Swedish ASIC miner company kncminer.com

[Biodom]

What is the most plausible theory for more than two months of silence re Neptune despite apparent discontent of customers?
Here is my speculation on possibilities (from the most probable #1 to almost impossible #5):
1. They are experiencing significant difficulties with Neptune design and want to overcome those problems before updating.
2. They are positioning to change their business model from selling individual units to the "fair shake" cloudhashing model, where customers will be buying slots in the icelandic super-mine managed by KnC. Everyone who ordered Neptune would be offered a slot with a modest increase in hashing power (to 3.5-4TH), but will have to pay extra for "hosting".
3. They were bought by someone or majority bought by a third party (perhaps even by a government-controlled entity).
4. They were bought/invested into by 21e6 (or merged with 21e6). Alternatively, they were supplying Jupiters to a single unknown party (cloudhashing?).
5. They are resting on their prior success and "taking it easy".

[je1p7u7]

Knc will give us updates and maybe upgrade boards once competitors do begin shipping, and by competitors I mean the above, not Antminers, though I do appreciate the latter is contributing to difficulty increasing.

Why would they hold off for those outfits specifically?  HF is shipping, ngzhang claims 5.1PH of Avalon gen2 chips have shipped and they're increasing production.  Bitmain (even though you're discounting them) have shipped a tonne of hardware.  Bitfury and his re-sellers are still shipping in-hand product.  Bitmine has their first lot in and are moving into production.  This concept that KnC is sitting here waiting for Cointerra, BlackArrow (lol), and/or AMT (lol) to ship before offering upgrades is a bit ridiculous.

Here's a theory:  KnC has their own mine.  They cannot control what other manufacturers are shipping and are at their mercy regardless.  What they can control is their own product.  By not adding module or Jupiter (or whatever) sales, they are stemming the tides to protect their own interests.  Perhaps they're trying to recover their own ROI (BTC -> BTC) before undercutting themselves by selling more KnC gear to consumers.

Wow, you didnt even mention BFL. Thats just plain rude!

[madsusies]

all those points say - no news till Q2   it was obvious in December they got no plans for Neptune, it was just pre order lurking plan

[Biodom]

it was obvious in December they got no plans for Neptune

Not sure if I get your point. How was it obvious?

[arlekyn13]

"1. They are experiencing significant difficulties with Neptune design and want to overcome those problems before updating."

+1

I think they just try pushing as much hash power they can for some 2000-2200W electric power. 3.5TH for 2000W on 20nm is plausible and I think this is their target. Probably still working on that meaning they're still in "design stage". Let's just hope it's not "early design stage" as it was almost a month ago.

[dropt]

Their "ROI" was already taken care of. They've been operating in the black since batch 2 most likely.

Building a data center to house a mining farm can't be cheap.  That money could have bought quite a few coins.

[madsusies]

it was obvious in December they got no plans for Neptune

Not sure if I get your point. How was it obvious?

I don't know, perhaps 20nm is quite a sound of future no time plan just give us your BTC

[btcusr]

55 days to Q2.
And, another 91 days before Q2 ends.

[Biffa]

What is the most plausible theory for more than two months of silence re Neptune despite apparent discontent of customers?
Here is my speculation on possibilities (from the most probable #1 to almost impossible #5):
1. They are experiencing significant difficulties with Neptune design and want to overcome those problems before updating.
2. They are positioning to change their business model from selling individual units to the "fair shake" cloudhashing model, where customers will be buying slots in the icelandic super-mine managed by KnC. Everyone who ordered Neptune would be offered a slot with a modest increase in hashing power (to 3.5-4TH), but will have to pay extra for "hosting".
3. They were bought by someone or majority bought by a third party (perhaps even by a government-controlled entity).
4. They were bought/invested into by 21e6 (or merged with 21e6). Alternatively, they were supplying Jupiters to a single unknown party (cloudhashing?).
5. They are resting on their prior success and "taking it easy".

Or...

6. They are proceeding as planned and according to their internal schedule.

We don't know, and perhaps until they have something meaningful to share such as a tapeout then there really isn't any news yet.

[btcusr]

Just wondering, KNC is still selling Jupiters? When they busy with higher end Neptune stuff, why don't allocate some resources to build and ship Jupiters too?

I think, there's a good market for sub-$1k miners targeted towards home / individual miners.

Pricing miners in terms of current total network hashrate, would be great; say cost of this 1 THash miner is bitcoins it would mine for 2 - 3 months at 20 PHash (or, hashrate on the day you receive the miner).

[jelin1984]

the big problem is that no new newsletter from knc days now

[elasticband]

wow this thread is actually like a broken record.

I understan why people cry in BFL, BA & AcM threads but why everyone cries here so much i have no idea

[vesperwillow]

wow this thread is actually like a broken record.

I understan why people cry in BFL, BA & AcM threads but why everyone cries here so much i have no idea

+1

[joeventura]

What is the most plausible theory for more than two months of silence re Neptune despite apparent discontent of customers?
Here is my speculation on possibilities (from the most probable #1 to almost impossible #5):
1. They are experiencing significant difficulties with Neptune design and want to overcome those problems before updating.
2. They are positioning to change their business model from selling individual units to the "fair shake" cloudhashing model, where customers will be buying slots in the icelandic super-mine managed by KnC. Everyone who ordered Neptune would be offered a slot with a modest increase in hashing power (to 3.5-4TH), but will have to pay extra for "hosting".
3. They were bought by someone or majority bought by a third party (perhaps even by a government-controlled entity).
4. They were bought/invested into by 21e6 (or merged with 21e6). Alternatively, they were supplying Jupiters to a single unknown party (cloudhashing?).
5. They are resting on their prior success and "taking it easy".

1. No
2. Perhaps
3. No
4. No
5. No

It may not be outside the realm of possibilities that they have other projects they are working on?

[wpgdeez]

Plans have changed, they are waiting to buy Asicminers new chip 

[matt4054]

Since no one has posted it yet, here's the news update:

Dear All
 
It’s been a while since our last communication and this update is overdue and we do apologise for that. In this newsletter we want to update you on 3 important things.Neptune Development Progress, Jupiter sales and our new project - Plan B.
 

Neptune Development Progress

Over the last few months things have most certainly not stopped here at KnC, and we have made massive progress on our 20nm chip and it will be one of the first 20nm chips to come out to market with the strong support of our partners, TSMC, AST and Alchip. The backend engineering teams have been working 7 days a week around the clock to bring this chip to market as fast as possible. We have of course learnt a lot from our previous 28nm design and with that knowledge we will squeeze even more out of our 20nm chip.
 
The news we can tell you today is that we have a further reduction in power consumption of around 11% from our initial calculations, which means we can squeeze in even more cores. The core count per package is already over 1000 and with every reduction in power usage we will add in more cores to maximize the performance. This is a great bit of news.

Jupiter sales
 
We are no longer going to offer Jupiter for sale. We had intended to offer Jupiter following the end of our Network Protection phase, however things move fast in the Bitcoin world and we have decided to end all future sales of Jupiter. We know this may disappoint some people waiting for buy more Jupiters, however, we have some exciting news that we would like to share today and its called ‘Plan B’.
 
Plan B

As you are all aware we broke many world records in releasing the 28nm chip in such a short amount of time. We are a very ambitious company but even for us, to go “all in” and not be able to deliver on our performance targets, like our competition, would be completely unacceptable to us as a company and everything we stand for. So today we are introducing, Plan B.
 
To make sure that everyone who has paid for their Neptune we are building a data centre like no other. It is located in the north of Sweden not far from Facebook and other Mega Data Centres and it’s totally powered by renewable energy.
 
Over the next few months we are bringing online enough hashing power to make sure that any delay in the Neptune timeline will be compensated with a completely free hosted hashing packages to all fully paid customers.
 
In the addition to this commitment, as part of Plan B, for all Neptune customers, we will be offering a free conversion to a hosted hashing package where we will simply fill your wallets directly and you won’t have to worry about anything else. All the other costs taken care of by us. We are able to do this by using our 28nm chips which is why all products that we have coming out of our factory in the next few months will go into building and supplying the Plan B facility.
 
If, during the course of development of Neptune, there is any threat to the timelines for delivery, those delays will not result in the loss of any mining time for our Neptune customers. We will release more details of this as we get closer to the delivery date, but for now we have one of the world’s largest data centres to build.

Thanks
KnCMiner Team

[jelin1984]

These I think
Is bad news at all



Why not sell
Is simple

At every early buyers
Only one or two module
Per person
Is very easy to do that
And clever

[sbfree]

WOW
MONEY WELL SPENT IF YOU BOUGHT KNC.....

now that is a miner protection plan.

everyone else.....EAT IT!!

[sbfree]

I wonder how much NEPTUNE PRICES go up now on Ebay???

OH, and they said they will be back with more GRAVY!!!

nice!!

[DPoS]

WOW
MONEY WELL SPENT IF YOU BOUGHT KNC.....

now that is a miner protection plan.

everyone else.....EAT IT!!

"Over the next few months we are bringing online enough hashing power to make sure that any.."

  ...other miners will make .0000000001btc per week