The mining market balance

[dave3]

Ill check your math later, but this needs a rebuttal first:

aye, that was exactly what I said. Market demand will be the bottleneck for BFL.. ;p

You seem to forget BFL can price these units almost arbitrarily. If demand slows down too much because the ROI becomes too long, BFL can easily slash prices by 50%, 90% or more. ASICs cost next to nothing to produce, and Id be surprised if any of the other components in the miners would. So slashing prices wont really hurt BFL, their gross margin would go from say 10000% to "only" 5000%;  it would only really hurt previous BFL customers if it spurs another gold rush. BFL can play that game over and over, and they might even begin it before they ship their first unit.

While it's possible BFL could keep slashing prices and make it difficult for miners to break even, it's also possible they'll maintain a relatively stable price.  Perhaps the benefit to them would be more consistent sales to miners.

A track record of keeping ASIC prices stable would encourage more first time purchases and additional sales to miners wanting to add more hashing power.

If the price becomes unstable, they may benefit in the short term, but their customer base would be more limited to big risk takers.

Of course if there's an ASIC competitor, all bets are off.  Only time will tell.

[Cobra]

What's a cooperative? It's a business owned by the members. Every member have an equal share in it. To be part of the cooperative, you usually pay a social share (like 5$), and you become a member. Members have a rebate to products of the cooperative, and, at the end of the year, profits are redistributed to members. So, a cooperative is not about who have the biggest capital, but who is a member. The most member a cooperative have, the better its health.

I really like this concept and think it would be an excellent contribution to the community. This goes along with the "credit union" model that many people are familiar with.

In my opinion this would be a true COOP unlike an ASIC based GLBSE offering. In that scenario it is really just another mining investment using newer technology that you are helping purchase. Your idea caters to the need of people that still want to actually do the mining and not just invest. A members mining pool could also be an option for something like this. The ability to get discounted mining gear is great bonus as well.

The possibilities are endless. Imagine if the COOP was also in the Lending business and members could vote on which loan requests to approve and for what business ventures while evaluating risk/reward as a group.

Nice work Brunic......sub.

[jjshabadoo]

There are many ways to do this and it needs to be pursued. The biggest question/ hurdle seems to be how quickly can we develop s competitive ASIC product before BFL floods the market.

I personally don't believe they have any shot at fulfilling these orders in any quantitiy by december 2012 based on their previous track record. Also, if they had this legit VC funding behind them, why the hell do they need full pre-orders instead of simply deposits to help them measure demand.

Once again the bitcoin mining community is so obsessed with profit they are eager to fund someone's project interest free and tie up their funds for months on end. How much more could be done with this money if it were spent or utilized to fund bitcoin related business and services?

Are the people in this community just so ignorant about standard business practices that they can't see this is a long con ?

I like a combo co-operative mining effort that everyone can benefit from and also allows co-op members to buy discounted equipment as well. i could see the first large units being used to simply mine on behalf of the co-op members to repay the initial investment which would then allow for reasonable sale prices to co-op members moving forward.

If we could get 4-5 1 TH up and running before any of the BFL units hit the market we could get the initial dev cost back in no time and then be able to sell cheap units to co-op members and effectively put BFL out of business or at least force them to start acting as an ethical business in order to stay in this market.

I could raise probably $50,000 toward this project if someone could show me a way that we could get a custom ASIC by December 1st. I believe that would be AT LEAST one month before BFL could deliver any of their units, save maybe those coffee warmers.

I think we could have raised over 1 million if we had put this together before BFL announced their pre-orders, but don't think for a second they didn't do that as part of their plan to lock up the community's money in order to kill any project like this.'

Once they saw companies like enterpoint entering the game they knew they had to craft a plan to stall FPGA orders and screw every competitor over.