What are you talking about? I seriously doubt HashFast, Cointerra or KnC spent 9 months on their designs Cointerra started in April and only promises hardware by late december. Are you giving their all star team less credit than Theswede? KNC seems to have pulled it off a bit faster, although I dont know when they actually started. Just that they were already working on it in April, claim to have broken all speed records and they are using orsoc, a large and experiienced team. Note that neither of them have so far delivered a working asic. A company that has is called BFL. Not small or underfunded either. How long did it take them again? HashFast taped out like a week ago and expects first silicon by the middle of October. They actually taped out end of august and say they promise shipping miners will start end of october. But how long did it take them to reach tape out? And by them I mean Uniquify. Again a large and experienced team, and no working silicon yet, much less working miners, so lets just wait and see if they actually pull it off. and they were 28nm. Seems pretty obvious that the larger the feature size the shorter the development time. If you're doing standard cell cmos it should be pretty easy to do a die shrink, you only have to design at the gate level. I cant rhyme those two statements. What exactly is it you think people have to do that would take, say, 3 months from when they determined the process node to when they taped out and ordered silicon from the fab?
I never mentioned tape out. I said working silicon. From tape out to working silicon is typically 2 months or more. If you believe they are close to tape out, but havent even selected a process yet, I got a bridge to sell. |
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"All pre-orders are guaranteed to be protected against any price decrease"
I like that. But Im not sure how it works. Say I order 1 X3 unit for $4000, and price drops to $3000, what will I get? You cant send me two units, nor can you send me 1.25 units?
15 days free hosting/testing is another good idea.
Anyway, your prices are too high for me, but that goes for all your competitors too. Looking forward to see how this will pan out.
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Who is doing the PCB and software ? How far along is that?
thing is, I dont know Ken, but he doesnt seem to be regarded too highly by many. So be it, more important i think is that we have little reason to doubt e-asic's ability to design and produce working chip in a timely fashion. Thats at least 70% of the risk right there. What remains is mostly an ability to turn working chips in to working miners (yes Im ignoring product sales). Any reassurance on that front would go a long way making this look at the very least as a plausibly profitable venture, just by self mining at hardware cost. Hardware sales would be icing on the cake. Dont get me wrong, very sweet icing that I dont want to see ignored.
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We really don't know what's going on with these 130nm chips. Are they overheating? too susceptible to noise? are they just crap? Do they exist? Ultimately, Labcoin is planning on replacing them with their 65nm chips in a month or two anyway, they're just a stepping stone. TheSeven is also working on the 65nm chips, and he's someone who's much more accessible to the bitcoin community. He showed up in #labcoin earlier and answered questions about what's going on (including what he knew about the 130nm chip project). It's clear that there really is a 65nm chip under development, and that chip could very well work out.
I dont know who TheSeven is, but I just googled and found what I assume you are referring to: http://bcoinnews.com/theseven-confirms-working-with-labcoin/"yes, from what i know that second generation will be 65nm, although we could technically still switch to something else at this stage"
Lets get real here. "from what I know", so you have your hopes pinned on someone working on this chip who apparently isnt even sure of the process node size? Whatever work he is doing on it, it cant be lead designer. And if you can still switch process node, you are at least 6 months away from first silicon, and unless you have a large and experienced team, more likely >9 months. Perhaps more importantly, you havent funded any of high NRE costs. This is going nowhere, even if labcoin were sincere. Coming to market with a 65nm product at the very least 6 to 9 months from here, competing with 55 and 28nm products that have already recovered their NRE, is simply a non starter. At the latest that will sink in when the masksets have to be ordered. Not that I believe it will ever get that far. Anyway, best of luck with your investment, For the record and full disclosure, I decided to gamble a few coins on active mining. Not all is rosy there either, not by a long shot, but at least I have confidence easic has the ability to produce working chips in a timely fashion Being 28nm and probably 6 months earlier than labcoin, at least it has potential for profit. This here, I just dont see it. |
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if you would have made your statement when bitcoin was at 10 $ it would be wrong in the same way as it is today.
Nope, $10 was the expectation back then. Expectations change, as will the price. |
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I dont know what it will be in 2025, but I can tell you fairly exactly what the current consensus is of what it will be:
$123 (excl inflation).
THink about it, anyone convinced it would be way higher would buy more, anyone thinking it would be way lower would sell.
The current price is an exact reflection of what we all combined think it will be worth in the future. A much better indicator than your poll.
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Preorder business model is only good for trusted big companies. I guess many people got tricked to BTC preorder  Preorder is fine if the law is not broken: When you learn that you cannot ship on time, you must decide whether you will ever be able to ship the order. If you decide that you cannot, you must promptly cancel the order and make a full refund.
If you decide you can ship the order later, you must seek the customer’s consent to the delay. You may use whatever means you wish to do this -- such as the telephone, fax, mail, or email -- as long as you notify the customer of the delay reasonably quickly. The customer must have sufficient advance notification to make a meaningful decision to consent to the delay or cancel the order.
...
In any event, no notification to the customer can take longer than the time you originally promised or, if no time was promised, 30 days. If you cannot ship the order or provide the notice within this time, you must cancel the order and make a prompt refund.
....
In seeking your customer’s consent to delay, the first delay notice you provide to the customer (the "delay option" notice) must include:
a definite revised shipment date or, if unknown, a statement that you are unable to provide a revised shipment date;
a statement that, if the customer chooses not to wait, the customer can cancel the order and obtain a full and prompt refund; and
some means for the customer to choose to cancel at your expense (e.g., by providing a postage prepaid reply card or toll-free telephone number).
the following information when you cannot provide a revised shipping date:
the reason for the delay, and
a statement that, if the customer agrees to the indefinite delay, the customer may cancel the order any time until you ship the merchandise. http://www.business.ftc.gov/documents/bus02-business-guide-mail-and-telephone-order-merchandise-rule |
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I dont understand this obsession with their hashrate.
It's the only provable thing. Pictures do not prove the chips work. They stated they were hashing at 2 TH/s. Not many people have access to that. Clearly they dont have 2TH yet, but with his IPO funds and him constantly posting in threads where people offer mining rigs, getting 2TH (soon) would be trivial and if anything, prove you are getting screwed. If you can get 2TH working non stop with your own asics, you can get 20TH working within days and weeks. BUt posting some decent video or photos of their prototype miner in action, wafers, simuilations, test equipment etc, that would be a bit harder to do if you dont have anything, and trivial to produce if you actually have one. |
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Whether they have 2 or 3 is irrelevant. They have about 400Gh/s, so it's actually about 4.8 Avalon's worth of Hash power. So it's not just one Avalon pumping in bitcoin. I dont understand this obsession with their hashrate. I mean either labcoin are indeed working on their own chip, and that is what you should demand proof of. Or they used your money to buy some miners on the open market, and that means you were all swindled. If he lied about the core of his business model, do you honestly expect him to pay out mining revenue fairly? Get real. If there are no labcoin chips forthcoming, kiss your money goodbye, regardless of what hashrate he has. |
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I missed your thread and was operating on bad guesses. Sorry.  Though - if 1TH/s = ~$140 retail after chip, PSU, shipping, cables, and whatever else - and it consumes, say 500W (this assumes it's significantly more efficient than babyjet2s, which I don't think an unreasonable assumption. It'll probably be much more efficient than my grim guess) - 6-12 months out (6-8 months out might be okay), and it's hard to justify the cost even if electricity's dirt-cheap (say, $.05/KWh after taxes/fees) - especially if everyone else is going to be mass-ordering these chips, too. At the end of the day, we're all chasing a piece of a 3.6kBTC/day pie (+~100BTC in fees) until the next halving, which is probably significantly less than three years away with the rapid increase of hashpower put on the network. We may not even have much more than two years if upfront costs drop dramatically and the pre-order hysteria keeps up. -So what do you see in, say, 18 months? Near-complete mining centralization in a small handful of geographic locations with sub-$.05/KWh electricity? Well, based on assumptions like you just wrote you can calculate where its headed, just not how fast it will head there. Your guess is as good as mine. But yes, I do expect the majority of mining (and all of profitable mining) to eventuallyt move where electricity is cheapest. And there are some pretty extreme low (subsidized) prices to be found. In Kuwait the price is fixed at $0.01 per KhW: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20644964In russia apparently you can buy electricity for $0.025 per KwH Those tariffs cant last forever, as that is well below cost but even if its only for a few more years, its not unreasonable to assume someone will set up shop there and Kuwait would effectively subsidize bitcoin security |
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Mining as a profitable venture you can get into now is dead. There's no justification for the mining network to add new participants right now. If BTC price soars in the future, maybe this will change, but if it doesn't increase to, say, $250 by the time of the next halving, the ASICs pre-ordered now may be the same ASICs making up the majority of the hashrate share five years down the road. It's a very possible situation to have no ASIC manufacturers still outputting in a year or two. It'd be like the Cuban automobile situation.
Hu? The little flaw in your reasoning is that you think hardware prices will remain stable. It makes no sense to buy mining hardware at the current price per GH, but vendor cost per GH, particular variable cost, is more than an order of magnitude lower. What do you think they will do once sales dry up? Remain dormant, dissolve, or make something else Good job of totally missing the obvious. They will lower prices. A 400GH/s hashfast asic costs ~$30 to produce in volume. Of course at some point mining profitability and production cost will meet and we will get stagnation, but we are at the very least 50PH away from that, and if mining shift to low electrcity cost countries like Russia or some states in the US, possibly more than 500PH. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295270.0I have no idea how long it will take manufacturers to ship that kind of volume, but its likely gonna be more than 6 or 12 months. Hardware prices, so far, haven't been able to come down to a price where it is at all safe to purchase And they never will. If it were truly safe, hardware vendors wouldnt sell, they would mine. ASIC manufacturers don't have a sustainable business model if they're just planning on producing Bitcoin ASICs for years. This is true, but you grossly underestimate how low prices can and will go. And once they reach marginal profitability in a few years, well who really cares what they do next, none of these guys will ever need to work again. |
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Mining as a profitable venture you can get into now is dead. There's no justification for the mining network to add new participants right now. If BTC price soars in the future, maybe this will change, but if it doesn't increase to, say, $250 by the time of the next halving, the ASICs pre-ordered now may be the same ASICs making up the majority of the hashrate share five years down the road. It's a very possible situation to have no ASIC manufacturers still outputting in a year or two. It'd be like the Cuban automobile situation.
Hu? The little flaw in your reasoning is that you think hardware prices will remain stable. It makes no sense to buy mining hardware at the current price per GH, but vendor cost per GH, particular variable cost, is more than an order of magnitude lower. What do you think they will do once sales dry up? |
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I did a lot of research on this a while back.
You can actually buy mineral oil cooling rigs online.
The problem with cooling with oil is that oil doesn't absorb heat as readily as water or the cooling liquid specifically designed for PC cooling. True but nor does it need to. You keep the heatsinks on and you have a very much bigger surface ocntact than your typical waterblock. Also, it takes a very strong pump to circulate oil through a heat exchanger -- you can't just use a pump designed for water, or if you are able to the pump will have a very short useful life. OIl is thick, so you will need to buy a much stronger pump than you would think if it were water, but if anything, it may live forever. If you submerge the pump it will be well cooled and perfectly lubricated all the time. You also dont need a high flow rate. |
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Dude why are you always using wring numbers? Only 250 BTC per hour are generated
Clearly I had a brainfart. Just like you (its 150 not 250), only a bit bigger |
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that logic has been debunked so often... Send me 1 BTC and in a year I will send you 0.9 BTC back. If BTC price doubles you will make a killer profit.. Thats essentially what a miner does, only my deal is better and you dont even have to wait a year, I will send you your "profit" immediately !
And if you want to buy with fiat , Im willing to accept fiat and send you 0.9 * exchange rate in BTC. No need to wait 6-12 months.
if you expect BTC to rise, buy btc.
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Since wind mills have a power production of 4 to 7.5MW nowadays that means 2 wind mills alone could run the whole bitcoins network power usage world wide. I think its a good comparision.
Its a good sound bite for now, and certainly an acceptable reality, but this is only because currently the biggest cost is still by far the hardware. Over time that will evaporate and we will be left only with electricty cost. ~3600 BTC/hr * $130/BTC / $0.1 Kw/H = 4680000KW or 4680MW Not sure if your argument will still be as convincing if you have to say bitcoin even in its current infancy at just $130 would require ~1000 large windmills and possibly close to 5x as much with russian electricy prices. |
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But then everyone stops mining, difficulty drops and after a time it becomes profitable to mine again. Until everyone starts mining again and then the cycle repeats. There will be a limit to the amount of energy used. It won't rise "to the moon".
Of course there is a limit. That limit is profitability: Total mining reward == total electricity cost + hardware write off. IOW, total electricity use per hour == ~3600 BTC / (Price Kw/H + hardware write off per hour). Add any mining fees to that 3600 if you want, and divide by 2 for each block reward halving. In reality over time hardware write off will become a non factor, and average electricity cost in BTC will be the only variable that will determine the overall electricity use of the bitcoin network. No cycles or moons involved unless both electricity and hardware would be free, in which case you get div/0 or infinity. |
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I think the market has been severely distorted by pre-sales. Miners have been willing to pay more for gear because they have been paying for it in a time frame when it looked like a good investment - but by the time they actually get the gear, the ROI is nada. Miners will soon (out of necessity, if not common sense) come to realize that this preorder thing ain't working - and vendors will have to have gear in-hand to sell it. THEN, miners will be able to make realistic decisions about what prices make sense.
Not really. It may seem like presales is the problem, but its not. Let me explain: The problem with presales is that you dont know how many TH have been sold and will be sold by the time you receive your unit, let alone by the time your expect to ROI. Those TH will influence future difficulty and thus your revenue, so you cant accurately predict your ROI. However, even even without presales, if you buy available hardware you still cant predict how many TH those companies are selling and will sell in the near future before you reach ROI, so you cant really predict your ROI either. Well, in fact, you can predict your ROI in both cases. ITs quite simple; on average it will be negative. Because of the dynamics of the market. Whenever there is an opportunity for mining profit, it will be taken by usually over optimistic miners. If there doesnt appear to be one, asic vendors will drop their prices to make sure there appears one again. Which ensures the previous miners will see their profit evaporate. Because if they had predicted these price drops correctly, they wouldnt have bought. This will happen over and over again until we reach the bottom of asic pricing. |
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Your translations are correct.
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If enough people take their miners offline because they don't make a profit difficulty will drop and then it will be (briefly) profitable to mine again. It then helps if you have the best energy efficiency. I guess when the limit is reached we will see cycles between high difficulty and low difficulty ad infinitum, until quantum computers come online and the arms race starts again.
For an individual miner, power efficiency will soon make all the difference in the world. But for the network as a whole, it makes next to no difference. It would make zero difference if the hardware were free or its cost could be amortized over an infinite time. In that case, total mining revenue of the network == electricity cost of the network. That makes it pretty darn simple to predict and completely independant of efficiency per GH. Instead cost per KWH will nicely predict network speed. See link above for a chart of that. |
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