You forgot a few important ones:

Steamboat regular and thorough communication with customers - yes
Terrahash communication with customers - not so much

Steamboat working with BkkCoins (designer of Klondike) - yes
Terrahash working with BkkCoins (designer of Klondike) - not so much

Steamboat provides proof of Avalon chip purchases - yes
Terrahash provides proof of Avalon chip purchases - no so much

Possibly, but keep in mind Avalon has said:


So using a higher clock rate might be much less of a hack than it seems.

Based on recent posts, it looks like Terrahash is using Avalon chips, so it doesn't make sense to have their Lead Time be August and all the others be delayed to November. That said, I still don't understand why those are delayed all the way out to November. Based on the Sample Chips being shipped and recent communication from Avalon I don't think they'll be delayed by months.

Steamboat: I'm not sure if you saw it but Yifu posted on another thread (where someone got an Avalon clone board working with a sample chip) this:


I don't think anyone knows details yet, so just an fyi.

BKK: I'm not sure if you saw it but Yifu posted on another thread (where someone got an Avalon clone board working with a sample chip) this:


I don't think anyone knows details yet, so just an fyi.

BkkCoins is making good progress on the K1 and K16 boards. He doesn't yet have any Avalon sample chips, but has still been able to develop and test his design pretty well. It'll be exciting to see once he gets his hands on the first chips. Here is his klondike development thread.

50% increase continuing for a full year? That seems unrealistic. Assuming a starting point of around 500 Th/s, that would put total has of network at 50+ Ph/s 12 months later. Even at an ASIC generation 2 price of say 0.10 BTC per Gh/s that is $500 million cost just for the miners. The only way that could happen would be for the exchange rate to have some extraordinary growth. Could happen I guess, in which case I won't care that my mining hardware investment didn't get a ROI.

^^^^ THIS ^^^^^

While I don't believe anyone has heard from Avalon regarding the matter, I don't think we can assume that the delays in batch 2 & 3 means that the chips will be delayed by that amount. There are production problems with the batches (as Avalon has stated) that I highly doubt relate to the chips. So then the question is, will Avalon intentionally hold back delivery of 61 batches of chips just because the miner batches 2 & 3 are delayed? Based on the chip sample deliveries (which were just a bit late and not months late), I speculate the answer is No. They will ship the chips relatively soon.

Now that might be wishful thinking on my part (I'm waiting on chips), but I think that argument is just as valid as the one (if not more so) you've used to bump Avalon chip miner dates by several months.

I've modeled it several different ways. There is definitely a wall of ASIC powered miners coming online which is going to significantly increase the difficulty over the next several months: almost a year of BFL orders, Avalon batch 2 & 3 + chips, BitFury, KnC, and ASICMiner likely increasing their hash to maintain 20%+ of the hash pie.

The two critical question, IMO, are how quickly will all of the above be delivered and what happens to new ASIC miner demand after this first wave is fully delivered/deployed? Possible outcomes:

1) First wave of ASIC backlogs above is fully deployed very quickly (within 4 months) and new ASIC demand continues strong.
Result: unlikely to be profitable.

2) First wave of ASIC backlogs above is fully deployed very quickly (within 4 months) but new ASIC demand drops significantly because ROI isn't there.
Result: might eventually be profitable, but will take several months or year+.

3) First wave of ASIC backlogs above is fully deployed more slowly (6 to 9 months) and new ASIC demand continues strong.
Result: will break even or make a reasonable profit.

4) First wave of ASIC backlogs above is fully deployed more slowly (6 to 9 months) and new ASIC demand is muted because of increased difficulty.
Result: likely to be profitable to very profitable.

Of all the scenarios, I think #1 is least likely. The spike in difficulty we will be seeing over the next several months is because of back orders and pent-up demand for ASIC miners. Once that is deployed the rate of difficulty increase will trail off significantly... until 2nd generation ASIC miners start to come online (but I think that is a ways off and although 2nd generation miners will be much more efficient/cheaper, it is not the same type of increase as FPGA -> ASIC gen 1).

Right. That is exactly what I said in my first post.

IP addresses mean next to nothing. If it were really a mining pool of multiple individuals do you think it would really have USD$200K of undistributed funds in it? That address has never had a draw from it.

My point is: whoever it is (entity or individuals), they have some serious hashing power. This isn't some teenager with a couple of Avalons in his Mom's basement that has gotten lucky the last several days in a row.

I agree it is totally speculative to claim it is BFL, but it is more than a few Avalon boxes. Based on the rate they are hashing, if they are using Avalon boxes it would be between 50 and 100 of them.

I'm not so sure about that. They have responsibility to do everything they can to fix their assembly production problems as quickly as possible, but presuming the problems they are having there aren't related to chip production I don't think they will hold off shipping chips until batch 2/3 (and some 1) is 100% fulfilled.

Chips are a different product with different requirements than a full miner from the batches, so shipping chips whenever they are available isn't the same thing as line jumping the batch orders. Of course I'm waiting on chips and not batch 2 or 3, but even if it were the other way around I don't think I would expect them to withhold shipping of chips because of unrelated production problems with the batch miners. Especially given all along they have claimed they want to sell chips not completed miners...

That said, I do agree it sucks though for the folks waiting on batch 2 and 3.

To my knowledge, steamboat is only accepting payment for chips now. You won't be able to pay for assembly until he has the chips.

Thanks John, and thanks to steamboat for providing the docs to John.

Steamboat has been the model of good practices for group-buys / asic assembly services: great communication, willing to escrow identity with John, has not take preorders for the assembly costs, preorders the chips once half the funds are raised, has committed samples to BKK for klondike and will be paying per board royalties, etc.

Now we just need to get Avalon to provide the samples and ship the chips (I hear an update is coming this week on that) so steamboat can startup his process of getting completed miners out the door.

SB: do you care to give an estimate on when you will be launching the web site?

I went with steamboat's group buy after looking at the quickest way to get a complete miner built (in US) by someone that has a strong reputation, good communication, and seems to be heading down the most plausible path. I don't want to go down a cheaper path and end up with raw ASIC chips I am then struggling with finding someone to populate into a complete miner.

I am also not that convinced that lower chip orders will matter that much. It wouldn't surprise me if, once Avalon starts cranking out chips, there isn't that much time difference between the first order and the last one shipped.

Yeah, I think I'm done here. Something might doom BTC, but dust isn't it.

Sorry, but I understand neither your logic nor arguments. Nor do I see anywhere in that link that makes your point. Here is the summary at the end:


Which is quite the opposite conclusion that you have (that somehow the new dust prevention threshold will cause the end of bitcoin). Again, I'm open to debating a coherent argument but I just don't understand what your argument is. Walk me through step-by-step (pretend I'm a bit slow, because maybe I am) exactly how this is going to doom BTC.

I'm not sure what the value is now, but I would bet it is a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of the BTC market cap.

And I don't see how it is going to get worse. Once miners stop passing dust on for free, clients will have less incentive to try to use dust so there will be less dust accumulation.

http://bitcoin.lift-institute.com/killing-the-dust/

I don't understand your argument. There is lots of dust out there, yes, but by definition the value of each piece of "dust" is so small that even if you added all the dust together its total value would not be large enough to impact the economics of bitcoin.