Point is that its not vendors pricing thats to blame for the lack of profitability. LIke I said, they can put any price on it per TH they want, 5x lower than today, and it would still not be profitable because miners would just buy 5x more and still  over invest. Once they stop doing that, asic prices will drop further (further increasing difficulty). There is no solution, its inherent to the nature of the mining market and asics.

THats incorrect. It doesnt matter how energy efficient you make them, once these hardware prices have come down to something near marginal cost, electricity cost will be the overriding factor for miners, and the only real limit on network growth. More efficient chips would just result in almost proportionally lower mining cost per TH, which will  results in a proportionally higher network speed, and thus rendering the higher efficiency pointless. Have a look here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295270.0

For a given BTC price and electricity cost, you can pretty much calculate how many megawatt bitcoin will consume. The only way to prevent that would be if hardware became more expensive somehow, so that the hardware investment would be a bigger brake. Not very likely with asics.

Yes they will. Because you ask the wrong question. The correct question is: how much will a terrahash still cost once difficulty is 4 or 5x higher? Answer: ~4-5x lower than today.

Your next question should be: how low can the cost per GH go? Answer:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295270.0

Banks offer services and volume that is just not comparable to the blockchain.
Paypal is a much more direct comparison, even though they do a lot more than just processing transactions, and I just showed its using a comparable amount of energy. Except PP handles $100 billion worth of payments each year for 130 million users and does tons of other things too. That makes it very much more energy efficient.


The entire bitcoin network doesnt really represent a whole lot yet does it? Not compared to PP or banks, heck not even compared to Bloomberg.
I wouldnt go as far as calling it a environmental threat, but its certainly not something to take pride in and if bitcoin ever becomes a mainstream currency, it would get fairly ugly.

Define reasonable price.
No matter what price point per TH you pick, if miners overbuy it wont be profitable.

Im sure it would  be a huge relief for miners to learn that it would appear growth of the network may stabilize resulting in an exponential growth some point above  +125%  per month, but below infinity. Because thats all that tapering of the growth of the growth tells you.

Not that you can conclude anything of that sort from a short term highly variable chart in a time that predates all the important asic shipments.

Are you saying bitcoin ATMs are more energy efficient, or that bitcoin somehow eliminates the need for POS transactions?

+2

And what car did you get ?

The growth seems to be accelerating still, if anything:

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/growth.png

A solid 2.5% per day, which is +125% per month.

Perhaps the growth of the growth has tapered off a little but thats a bit meta to me and statistical noise at this point

I had no problems adding 1000 reels to my cart. I may have some problems coming up with the €83,700,000 needed to find out if they actually ship

Anyway, 9TH in a box is kinda cool.

Well lets compare, not to a bank, but to paypal/ebay.

The first phase of the Topaz project is a 240,000 square foot building housing three 20,000 square foot data center halls – one for eBay Marketplace, one for PayPal.com, and a third hall for expansion space. The master plan for the site calls for four phases, which will allow eBay to consolidate leased data center space currently spread across three states. The facility has 7.2 megawatts of capacity in phase 1, with a 30 megawatt substation on site.
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/05/23/ebay-unveils-new-flagship-data-center/

So bitcoin is currently using a roughly comparable amount of electricity as ebay+paypal datacenter.
If you are going to spread that over  transaction volumes, honestly bitcoin isnt going to look very green.

I cant forget "facts" Ive never known about. Much less facts that arent. That said


I wasnt talking about bitcoin asics, Im talking about asics in general. And if you think KnC is the first company  to face a huge time to market pressure, well, you're wrong.
In fact, the pressure really isnt on KnC so much as its on its customers. KnC already collected, and a few days or a few weeks of delays doesnt cost them much, if anything. Its their customers who stand to lose, but if KnC delivers only one or two weeks behind schedule, not many will complain and only a fool would charge back and go stand in line at a competitor.
 And we are not talking about weeks, I dont know why I keep saying that, we are talking about.. well, no time at all really.


Thats a fact I hadnt read about. But not a surprising one. Nor should it matter, it seems extremely unlikely that the fab wouldnt have a wafer probe nor the assembly house  either a wafer probe nor chip testing equipment.  That just isnt gonna happen. And even if that were the case:


You wouldnt send it across the globe, you would find a company offering testing services in the same building or at least same campus. Dont you think each and every customer of the packaging house needs testing? Not finding a testing facility less than a stone throw away sounds about as likely as a hospital without coffee machines or news stand


Sure, not sure how that makes a point against wafer and/or chip testing. On the contrary, you would want to know what is going wrong with every non functional miner. Is it a bad PCB?  Bad assembly? Bad packaging? Bad die's ? Where on the wafer were the bad dies located? That sort of stuff. Hard to find out after you packaged and assembled everything. All you know is it doesnt work for some reason.

Anyway, this discussion isnt important enough to continue, but Im pretty sure you have it wrong.

You dont. You know they will happen and it will be a non trivial percentage. Could be anywhere from 5 to 50% on a first run. But thats not the question. The question is if you want to discover all those bad chips before you spent time and money putting the defective chips in a fully populated PCB and assemble it to a functional testable miner, possibly with components that are harder to score than the asics (ask BFL) , or if you are going to do what is done with probably every other asic ever produced, test the dies and/or packaged chips before you waste those components,  time and money.

Im nt sure you realize those chips might be among the cheapest components and with the highest defect rate by far. Thats the one you want throw away, not the rest.

I get it that time to market is crucial, but if that is your only argument, testing a die or  chip (that has been processed for about a month or more in the fab) takes about 5 seconds in a machine.  How long do you think it takes to assemble a complete miner based on a faulty chip?

Seriously you guys are misinterpreting whats been said, or they misunderstood the question. There is no way anyone is going to assemble a complete pcb around a chip thats had neither wafer level nor chip level testing.

If you think its a better idea to buy shares after they went up and sell shares after they went down, I guess Im not interest in your investment advice.

I dont give a hoot about the current trend, Im interested in finding out about the fundamentals.

Just curious, do you think they should test assembled miners before shipping? Like at least turning them on and running them for a few minutes?  Or ship them asap and let customers find out if they work? The latter also saves them time and money.

This isnt only about wasting components, automated testing of those chips will if anything, speed up production of functional miners. It takes so much longer to assemble (and test!) a complete miner based on a bad chip than it does to do chip level testing.

I just cant see how you can compare them. Labcoin has no credibility, no proven trackrecord, nothing. Pictures of PCBs that couldnt possibly be functional PCBs.

Now IM not comparing that to AM, I dont know shit about the people behind AM either, but IM comparing it with easic and their public claims. What are the odds labcoin would bring a working asic to market and easic would fail? Zero. easic is using this chip to show off their brand new unannounced nextreme3 process. You can bet they will do anything to make it work!


No its not.  First proof of that is BFL. Second proof is Avalon.
Moreover, whatever AM sells as mining devices is icing on the cake, just mining themselves with this hardware at cost should give them a pretty darn nice ROI if they can deploy it before the end of the year.

So the only real risk I see, is turning working chips in to working miners. I guess BFL has proven how badly you can screw that up, so thats where Im looking for more info.

Thats one reason Im interested. People seem to think activemining and labcoin are like the same, and are discovering one is an obvious scam and assuming the other one will therefore be one too.

I see no resemblance whatsoever, unless anyone wants to think a company like easic is in on it too.

Another reason people seem to vote down AM/VMC is because their list prices are too high. Well they are to high, but so what, all those 28nm prices are too high. As a shareholder thats a good thing and moreover they can just mine with anything unsold at cost.

Makes no sense. You have to test these chips at some point anyway, its generally easier and cheaper to do that before they are mounted on a PCB
So regardless of the fact that it saves you the PCB and assembly cost, you would want to do this.

The only sensible explanation I can come up with is that packaging and testing is handled by orsoc and KnC just pays for tested functional chips and wont be doing any other testing on them.