Topic: [ActiveMining] The Official Active Mining Discussion Thread [Self-Moderated] - page 149. (Read 771512 times)

It is not nice to bring math to this fantasy fest.  It is far more fun to dream that "Ken" will dream up a brilliant plan and everyone will get rich.   "Ken", a man with over 6 million dollars in pre-order money plus all the millions in investor funds that could not hire people over the last months to make an eASIC chip and get it on a board (a process with a total NRE of around $1.5M including board design)
"Ken".   Has anyone thoroughly researched who Ken is and where the money is?

Exactly, Ken knew whether or not he could develop an RTL. It is not that difficult once you raise funds to hire a small team to pull-off a workable RTL and board. This should have been a done deal.

Cointerra hired on their website.  It's not hard to find people who know what they're doing.  There are ASIC experts out there, and a lot of them even visit bitcointalk.  If I was selling rocket ships and didn't know how to build one, I would start hiring.  I'm sure he knows how to screen through resumes, right?

It was being worked on back then but I can't say how much time it took. Can't say whether it delayed anything much but it would have required some software changes and it was all on Ken to do so. Once I sussed what it was he was doing, we tried to talk him out of it, or at least to wait until the next hardware iteration & hiring in specialists. It was valid R & D, to a point anyway, but the timing was off.

I wouldn't expect it to have resulted in the current delay but neither did I consider it a good spend of the CEO's time during that key period. I don't mind saying that Ken then told us we were backward thinking and weren't innovators. We felt it got a little unpleasant. I still stand by what we said about the tech. Happy to eat humble pie if we were wrong but there are implications which Ken never answered, even if it was economical.

Anyway, that didn't do a lot for morale, nor did changing key pricing (badly IMHO) without even a word to us or the endless web issues. Our position was untenable and we weren't going to be able to help any further since by then it was all down to production. I don't think the advisors ever disagreed over anything, but we did disagree a lot with Ken's approach and were disappointed by problems cropping up daily that we ended up trying to fix. It was a game of whack-a-mole.

Ken didn't and doesn't need an advisory board, he needs a management team with real power and full knowledge of the company.

In the end, the real problem is one man being responsible for so much and, in my opinion, not realising his limitations. You need a strong management team and VMC/ActM don't have one IMHO. Ken said he'd like to have more people but finding the right people was his problem. It's a fair point but then, having run a business myself, it's the job of the CEO to put the management team together.

I have always respected Ken for what he's trying to do but it's the end result that matters. We're in January now and too little has changed. I often found that shareholders were too fussy and asked for far too much and too quickly. At this stage, however, I feel a lot more openness is required. I don't see that there is a lot to lose.

Actually about $4-8billion needs to be spent on mining hardware at current BTC prices before 28nm chips will be obsolete....

QFMFT

@Ffss Thank you, so this intelihash has been sucking time away from our main goals since back when you guys were around?

@Vince Ask ken about the additional hashrate that came on in November. What was it? When did he hire this new firm of engineers and how long have they been working with Ken?

Please add questions to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:VinceSamios#Questions_for_Ken

I'm fairly sure that the engineering firm was being sorted out in late Aug/early Sept but we left before it had been finalised. I think they were named but I don't remember those details. At the time, VBS thought they were fine from what we'd been told. That's why I'm so surprised to hear about problems this late. The boards should have been reasonably easy jobs, I'm told, for an experienced firm, perhaps except for the largest one.

We did have an issue was the 256 board as it was high risk due to the size, cooling etc. Ken was adamant it would be ok but we thought it not a sensible risk to take. We felt the overall product offerings could and should have been improved substantially. Ken did choose to make some minor changes.

We had actually designed completely different set ups, commercially much more viable & appealing, significantly cheaper to manufacture, more flexible, and much lower risk all round. Ideally we'd have dropped the 256 board altogether or reduced it by a few chips. Our options didn't include the expansion unit set ups - they didn't make economic sense and were detrimental to all products in our opinion. Ken disagreed and it's his business after all. I'd be interested in knowing how many expansion case set ups were ever paid for, particularly at the top end, and the profit margin on those sales (if any).

We weren't told anything different about code/engineering than you guys. Apparently Ken had done it all as required for the chips but at the time we quit he was spending time on the 'boost' technology. We did not believe it made sense and I'm still doubtful. Besides, we definitely thought it a bad spend of time considering everything else that needed doing and the lack of qualified staff in the company. That meant Ken was responsible for everything. Even if he were a brilliant polymath, that was not a good situation for a business. When we quit, only a few weeks after we started (it was about 4 weeks in total), we urged Ken in private and in public to hire people in.

I have told people on IRC since then that the product side wasn't where money would be now but that the mining side could still be wonderfully profitable. However, I have never known anything about Ken's mining plans beyond what he has posted in public.

The 'boost' technology I won't discuss because Ken would not wish me to. Note that he never told me what it was in the first place, I sussed it out. I'm also not under NDA about that or anything else.

All in all, ActiveMining could still do really well if it could get mining in bulk ASAP. That's why I think Ken should be a lot more up front about what's going on. I simply don't understand how this situation has arisen. Having eASIC on board was a real coup for which Ken deserves a lot of credit, but it's no good if there is no end result.

Was it because of the large board requirements?
Did Ken's code not run as required?
Did the experienced engineering firm completely screw up and if so then is there legal action in progress? When was the screw up known about?
What is the target date for mining and how much will there be initially/how much will be added per week?
What is the target date for deliveries to customers?
How many units actually went out and how come that was managed yet the current situation has arisen?

You shouldn't read an evaluation into my message if there isn't a clear one.
I appreciate the honest update Ken made, but try to keep my emotions (positive or negative) out of this thread, since it's already a mess.
And even if Ken "only" updated us on Status quo, he kept his promise to post a weekly update!


+1

Time is of the most importance in regards to the small budget we have to purchase our own miners (which will fall as people start asking for refunds now).
As times goes by difficulty goes up and it costs us more money to take any portion of the market.

Ken MUST now have a discussion with shareholders, be it on here or IRC. We are entitled to know what is going on especially with such a disastrous announcement.

I look forwards to Bargraphics report - kind of.

Noted - although my clogging is far more palatable than the likes of VE, Crumbs, etc... I'm sure you'll agree :-)

Vince you are clogging up the thread with that huge quote, quotes are best edited when that length. Cheers.

Add questions to the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:VinceSamios#Questions_for_Ken

Is there any evidence suggesting the opposite?

There is no evidence that would suggest that's the case.

Crypto-Trade/ACtM/Details/Products and Services:

'AMC through VMC expects to sale 1 Million of its 28nm Bitcoin Mining Chips in 2014.  After AMC recoups its
NRE of ~1 Million dollars, then AMC expects to receive ~40 Million dollars in profits from its VMC subsidary payment in 2014.  The recouped NRE and profits from VMC will be used to make AMC the largest Bitcoin Mining Farm in the world......mwah-hahaha'


So in terms of defining success, maybe most people are thinking too short-term with this project?

Let's accept the chips have been delayed (by up to a month) and the boards adds another month, possibly for a total of 2 months delay (depending on when the new firm was hired and board design was begun). Now there are 12months in every year, and what people seem to be panicking about is time to market with difficulty ever rising. But you can only operate as a successful farm for an extended period if you have efficient boards and chips. It doesn't matter if you start mining in January 2014 or March 2014 - with energy hungry boards and chips you will only have a finite amount of time to mine as your equipment will become obsolete when energy cost outstrips FIAT returns from BTC. So it doesn't matter when you open your power hungry mine - a few months down the line your costs will outstrip mining profits and the farm will have to close.

Now the situation we have with ACtM can be seen as the opposite of that scenario.  Ken is (slowly) progressing towards a very power efficient board and chip combination with a very powerful chip which will have Intellihash optimization code applied to it. Unlike deployment of a power hungry setup, this combination is nimble, light on it's feet, and so will have a far extended lifetime to mine profitably.

So with these two scenarios you have either an early-to-open farm that has a finite lifetime or a late-to-open farm that is sustainable into the future as it's costs are adequately met by FIAT returns from mining.

Now the central point to that is: if the ACtM farm is able to grow month on month to either meet or exceed global hash increases in essence it does not matter if it opens Dec 2013 or March 2014. BTC could be being mined profitably by ACtM for the next 10 years. A 3 month delay represents a tiny percentage point of lost profit over that extended time. So the key thing in year 1 of this project is getting the fundamentals in place which will allow ACtM to operate a sustainable farm that is able to grow with rate difficulty and pay good divs to shareholders.

Now that's the farm side covered. I'd like shareholders to consider chip-only sales (which could be huge if the chip is priced well) and professional and home rig sales too.

In summary: time to market is not, as most people seem to think, the crucial aspect of creating success in the BTC mining industry. What is crucial is producing cost-efficient machines and being able to keep producing these machines through 2014 and into 2015/16/17 etc.

Look VE, I think you'd do us all a favor if you did exactly that and instead stopped the silly bantering and trolling of other posters here.

I've been telling you guys for months now that Ken is an incompetent liar. This became pretty damn obvious to me during the initial AMC tenders to ActM. It was obvious then that Ken couldn't even create a script to do them automatically, never mind anything more complicated. Expecting miners in January was pure delusion.

ActM supposedly have about $6 million worth of orders. Does anyone here think those people will be happy to wait for a few more months for their product? That is also pure delusion. Those pre-orders are getting refunded or ActM is getting sued into oblivion.

By the time ActM has miners, their chips will be about as good as AM's are now - pretty fucking useless.

Ken's total incompetence has destroyed any chance of ActM being profitable, I don't see it still existing by the end of the year, probably getting sued into oblivion by customers.

It seems Ken responded to the concise list of questions I PM'ed him, so I guess we've got a green light on this. It appears I am a self appointed shareholder liaison... I can't (and don't want to) read every post on this thread so instead I've created a list on my wikipedia talk page and invite people to add their questions to the list. Please sign it (just type ~~~~ after you comment) - I'll PM it to him early next week (and he can check it quickly from time to time.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:VinceSamios#Questions_for_Ken

I'll try to keep up with the thread, but if anyone has a question or notices a question by someone else which isn't on the list, please add it to my wiki talk page.