ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

[friedcat]

Update

The wafer of the first half (100TH/s) of next batch is to be out of fab.
More than 4,000 USB devices are sold out in total.
The demand of blades are surprisingly long-lasting and still high.

With respect to the mining business, we have never seen it as a drying up one
in spite of persistent block halving. If Bitcoin ever rises as a successful currency
in a few years, and the transaction fee has to be, say, 15BTC each block on average,
to prevent attacks from organizations that are all over the world and begin show
up when Bitcoin flourishes, what we could expect is 27.5BTC per block after the
next block halving, and more than 15BTC forever in the further future.

The shares "missing" are those missing from the original GLBSE database when we got
them. Some people had failed to report their Bitcoin address. Among them, several ones
successfully redeemed their shares after we mailed them for the address info. But the
rest failed to mail back.

The delay of confirmation of this week's dividends is caused by the payments of real
dividends are chained after the satoshi transactions, which are now refused by most
of the clients. We will either stop the satoshi payments, or unchain the payment in our
modified scripts.

[Franktank]

Update

The wafer of the first half (100TH/s) of next batch is to be out of fab.
More than 4,000 USB devices are sold out in total.
The demand of blades are surprisingly long-lasting and still high.

With respect to the mining business, we have never seen it as a drying up one
in spite of persistent block halving. If Bitcoin ever rises as a successful currency
in a few years, and the transaction fee has to be, say, 15BTC each block on average,
to prevent attacks from organizations that are all over the world and begin show
up when Bitcoin flourishes, what we could expect is 27.5BTC per block after the
next block halving, and more than 15BTC forever in the further future.

The shares "missing" are those missing from the original GLBSE database when we got
them. Some people had failed to report their Bitcoin address. Among them, several ones
successfully redeemed their shares after we mailed them for the address info. But the
rest failed to mail back.

The delay of confirmation of this week's dividends is caused by the payments of real
dividends are chained after the satoshi transactions, which are now refused by most
of the clients. We will either stop the satoshi payments, or unchain the payment in our
modified scripts.

Thanks! Always a pleasure to see your updates! Again, thanks for all your hard work and keep it up!

[neilol]

Thanks for the update fried!

Good news

[JSMill]

We are so lucky to have such a smart team running this company.  Thanks for the update!

[tinus42]

Strange. I thought Friedcat's update would generate a lot of reactions but instead it has been rather quiet in this thread.

Thank you for the update Your Friedness!

Looking forward to next week's divs. 

[wtfvanity]

The delay of confirmation of this week's dividends is caused by the payments of real
dividends are chained after the satoshi transactions, which are now refused by most
of the clients. We will either stop the satoshi payments, or unchain the payment in our
modified scripts.

Does anyone care if this happens? Just send the div's!

[boyohi]

Strange. I thought Friedcat's update would generate a lot of reactions but instead it has been rather quiet in this thread.

Thank you for the update Your Friedness!

Looking forward to next week's divs. 

Maybe everyone is still at work.

[romerun]

no doubt, BFL is no go, Avalon is shady, at this point Bitfury and Kncminer are the only threat to AM wealth.

Dangerous assumption, for all we know Intel could launch a 10x more efficient chip tomorrow and Nvidia announce a competing product Monday morning. Screw marketing, numbers talk here and AM could get drowned out overnight if one of the big firms wants a piece of the pie but AM have experience, a head start and a rock solid reputation so my moneys on them for the long run.

EDIT: Thanks for the update

not until walmart start accepting btc

[sngwinner]

This may be bitcoin 101 that I just missed but it would be great if someone could flush out some justification to what Friedcst said about transaction fees becoming a bigger part of the reward for mining a block. Why is it that this will happen? 15 btc per block seems like a lot in fees. What sort of fee per transaction would that equate to?

[Fabrizio89]

This may be bitcoin 101 that I just missed but it would be great if someone could flush out some justification to what Friedcst said about transaction fees becoming a bigger part of the reward for mining a block. Why is it that this will happen? 15 btc per block seems like a lot in fees. What sort of fee per transaction would that equate to?

I'm wondering about this too. With BTC being widely adopted, its value would have to increase to support a dramatic boost in demand and usage. If that's the case, transaction fees will be lowered as its value goes up.

[canth]

This may be bitcoin 101 that I just missed but it would be great if someone could flush out some justification to what Friedcst said about transaction fees becoming a bigger part of the reward for mining a block. Why is it that this will happen? 15 btc per block seems like a lot in fees. What sort of fee per transaction would that equate to?

We're doing a lot of extrapolation here since the number of BTC issued per block isn't set to halve again until ~ 2017. At today's transaction amounts - aka 50K transactions per day or about 350 transactions per block this would be about .04 BTC per transaction. However, we have to presume that the number of BTC transactions will significantly increase as BTC gains more popularity. Anyone want to take a guess about how many transactions per block in 2-3 years?

[sngwinner]

This may be bitcoin 101 that I just missed but it would be great if someone could flush out some justification to what Friedcst said about transaction fees becoming a bigger part of the reward for mining a block. Why is it that this will happen? 15 btc per block seems like a lot in fees. What sort of fee per transaction would that equate to?

We're doing a lot of extrapolation here since the number of BTC issued per block isn't set to halve again until ~ 2017. At today's transaction amounts - aka 50K transactions per day or about 350 transactions per block this would be about .04 BTC per transaction. However, we have to presume that the number of BTC transactions will significantly increase as BTC gains more popularity. Anyone want to take a guess about how many transactions per block in 2-3 years?

Do we have any idea what portion if transaction fees AM is currently collecting on each block in addition to the created btc?

A related question is how is btc designed to continue after all block have been solved? I know this is decades away but I'm curious if this isn't a problem to worry about or if this is something that will be solved eventually.

I guess I'm thinking that since the amount of rewarded btc for every block halves eventually the reward for solving a block wil be .00001 btc and miner will continue because they will be paid a transaction fee. If that's the case then eventually the transaction fees might be a decent percentage of a regular transaction. Seems a little worrisome in the long term to a currency that has a major advantage because of low transaction fees.

[kokojie]

no doubt, BFL is no go, Avalon is shady, at this point Bitfury and Kncminer are the only threat to AM wealth.

Dangerous assumption, for all we know Intel could launch a 10x more efficient chip tomorrow and Nvidia announce a competing product Monday morning. Screw marketing, numbers talk here and AM could get drowned out overnight if one of the big firms wants a piece of the pie but AM have experience, a head start and a rock solid reputation so my moneys on them for the long run.

EDIT: Thanks for the update

Not possible until Bitcoin market share is least 1 Trillion. Intel alone has 100X market cap of bitcoin, the potential market is simply too tiny for these companies to produce anything for.

[canth]

no doubt, BFL is no go, Avalon is shady, at this point Bitfury and Kncminer are the only threat to AM wealth.

Dangerous assumption, for all we know Intel could launch a 10x more efficient chip tomorrow and Nvidia announce a competing product Monday morning. Screw marketing, numbers talk here and AM could get drowned out overnight if one of the big firms wants a piece of the pie but AM have experience, a head start and a rock solid reputation so my moneys on them for the long run.

EDIT: Thanks for the update

Not possible until Bitcoin market share is least 1 Trillion. Intel alone has 100X market cap of bitcoin, the potential market is simply too tiny for these companies to produce anything for.

Yep - it's just not that interesting of a market for Intel. Besides, right now their focus is on mobile phones, tablets and the like. If laptops and PCs end up being trounced by tablets and phones, then Qualcomm, nVidia and others will end up being much more problematic for Intel. "Missing out" on the relatively small crypto currency mining market will be the least of their problems. Face it, this is still a niche market with perhaps only hundreds of thousands of customers compared to cell phones, tablets with over 1bn customers.

[nubbins]

15 btc per block seems like a lot in fees. What sort of fee per transaction would that equate to?

At today's transaction amounts - aka 50K transactions per day or about 350 transactions per block this would be about .04 BTC per transaction. However, we have to presume that the number of BTC transactions will significantly increase as BTC gains more popularity. Anyone want to take a guess about how many transactions per block in 2-3 years?

21 million transactions a day, with a BTC0.0001 fee, would give you around BTC15 in fees per block.

BTC0.0005 fee, you'd need 4.2 million tx's per day

etc

[nubbins]

for reference, visa does ~150m tx's per day

[Mastergerund]

There was a block a few days ago with 11 BTC in transaction fees, but it was a fluke. Expensive typo 

[neilol]

for reference, visa does ~150m tx's per day

This is a good comparison. Imagine if we could capture even a 10th of their volume.

It wouldn't be hard either with a stabilized Bitcoin. Businesses that accept CC pmts would instantly gain 3-5% on their top line by switching, not a very hard pitch to agree to. I know there are assumptions baked in here..but there is real promise.

[metavox]

This may be bitcoin 101 that I just missed but it would be great if someone could flush out some justification to what Friedcst said about transaction fees becoming a bigger part of the reward for mining a block. Why is it that this will happen? 15 btc per block seems like a lot in fees. What sort of fee per transaction would that equate to?

We're doing a lot of extrapolation here since the number of BTC issued per block isn't set to halve again until ~ 2017. At today's transaction amounts - aka 50K transactions per day or about 350 transactions per block this would be about .04 BTC per transaction. However, we have to presume that the number of BTC transactions will significantly increase as BTC gains more popularity. Anyone want to take a guess about how many transactions per block in 2-3 years?

Do we have any idea what portion if transaction fees AM is currently collecting on each block in addition to the created btc?

A related question is how is btc designed to continue after all block have been solved? I know this is decades away but I'm curious if this isn't a problem to worry about or if this is something that will be solved eventually.

I guess I'm thinking that since the amount of rewarded btc for every block halves eventually the reward for solving a block wil be .00001 btc and miner will continue because they will be paid a transaction fee. If that's the case then eventually the transaction fees might be a decent percentage of a regular transaction. Seems a little worrisome in the long term to a currency that has a major advantage because of low transaction fees.

Yes, you can check the mined ASICMiner blocks and their fees here - http://blockchain.info/blocks/ASICMiner

You are correct.  BTC is designed to be supported solely by fees once all coins have been mined.  The idea is that as the block reward is halved, the number of transactions will have likely increased and will offset (to a degree) the reduced mining reward.  The key here is to estimate the transaction total per block and avg fee size per transaction.  For 15 BTC in fees per block, at today's numbers (randomly selected: 394 trx @ 0.2812 btc fees), we're looking at ~.0007 btc fee per trx, or 21000 transactions per block.  That's an increased transaction volume of roughly 47x to yield 15 BTC in fees.

Now, if the relative value of BTC/fiat goes up, then the fee will likely have an inversely correlated drop - BTC doubles, fee halves.  If we assume a doubling of BTC/fiat value by the next block halve, and a halving of the average fee to .00035 btc, we would need 42000 transactions per block to yield 15 BTC in fee rewards. We're getting close to a required transaction volume increase of 100x with this scenario.   I think major retailers would need to start accepting BTC to yield these numbers in either example.  The acceptance bar here is to make sure BTC is simple enough to acquire, secure, and spend that my parents could start buying things with it at Costco.

Please feel free to critique my numbers and approach, but this is my back-of-the-napkin approximation.

[nubbins]

It wouldn't be hard either with a stabilized Bitcoin.

emphasis mine.

i think tx fees in excess of BTC12.5 per block will happen before the next reward halving.