ASIC wars, devil in the distribution. Has Avalon killed all other startups?

[NorthChileanG]

Hi,

 as I cannot yet post in more appropriate sections, let me start here.

 Recent relatively high volume rushed Avalon bare chip sales have left me wondering what is the real reason behind inventory dumping.
At first glance one might suggest board manufacturing capacity limitations, chip manufacturing limitations (large minimum amount of chips
in one batch), the wish to calm 51% attack fears or other fairly benign reasons. However, at the current moment Avalon has almost
monopolistic hold of the market - why should one rush to inventory dumping in this kind of situation?

 I can see but only one actual reason - to further leverage monopoly, they chose cheapest way to kill arising competition - flood market with
promise of reasonably cheap ASIC rigs. There is no better way to do it than dump already known working chip design to multiple vendors. Anyone
interested notices either chips now or in later phase, the readymade boards just because the publicity. The use of distributed parallel manufacturing of rigs still containing Avalon chips is brilliant in at least three ways:

*Avalon can have reasonably high price per chip now, with the water written promise of high ROI of rigs made from the chips later. Buyer's fallacy is to expect ROI on current projections of difficulty rise that are !mostly linear!.

*Avalon pretty much stops new orders made for competitive products that cannot hope to compete with numerous board manufacturers as a single entity. Assume BFL preorder sell or cancels appearing en masse. I would suggest, that selling the first generation Avalon chips this way is actually the most significant event since the announcement of ASIC chips.

*Avalon has a extremely fast way to raise capital for second generation shrinked die faster and bigger chips. One might be surprised how soon the second generation can arrive.

 Any thoughts are welcome.

[zerosomething]

The ASICs are going to drastically change the mining activity. I'm betting those not able to make bitcoins will move to other coins to mine. That will build the competition for the distributed anonymous currencies. Canada and the US are starting to regulate Bitcoin transactions. That will also make people move.

I'll mine my Bitcoins with my ASICs if I ever actually get them but will use my yet to be setup GPU rig on something else. Or buy someones GPU rig that's moving to ASIC.

[zerosomething]

Oh hay that was post 4 so now just 2 hours left of browsing. 

[iGotSpots]

I think BFL has done more damage than anyone else

[DanoTime]

Your third advantage is what intrigues me... I think they may be able to move that fast.

[kostagr33k]

Im no EE or anything, but I'm pretty sure if they shrunk the asic, it will most likely blow away the first gen chips out of the water .. .if they truly are for keeping the network secure, I do not see them releasing those chips anytime soon, at least not as first gen is barely out, could they?


I could see them developing and mining in the beginning and once the network is ready for another flood, start offering those chips that have been tested and deployed already.


anyway another newbs 4th post so take it with a grain of salt

[zerodrama]

Except Avalon is nowhere near this:

https://www.kncminer.com/products/jupiter

[Cameltoemcgee]

Except Avalon is nowhere near this:

https://www.kncminer.com/products/jupiter

Seems Legit...

I think Avalon are doing it for the good of the community, as well as making themselves a shitload of money Open Sourcing the designs is the best thing they could possibly do... all the asics out there means that ASIC's won't be a get rich quick scheme like most people are crying about, but the massive difficulty increase will certainly make it harder for large private enterprise to attack BTC if they choose to....

[BitshireHashaway]

Very interesting, however, I think that many people put enough money into BFL, that they will continue to worry about them for a while to come, especially if BFL can start delivering. I think Asics will destroy the market for the average person trying to get in, which may cause people to have less interest, which will cause the price of bitcoins to go down, and as such, the profit with asics to go down, which I'm hoping may give me enough time to jump in with a GPU miner and collect some bitcoins before it becomes unprofitable again (assuming that all works  ).

I know that I personally plan on switching over to Litecoins after the Bitcoins are flooded by Asics (though I may purchase my own Asic for bitcoins), so that I can use GPU miner, since from what I've heard you basically  can't make an Asic for Litecoins, so high end GPU miners are the top of the line, which is cool by me:). Frankly I find building a GPU miner much more enjoyable compared to plugging in an Asic.

[kong2029]

An ASIC for LTC can be made, it just hasn't been done yet. 

[curtisbigs]

I put in a BFL order months ago, im glad i finally just decided to GPU MINE

[NorthChileanG]

So, depending on Avalon order number sequentiality - do we have 1 PetaHash/s mark in the air ?

[NorthChileanG]

 Well, this is interesting - BFL also offers not mounted chips now. Assuming BFL chip yeld is reasonably good, then it might get interesting. It all depends on real chip availability - we have not seen Avalon chips available en masse yet but considering appearance of 1...3Thash clients, there probably is significant number of ASICs available already. I would speculate for high volume chip buys before availability to general public orders and fast rising network hashrate at the moment might be direct result.

https://products.butterflylabs.com/65nm-asic-bitcoin-mining-chip.html

[suprabitz]

1st gen of asics will be about getting it out - avalon & asicminer are winning

2nd gen of asics will be about who can use the least power per hash.


cuz if everyone is running a gazillion hashes per second then power consumption and hardware cost will be the 2 factors deciding who can make a profit or not

[rolloffacliffpleaseanddie]

im just waitin till 2nd gen asics come out