Definitely something to follow. Looks like details are coming out this month on the chips pertaining to a data sheet if it hasn't already?
At those numbers (8.5$ per Ghash) and a quick swag at the term it looks like these would need to be ready to ship in around the next 60 days at $1700 per 200 Ghash to make it towards a ROI projection. Looking at getting them out in November at 200 Ghash or possibly December if they can hit 400 GHash (4.25$ per Ghash) should be a target. If that isn't realistic or at least close it may be a tough sell!
Pretty rough rough numbers so hard to really say yet.
The point of this is cutting out the "middlemen" to certain degree and going at this from a more collective perspective, so in terms of costs it be a lot more reasonable to do a DIYer or even the novice miner using this methodology, than say purchasing a similar ready made "off-the-shelf" unit from someone else and given that the group buy members are the owners of the project there won't be the same sort of lack of information for the members that can occur. I would hope also that we can look at this rig in some way to upcycle or reuse it for other purposes rather than just a dead miner. There needs to be some sort of way to give ASICs a secondary value if they become redundant as miners. Vanity Address Generating Engine? But yes we have to look very closely at the numbers what sort of target price do we need to make it viable?
I fully support the idea and believe in the community collective with detailed DIY service or some of the community members stepping up to provide a low cost assembly for those that can't or won't chance assembly. As long as it is expandable as mentioned similar to the hive reference that would allow scalability. I have not done enough research to even throw my hat in the ring as to "What else" ASICs can do to comment intelligently on that front. As far as the price goes That's a probability and statistics professors dream problem. There are inverse relationships that are interdependent on each other as you know:
Price
Time to market
Difficulty
It's a balancing act but a simple economics equation. If they can be created and shipped while the projections show a probable ROI they will sell plain and simple. If they are close to ROI, but can be expanded with expected dropping prices for each batch that then project ROI the original batch has a higher chance of selling than being a stand alone product.
At $1700 as I mentioned doing 200Ghash they would need to be out in November and at 400Ghash December. That's using genesis block projections, but there are people that have more in depth projections as well beyond the readily available sites. The price point is determined by the time and difficulty projections of that time unfortunately not the hardware costs themselves to assure they will sell!
I could envision a controller board that could either daisy chain other boards together or provide a backplane for hashing boards. Yes this currently exists, but what I see is chip sockets that are similar to motherboard CPU slots insert chip snap down chip, heat sink, cooling and go. Controller sees it configures and hashing begins! This expandable board system and controller would allow for continued growth with changing technology smaller faster chips etc. This then at that point is just a matter of device power consumption as long as each board released projects towards ROI and you could continue to use the original controller with firmware updates etc. Just how I'm seeing it as instead of replacing devices as they get beyond useful life you can continue to use the same rig system just replacing or adding hashing boards indefinitely. Maybe even once the additional use of ASICs is found there could be a trade in program or something similar.
That's a lot of tangents, but I think the power beyond ROI projections is in a future proof controller and expansion system if possible.
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