats left is a BOM of $47 excl the asic (but including a load of stuff you dont need). But you think production cost of a monarch would be, how much exactly?


Please dont twist my words. Obviously efficiency is crucial. WHats far less important is reliability. Downtime of a KnC miner now in its first weeks is a huge deal. Not so much of a deal next year when your miners earn only marginally more than they cost in electricity, on a bad day it might even save you money . But I never said PSU's are not important, I said they wouldnt be included. THere is no PSU with a monarch, nor is there one with KnC. SHould miners calculate those costs? Of course. WIll they ? Very dubious, particularly people like me and assume you who still have piles of unused PSU's. And even if the cost has to be included, its shouldnt be written off in 1 or even 2 years. Those PSU's last much longer and have decent resale value, thats why in the cost calculation, they dont matter so much.

One last point about alibaba being so inaccurate; here you can buy a full ATX case, retail, 1 unit for 12 pound:
http://www.dabs.com/products/best-value-oem-717-midi-tower-with-hd-audio--no-psu--black-7XT4.html?src=3
Its not even the cheapest, I picked one that even looks decent. But you think $6-8 in large volumes is laughable and your $60 closer to the truth?

In terms of hashrate (and thus wafer starts)



Of course unit volumes will skyrocket, almost no one is even shipping 28nm asics yet,  and current prices are at least an order of magnitude above marginal cost.
Dont tell me you thought the network was about to plateau at 5PH ?

I used hashfast to guestimate electricity efficiency and asic costs in general, based on their figures as at that time they were the only 28nm ones with stated die size.  And you've seen the thread where I pulled that chart from, I never even made an attempt to price in the rest of the hardware, I based it solely on the chips and left it up to anyone who wanted to fill out their own assumptions for the non electricity non asic parts for reasons I also explained there. I also never set out to prove 650PH in a year, I didnt come up with that number, and I most certainly didnt come up with that timeline.

But hey, since Im to blame, lets see if we can defend it. Instead of using hashfast, lets substitute it with the Coincraft A1 specs at nominal mode (low power mode might be better, but I cant find a hashrate for it). And lets use some more realistic total system costs and expand the ROI horizon to 2 years. What do we get then?