The First Law of ASICS

[bcpokey]

First Law: An ASIC manufacturer will only deliver an ASIC when it's sale price is less than the gross value of Bitcoins it can be expected to mine.

I reject that law for 2 reasons.  First, you spelled "its" as "it's" and secondly, everyone knows the first law of ASICs is don't talk about ASICs.

Also wtf is a gross value of bitcoins?  That sentence doesn't even make sense.  It doesn't have a gross value when you mine it.  It has a gross value when you sell it.  Also, you'd be more concerned about a net value after the cost of hardware, maintenance, electricity, the building it's in, and cooling costs.  Oh, and all manufacturers claim they won't mine with their hardware (even though 6000GH/s appeared and disappeared off the bitcoin charts over the course of a few weeks, lol).  Also, the devices have no useable life expectation since they're all first generation devices.  That means nobody knows how many they'll mine total.  Also, bitcoin is unstable and can fluctuate in price or crash horribly or be blocked by governments suddenly or have an exchange get hacked so mining 10,000 ASICs instead of selling them is a stupid long term business investment.  Selling ASICs to people and pocketing their cash immediately and permanently is a smart investment by comparison because that's basically a "sure thing."

The first law of asics is that an asic may not harm a human, or through inaction allow harm to befall a human.

[1715554923]

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[markm]

The first law of asics is that an asic may not harm a human, or through inaction allow harm to befall a human.

That law is for general purpose machines, in the supposedly "ultimate" robot story they actually dropped those laws when they went to special purpose machine such as robot earthworms and robot fly-catching birds and such, as they simply are not necessary for such special-purpose devices. So they are more like laws for CPUs than for ASICs.

-MarkM-

[Fuzzy]

I think OP is completely fuckin' right.

1. Design new efficient Mining Hardware
2. Take money for pre-orders
3. Build hardware using pre-order money
4. "burn in" or "test" new hardware while there's no competition and difficulty is steady
5. Delay delay delay...
6. Once competing ASICs start to ship, ship your promised hardware out
7. Sit on your virtual pile of coins and watch the difficulty skyrocket while taking more orders

Makes perfect business sense, and anyone saying "they wouldn't do that" is suffering from a terrible bout of wishful thinking. "That" is exactly what companies try to do, make maximum profit.

Would be disappointed if all the major competitors weren't in on it too.

[SgtSpike]

I think OP is completely fuckin' right.

1. Design new efficient Mining Hardware
2. Take money for pre-orders
3. Build hardware using pre-order money
4. "burn in" or "test" new hardware while there's no competition and difficulty is steady
5. Delay delay delay...
6. Once competing ASICs start to ship, ship your promised hardware out
7. Sit on your virtual pile of coins and watch the difficulty skyrocket while taking more orders

Makes perfect business sense, and anyone saying "they wouldn't do that" is suffering from a terrible bout of wishful thinking. "That" is exactly what companies try to do, make maximum profit.

Would be disappointed if all the major competitors weren't in on it too.

Except some (dare I say most?) companies are actually ethical and don't lie to their customers.

[Desolator]

You should read about BFL's history of shipping products and their CEO's history

[SgtSpike]

You should read about BFL's history of shipping products and their CEO's history

Their history of shipping products wasn't unethical - it just wasn't well estimated/planned/executed.  Incompetence, if nothing else, but not unethical.

Regarding their not-CEO employee, people CAN turn over a new leaf and change.

[Desolator]

Okay...at this very moment in time, their actual FAQ page live on their site right now states:
We cannot disclose the number of orders we currently have.  Shipping of new units is still anticipated to being late November or early December. We are unable to predict accurate wait times until shipping begins.

You were saying?

P.S. I still can't find that hilarious product FAQ where the question was basically "You delayed your FPGA products.  How should we believe these will come on time?"
And their answer was something like "it's unpredictable, who knows, supplies, ship time, blah blah blah, in other words we're lying about the shipping date [paraphrased]"

[bonker]

I think OP is completely fuckin' right.

1. Design new efficient Mining Hardware
2. Take money for pre-orders
3. Build hardware using pre-order money
4. "burn in" or "test" new hardware while there's no competition and difficulty is steady
5. Delay delay delay...
6. Once competing ASICs start to ship, ship your promised hardware out
7. Sit on your virtual pile of coins and watch the difficulty skyrocket while taking more orders

Makes perfect business sense, and anyone saying "they wouldn't do that" is suffering from a terrible bout of wishful thinking. "That" is exactly what companies try to do, make maximum profit.

Would be disappointed if all the major competitors weren't in on it too.

^^^^^^^^
I like this guy! One of the few here that understands how business works in the real world.

[Desolator]

All the major manufacturers swore up and down that they wouldn't mine on the main net with hardware they personally owned.  They'd all use testing nets and synthetic tests and whatever.  That's obviously not true, it's just a question of how not true.  There's still no explaining why 4000GH/s appeared and disappeared from the network rather abruptly over the last few weeks though so I'd say someone somewhere probably fired up about that many worth of them and profited from it.

[Fuzzy]

There's still no explaining why 4000GH/s appeared and disappeared from the network rather abruptly over the last few weeks

But you have to keep in mind that there is no true measure for Total network hashing power, its all extrapolated from the time it takes to calculate a block, which is a value that can swing anywhere from 1 minute to 1 hour (and even more in extreme cases), so variations like that are nothing out of the ordinary, even if total network hashing power was constant.

[crazyates]

There's still no explaining why 4000GH/s appeared and disappeared from the network rather abruptly over the last few weeks

But you have to keep in mind that there is no true measure for Total network hashing power, its all extrapolated from the time it takes to calculate a block, which is a value that can swing anywhere from 1 minute to 1 hour (and even more in extreme cases), so variations like that are nothing out of the ordinary, even if total network hashing power was constant.

+1 A 15% variance in the overall hashrate is NOT anyone bringing ASICs on and then off again. It's just natural luck.

[Desolator]

It was like 6 weeks or something.  That's one hell of a bad luck streak.  Cue the stat geeks coming in and stating the probability that everyone sucked at mining by a factor of 4000/25000 for 6 weeks or whatever   I bet it's one in a trillion.  I've seen individual blocks take 3 hours to solve sometimes.  That just means everyone is super unlucky that time.  But every 10 minutes for 6 weeks having a variance suggesting 4000GH/s that aren't really there?  That's impossible.

[farlack]

If I made a machine, that 'you' paid me to build, that can make me millions of dollars with the only effort needed is plugging in a machine and letting it do its thing, while claiming its not ready yet, I would be stupid not to.

And I think any company is stupid not to.
If you think that the ASIC companies wont turn the machines on, to put it blunt, you're an idiot.

Why would you sell a bank before you made money?
Why would you ship a product that you MADE profit on, but would make more profit in 2 weeks turning it on than you made shipping it?



Honestly a better approach would be refund everyone's money +10% interest, that's what I would do.

[SgtSpike]

If I made a machine, that 'you' paid me to build, that can make me millions of dollars with the only effort needed is plugging in a machine and letting it do its thing, while claiming its not ready yet, I would be stupid not to.

And I think any company is stupid not to.
If you think that the ASIC companies wont turn the machines on, to put it blunt, you're an idiot.

Why would you sell a bank before you made money?
Why would you ship a product that you MADE profit on, but would make more profit in 2 weeks turning it on than you made shipping it?



Honestly a better approach would be refund everyone's money +10% interest, that's what I would do.

It would take them 7-8 months to make the same amount of money as everyone's preorders.  Obviously, everyone would cancel their orders by then, and they would have a net gain of zero vs conducting themselves as a legitimate company.  And that's only if Bitcoin price held (which it would likely not once people figured out what they were doing).

How many times does this have to be rehashed?

[Korbman]

How many times does this have to be rehashed?

2^n ..where 'n' is the number of users who haven't been on the forum in 72 hours.

[farlack]

If I made a machine, that 'you' paid me to build, that can make me millions of dollars with the only effort needed is plugging in a machine and letting it do its thing, while claiming its not ready yet, I would be stupid not to.

And I think any company is stupid not to.
If you think that the ASIC companies wont turn the machines on, to put it blunt, you're an idiot.

Why would you sell a bank before you made money?
Why would you ship a product that you MADE profit on, but would make more profit in 2 weeks turning it on than you made shipping it?



Honestly a better approach would be refund everyone's money +10% interest, that's what I would do.

It would take them 7-8 months to make the same amount of money as everyone's preorders.  Obviously, everyone would cancel their orders by then, and they would have a net gain of zero vs conducting themselves as a legitimate company.  And that's only if Bitcoin price held (which it would likely not once people figured out what they were doing).

How many times does this have to be rehashed?

7-8 months to make as much as the pre-orders, but not 7-8 months to purchase the machine itself at their price.

[nathanrees19]

Based upon the assumption that the manufacturer will always do what is in its best economic interest.

Your assumption assumes the following:

• The manufacturer is actually able to map out all possible consequences of its own actions and outside events to determine what is in its best economic interest
• There is nothing else influencing the behaviour of the manufacturer

In short, you're assuming that the manufacturer functions like a superintelligent machine with no values or principles other than "optimise for maximum profits". In practice, this is not true, which is why almost every "law of X" turns out to be a "rough guideline of X" at best.

[SgtSpike]

If I made a machine, that 'you' paid me to build, that can make me millions of dollars with the only effort needed is plugging in a machine and letting it do its thing, while claiming its not ready yet, I would be stupid not to.

And I think any company is stupid not to.
If you think that the ASIC companies wont turn the machines on, to put it blunt, you're an idiot.

Why would you sell a bank before you made money?
Why would you ship a product that you MADE profit on, but would make more profit in 2 weeks turning it on than you made shipping it?



Honestly a better approach would be refund everyone's money +10% interest, that's what I would do.

It would take them 7-8 months to make the same amount of money as everyone's preorders.  Obviously, everyone would cancel their orders by then, and they would have a net gain of zero vs conducting themselves as a legitimate company.  And that's only if Bitcoin price held (which it would likely not once people figured out what they were doing).

How many times does this have to be rehashed?

7-8 months to make as much as the pre-orders, but not 7-8 months to purchase the machine itself at their price.

What's your point?