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May 27, 2017, 10:45:54 PM |
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Short term, a price increase DOES increase mining income.
It takes TIME for more mining machines to get built, get bought, get delivered, get set up/installed, and start mining.
There is also the current issue in ASIC mining that ALL of the ASIC manufacturers are having a hard time gettting enough chips to build miners WITH, due to the limits on available foundry capasity and the HUGE load being put on it by the new generation of AMD and NVidia GPUs, AMD and Intel CPUs, the continuing growth in Smartphone sales and the chips needed to build THOSE.....
The obvious reason Bitmain had had quite a bit of time in the last year with NO stock of current miners to sell is that they can't get the chips MADE as fast as they can sell the miners.
It's pretty obvious at this point that the reason BitFury hasn't been selling many chips to third-party miner makers is that their own internal usage + any sales they have made to LARGE farms has exceeded their available chip making capacity.
This situation seems to be easing some, but the current major shortage on AMD GPUs indicates it's about to tighten up a LOT again, at least for a few months, as AMD soaks every wafer they can get out of GlobalFoundries (AMD has a MAJOR priority there, only IBM might match the priority AMD can pull with GF, due to how GF came into being and the contracts of the time as amended since then).
It says a lot that the latest AMD "amendment" to their deal with GF specifies terms of AMD being allowed to use other foundries - the implication is that GF might not be able to keep up with the AMD demand at least for a short while at some point in the future, which is a BAD SIGN for availability of GF foundry capacity to anyone else (except IBM).
TSMC has it's own "overloaded" issues, to the point that NVidia has ALREADY moved some of their production of new cards to Samsung....
Net result - a price rise DOES give a miner significantly more income for a significant period of time, ESPECIALLY NOW when "new hardware to add" is in short supply all around.
On the other hand, there is no way the major farms will continue to add capacity if they don't see any likelyhood of such capacity ever achieving ROI - some SMALL miners might, but I don't see a significant probability of the BIG mines doing so (especially since a lot of them buy the chips themselves in bulk and build their own miners, as a significantly lower cost per TH then small miners have access to).
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