I do lump all the asic manufacturers together because they have all done exactly what I said. Your heroes, Asicminer, are one of the worst offenders because they mine themselves and by proxy whilst telling their customers that they want everyone to have a chance to participate in mining. What they actually want is the chumps to keep financing their mining activities by believing that they will make some money from their purchase. Also look at former all-round-good-guys KNC, the minute they said they would mine for themselves then purchasers should have walked away.

There's NEVER been one asic manufacturers who has said "thanks for your order, we will do everything we can to keep you as a customer and help you to make money. We'll make sure you get more hashing power when you need it, not when we decide we'll give you some more".

If the asic manufacturers has decided to keep their snouts out of the mining trough and actually support the customers that financed them, then the difficulty would be considerably lower and miners might still be making money.

All that happened was a serious of on-shot deals based on pre-orders, which would have been fine if the manufacturers had put plans in place to keep their original customers supplied with a steady stream of products as the difficulty rose. Instead they sold in bulk for their own or 'proxy' mining operations and the ones that paid the highest ( ie not discounted) pricing for their equipment got shafted.

Yes, there are some that say they don't (or won't) mine but the minute you start discounting for bulk sales, that's effectively what you are doing by proxy, the difference is that the supplier gets his profit up front from the bulk buyer rather than having to mine themselves (Don't you think it's peculiar why most rig suppliers ell in batches? It makes no commercial sense unless there are other factors at work)

You're also cheating your customers that pay full price - they provide larger margins and will also get hurt by higher hash rates.

Nice idea, but  it's totally impractical.

Home miners could compete still with the mining farms if only they'd choose the right companies to do business with, namely:

- Ones that don't discount for bulk sales

- Ones that actually want to keep their customers and view them as their primary income source, not mining

- Ones that will reinvest profits to make better products to keep their customers profitable.

- Ones that design mining system that can be easily upgraded to keep customers competitive at minimum cost.

- Ones that are content with a modest profit margin.

Maybe someone should give them Spondoolies web address and suggest they buy some SP35's? Makes much more sense, dontcha think?

So assuming a margin of 40% they'll need to sell about $17 million worth of this crap - about 7,000 boxes?

Are they insane or simply detached from reality?

Leaving aside the wholes issue of preorders, a machine design using 16nm chips running at 0.3J/Gh is a piece of shit, period. And don't forget that it 'can be powered with an internal or external power supply rated at least at 1350 watts of continuous power', so it's not 0.3J/Gh at the wall, by the time you include the PSU efficiency at full load it's more like 0.37J/Gh - over 20% higher.

It's just another bog standard cell based design which will be a nightmare to product engineer into a reliable system. No vision, no innovation.

And where did they get (or plan to get) the $7 million of NRE from?

Not really, modern FPGAs are set up as multipurpose devices, complete systems on silicon, as it were but reconfigurable. They contain multiple memory blocks, memory controllers and DSP functions, all of these soak up most of the 'gates'. SHA256 needs only the gates, and even then logical function blocks in FPGA are very inefficient at implementing them.

Might be slightly better for SCRYPT mining, but never looked into it, but would probably still be beaten by an asic solution by an order of magnitude.

Nor ever will. You can't get anything for nothing in this universe. Actually that's not entirely true as electrons can 'borrow' energy from the vacuum to tunnel, but only for very short periods of time.

Yeah, you've missed quite a lot here... for instance, spec'ing up a new machine with a second hand sever PSU? That is not a fair comparison but adding in the $170 or so for a new PSU for each tube would really screw up your figures, wouldn't it? No warranty, no guarantee on power factor etc, etc.

You really need to let the ventriloquist who is moving your mouth for speak directly. You're making up stuff, including your power consumption figures and while people who aren't proper engineers might be satisfied with them I know fine and well what you're doing. If you want a fair comparison, get a proper vaildated spec for the tube and it's actual power consumption, that mean the real power (resistive and reactive) drawn from the wall that appears on your bill.

The ST guys use proper performance figures and they also use an expensive server PSU that has active PF correction, their 3000 watts at the wall is what you'll pay for. Your figures are all over the place, just what I'd expect from an amateur, take best case yours and worst case theirs, and throw in some second hand equipment costs for good measure. You're an idiot.

I'm really busy with my job just now so don't have enough time just now to do this comparison for you, but I will get round to it. You're obviously not up to the task and can't be impartial.

Here we go again - you'll never actually answer questions, will you? You just try to throw them back with your usual arrogance. It won't work this time.

So now 'you' challenge anyone to show that the SP31 is the best option. In case you've forgotten I've already challenged you to do a detailed comparison of the AM solution versus the SP30/31 (which, of course you're incapable of doing so because you don't know how), so either provide it or shut up. And don't cheat by 'overclocking' - a device has a specification, overclocking it  means going above that specification so there is no guarantee it'll work properly.

Of course, you can always ask the guy that's pulling your strings.

I suggest you really do make a 'debate' about this in a separate thread, this isn't the place for it.

You really should give this up before you embarrass yourself further. You made a statement designed to demean the ST chip against a competitors without explaining the tech behind the apparent 'better' performance from the latter. That's not what good engineers do, they can only compare two devices by giving them the same operating conditions or by explaining how results come about from testing. Lower power consumption does not equate to higher efficiency, I don't have the motivation to explain it to you, so you'll have to work it out for yourself.

As for W/GH and J/GH, they are NOT the same. I would  gladly explain to you if I thought you might be capable of understanding what I said, but you clearly won't. Watts are a measure of power, Joules of energy. They are NOT the same, although again it's amusing that you think you can argue that they are.

I have no interest in what you buy of from whom but I'll be damned if I'll sit back and watch amateurs use misinformation to try to put down the technology of good companies that might pose a threat to their interests. I've read quite a lot of your comments about several companies, not much constructive criticism or support in there, is there? Not a lot of criticism of AM either, funnily enough, but I guess you feel you don't have to as they're going to 'crush' the competition, eh? I have the distinct feeling that you're going to regret ever having said that.

From now on, why don't you leave the technical stuff to the grown ups and stick to what you do best - entertainment?

While I'm writing can I also remind you that you haven't as yet done the ROI comparison between the AM solution and the SP30 I suggested? I'd really love to see it and I'll bet a lot of other would too, so get busy.

To the Spondoolies people, sorry for taking up space in your thread. I'm sure you have a lot on your plate at the moment but what you don't need is opportunists using this situation to push their own agendas.

It obvious from just about every post you make that you have an agenda, which is basically to criticise anything that isn't Asicminer or that might threaten their plan to 'crush' the competition. Incidentally, that really was one of your better quotes, I still haven't stopped laughing.

It's also dazzlingly clear that your technical knowledge is, how can I put this politely, 'wanting' and so you come out with stuff which you've most likely been fed by the guy with his hand up your back. It's a fairly safe bet you've never worked in the electronics industry (if you've ever actually had a job, which I doubt) and that you've never designed anything yet still you feel that you can stick your oar into situations that are way, way beyond your level of understanding.

The Bitfury chip may be able to run at 0.38 JOULES/GH, not watts/GH, it's a measure of energy, not power, (just another little detail which shows up your lack of knowledge) and their chip runs in a mode call Sub Threshold where is sacrifices speed for lower energy per GH by using a lower supply voltage than normal. I'm sure that the ST guys and any other competent designers will confirm that their chips could run at much lower J/GH figures if they ramp down the voltage.

The trouble is with this scenario - and read this carefully here because you might have considerable difficulty in understanding it - is that the lower voltage makes the chip run slower, a lot slower. To get the same number of GH/second as a full voltage chip you need more chips, thus making the advantage of low energy/GH useless.

You say the reason you want to know about compensation is so you can make informed decisions about whether to buy from ST in the future. This is rubbish, you simply want to make trouble for a competitor in whatever way you can, but you wrap it up in 'concerns' and criticism to try to get the community wound up.

It would be a lot better for the community in general if you simply shut up and stopped talking crap about situations that are none of your business and technical issues that are way beyond your level of understanding. ST have a problem which I'm pretty sure they are working hard to resolve, in the real world of electronics problems do arise and it can sometimes take a lot of time and effort to fix. ST are very active in communicating with their customers, I'm not one of them by the way, and it's clear to any external observer that they want to make things right.

That's the single most important issue in this situation.

Just as a closing point, why not show us all how clever you really are by demonstrating how an AM chip based system will make any ROI, comparing it to an SP30? I'd love to see it, I'll bet a lot of other would too and you've obviously got lots of time on you hands. If it's too difficult for you I'd be very pleased to help.

Since you clearly aren't one of their customers ('cause then you'd know), the answer to your question is:

None of your business.

By what metric?

Don't you think it's a bit unfair to accuse ST of scamming people? They produce complex electronic systems in a totally unique marketplace where time really does mean money, and like every other company that makes miners are under huge amounts of pressure to deliver. Things go wrong all the time in electronics production, no matter what size the company, the skills of its engineers or it's financial firepower. Being late or having production problems does not in any way equate to scamming, so I think you owe these guys an apology.

As for the other posters who think that everything should be delivered from stock: you're living in fantasy land. Any system that's remotely profitable doesn't sit on the shelves for long as has been demonstrated again and again. If you want off the shelf then it's unlikely you'll ever make money, most people hate pre orders but if you want the product (and profit) first you have to live with it. The miner suppliers simply don't have mountains of cash to build huge stocks, and even if they did build them then they would sell out very quickly.

Because there is currently no mainstream technology that would yield a financially viable solution for mining, but that will change soon, I'm sure you know that engineers can be very inventive if they are given the right tools and freedom to use what they've learned.

Anyway, like I said I don't want to keep posting stuff in your thread that's not directly related to your ongoing business.

Shit, hit the wrong key.

NO, by all means please do continue although I really don't want to post stuff in your thread that might belong elsewhere. I don't doubt that you have extrapolated knowledge of what your competitors are up to but you really don't know what non-retail groups are up to.

If you have the money, getting 100MVA is relatively easy in several locations, all you have to do is pony up some cash and wait 3-4 months for delivery of the main power transformer(s) and building of the substation. Not difficult at all, even 500MVA can be put in place within 6 months or less.

And you're assuming that no one has really low power asics.......if one of the independents had, oh I don't know, say a 0.12J/GH chip then 100MVA would equate to 600PH of capacity.