Its due to how PPLNS works most likely, plus the time it takes for a new block to be confirmed. They are now getting paid for shifts they completed before the change.

Im not claiming Ken has paranormal abilities foreseeing this closure, the point is he acted upon it. How many other BTCST asset issuers acted on that information and were or are ready to continue serving shareholders without exchange?

exponential curve has been a pretty darn good fit so far.
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-small-lin.png
Of course it wont last forever, but its only the next ~6 months or so that are truly relevant for a purchase decision today. Either way, its a much better tool than what asic vendors give you, who will gladly calculate and publish your monthly profits assuming no difficulty increase whatsoever.


Yeah, so we agree;  by using previous growth to predict future growth, in the coming months it may well even be far worse than what TGB predicts. They are not scaring miners nearly enough. Is that what you meant to say?

Though personally I doubt all these asic vendors will have a supply chain in place thats actually capable of living up to their promises and ship products as fast as consumers buy them. KnC may or may not, and  I hope they wont all falter as badly as BFL and avalon,  but in reality there will be shipping delays and production ramp ups, which would translate to continued exponential curve. No one expects that curve to be a perfect fit, but that its exponential does make sense because of production ramps and one other thing you are not factoring in : price drops. These will be inevitable.

To me its simple: difficulty curve will follow the production ramp of all those vendors combined. Whatever they produce will be sold or deployed, until market price approaches production cost. We are miles away from there. Once we get close to that, exponential growth will end and taper off, but not before. The resulting curve wont be a perfect exponential curve, but the bumps we are about to experience will flatten out and become invisible over time, just like its impossible to spot the bumps in the current charts, that we had  in the past due to BTC fluctuation or  the CPU to GPU and FPGA transitions


Whether the market is ebay or direct doesnt matter. Yes higher prices are achieved on ebay for now, but that makes no difference to the overall picture. There is only a demand on ebay because there is an (incorrect) assumption of profitability. Exploiting that ignorance for as long as it exists is a valid though risky business model for individuals, its not something you can count on when producing those miners. You think Apple cares about ebay premiums?

Fun fact. Even if hashrate remains stable at the current ~1200TH, so BFL, AM, BF and others stop shipping and deploying, next difficulty will be ~168M.
But its not so much the next one Im looking forward to, as the one after that. Assuming KnC stays roughly on target.

Reasoned?  Activeminer's 28nm chip is being developed by easic, we know that, it is on easic's website. easic isnt a small bunch of amateurs, there is absolutely no reason to believe they wont pull this off easily. As for the CEO's capabilities, Ken may or may not be a marketing guru, but at least his websites work and when BTCT closed not only did he manage an orderly migration to bitfunder in next to no time, he said they had foreseen the closure of both exchanges and had already developed  their own trading platform that would operate from Belize if the need arised. Now thats what I like to see in a CEO: foresight and bold actions.

Now compare that to the labcoin boosters who bet their money on a very inefficient 130nm chip thats supposedly developed for free in a university by a student no one's ever heard off,  is being deployed by a company who's CEO  does internet sales of mobile phones, but doesnt have a public website. A chip they claim 2TH of which is deployed since a few weeks, but of which no pictures, no video, no nothing has been shown. The only "evidence" is that they are sometimes mining at ~800GH at a pool, but most people suspect that is obtained with avalons and bitfury's that Theswede is known to have bought.

Oh and they have a future  65nm product under development; the only guy working on it is only working on its IO periphery, he doesnt know who will do the rest, and claims he himself is probably not capable of designing the core, is not aware of the 130nm chip, has no clue of a timeline for the 65nm one  other than that he expects his part of the design to be ready this year.

Yeah. By all means, sell your Active miner shares and buy some labcoin.

activeminer may or may not succeed, but Im quite confident its a very serious attempt with fairly good odds.

Falsely? We shall find out who was "false" in a few months, but its already rather clear to me they will be proven to have been spot on, if not even too optimistic.


For whom? Profit margin for the average preordering miner ? you wish.  Their only hope is a huge increase in BTC exchange rate, and if that happens,  its not so much preordering miners as the BTC hoarders who didnt preorder, that will profit.

Comparing it to iphones is just plain ridiculous.

The correct answer is 1. IN theory the very first (double) hash you do could be below difficulty and thus earn you a block.
xephireusMMX already wrote that.

Didnt KnC expect to ship 500TH in the first batch (supposedly september) ? If so, there is no way the next difficulty jump (after todays) would only be to 199,126,888. Even if everyone else stopped shipping, the network hashrate would be the current 1200 TH + KnC's 500TH  which gives a D of  ~240M instead of 200M. And I doubt BFL, Bitfury and others will stop shipping, in reality it will be above that, even after taking latency in to account.

Of course I dont expect every KnC customer to receive and deploy their miner next week either, but that only makes  it worse for those not getting their KnC gear in time.

Another thought is that the decreasing growth may not be incorrect over time, but in the coming months, I would expect the exact opposite. As KnC/Cointerra/Bitmine/whatever all receive their new chips over the course of ~2 months, I would expect to see a dramatic acceleration of the network growth compared to today. Perhaps early next year that will reverse, and the rate of growth may decrease (in %/day),  but surely not in the coming months which are crucial for the ROI of most current asic preorders.

Yeah there is a reason I edited the post That does make sense. I didnt realize those boards only held a single large asic.
Did I say large? I meant frigging unbelievably gigantic.

Ill grant you that, but I havent heard anyone refute hashfast's argument that the minimum estimate of KnC's die size based on the package/underfull dimensions would be on the order of 900mm³. Thats not just a little bit bigger, thats an epic size.


Please do also ask about the PCB testing with the cyclone fpga (see my last post edit at the end).  How come their "full custom" asic happens to be electrically and pin compatible with an altera cyclone IV (and therefore, hardcopy IV) if its not a hardcopy?

https://www.kncminer.com/userfiles/image/ASIC_PCB.jpg

It just doesnt seem very likely or credible to me.

edit: should have read the text better.

Their specs most certainly are, even compared to actual shipping 55nm products. That hashfast and cointerra and VMC and black arrow and Coincraft and BFL and whomever Im forgetting are all exaggerating remains to be seen (Ill grant you BFL) , but for bitfury we have tested numbers. Those numbers make  KnC's promised efficiency look anything but impressive and makes the other vendors claims for 28nm entirely believable.


which leads you to believe everyone except KnC is lying through their teeth about their specs, and which leads me to question if KnC are doing a full custom design.
btw, VMC is doing a structured ASIC and their efficiency projections are better than KnCs. OF course they may also be overly optimistic, but still.

Besides, you havent explained the die size.


How exactly would you tell? And how do you explain the picture of the PCB with a cyclone FPGA that was used to test the board? What are the odds a full custom asic would end up with the exact same compatible pinout as a cyclone/hardcopy?

“unsolicited” means, in relation to goods sent to any person, that they are sent without any prior request made by him or on his behalf.

donch, thats a quote from the legislation you linked. Clearly these shipments are not "unsolicited".

20% per 12 days is not just low, its borderline nonsensical. We are now at 35% growth per 12 days and thats before any of these new asics have hit the network.
The only way we could stay even close to the current growth rate is if all those vendors fuck up production and delivery in which case, you are calculating the ROI of  devices no one will actually have, or BFL/Avalon/Bitfury miners.  

Even 30% seems highly optimistic.

Impossible? nah, its still as easy as it ever was. Only the likelyhood of ever finding a block is probably on the scale of finding a large diamond by scooping up sand in the desert with a teaspoon.

Horribly slow. And its down to the  chart.

Ukyo, you should send (far) less datapoints for the chart or check what else it is you are doing wrong with high highcharts. Initial loading of the chart take an eternity.

At the very least give people the option to hide the chart or load it in its own frame/div whatever so it doesnt bog down everything.

I know KnC is on record saying this is a cell based asic, not a hardcopy. But that was said a long time ago, and  if you look at the known facts:

- significantly worse GH/J than competing 28nm (and even 55nm) chips,
- judging by the chip package, massive die size, ~3x larger per GH than cointerra and hashfast
- extremely fast TTM (assuming they meet their goals), with apparently no need for any chip testing
- Chip developed by a company with a trackrecord in doing altera harcopy conversion
- Originally planned to do an FPGA
- PCB tested/photographed with an altera cyclone FPGA that just happens to fit

I have a hard time believing this is not a hardcopy or some other structured asic.

(Note: Im not saying thats a bad thing. Its what I would have done too).

Thats a good baseline, but keep  two things in mind :

- THe daily growth has been accelerating since the start of the year:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/growth.png
Its at 2.5%/day now, but there seems to be a strong trend upwards.

- This is before any 28nm asic has shipped. In the coming months, that growth estimate may well turn out to be much too low, depending if KnC/Hashfast/cointerra/ACM/BFL and others live up to their promises and how many of these rigs they can ship/deploy. The current growth is pretty much only due to Bitfury and BFL

3 (square) dies in a package seems a strange choice. Are you putting in 4 and having one for redundancy?  Or was the number chosen to keep cooling manageable?

After you got the IPO money.

It scales perfectly. Pretty much a copy/paste job. I dont think anyone seriously doubt cointerra can design a working hashing core RTL with that all star team.
The only potential pitfalls are timing, manufacturing, system engineering (including cooling) and supply chain.