I thought i would just pop my head back up over the parapet to try and steer this back on topic. it would be great if some of the thinkers in this thread could weigh in on this:
If we do not get hashing soon, there will become a point where we will not be able to keep up with difficulty increases.
We will have a fixed capacity for production in the short term, and we will also run into efficiency issues with our 20GH/s chips in that heat, power, physical space for thousands of small, low power chips will be a lot more costly and difficult to manage than the same hash rate of powerful chips (like Cointerrra's 500GH/s Goldstrike chip).
Let us not forget the very recent example of ASICminer, who at one time had 40% of global hash rate due to being quick to market with their small, inefficient ASICs. Despite the huge amount of BTC rolling in during this period, they faced issues over supplying power to so many boards, cooling so many boards and actually the physical space needed for so many boards. Now they don't even show on the pie chart of hashing distributions. So quick and so fast has been their fall from grace.
This is because efficiency of ASIC chips is not ONLY about power consumption.
It is about efficiency of deployment
There are two ways i can see ActM will fail to keep up with the global hash rate.
1) We begin mining but we do not mine enough coins to pay for the equipment we need to keep up with the difficulty increases.
2) We begin mining and make enough coin, but our production capacity is too small to keep up with the difficulty increases (this will happen eventually, but the way things are going it may kill us before we even begin)
BTC ASIC companies that have failed to deliver on time (BFL, Hashfast, Cointerra etc etc) are usually the ones who do the assembly themselves.
Contrast that with KnC or ASICminer (in the early days) who asked one company to design and produce the chip, and another company to assemble the chips onto boards. They were on time because they dealt with reputable partners with proven track records and lots of experience.
What worries me with ActM is that we have a very small family team of non-engineers that are presumably going to assemble 'The biggest BTC mine on the planet' from their 5 benches in a garage (I'm not trolling, I'm pointing out facts - please correct me if I'm wrong)
So my question to you all is, at what point are we too late? At what point are our piddly little 20GH/s chips as useful as ASICminers old 0.3Gh/s chips?
Remember, AM could have continued pumping out millions of tiny hash rate chips but they ran into huge problems in their efficiency of deployment
I welcome any sensible comments
I appreciate your effort to steer this thread in the proper direction. I believe your concerns are appropriate. Much of the future of ActM lies in the efficiency and power of the Intellihash chips along with a properly architected reinvestment strategy. The later is probably the most important, in terms of the AMC Mining Operation.
What worries me with ActM is that we have a very small family team of non-engineers that are presumably going to assemble 'The biggest BTC mine on the planet' from their 5 benches in a garage (I'm not trolling, I'm pointing out facts - please correct me if I'm wrong)
This does not appear to be the case at all. The assembly area is not for engineering boards or even placing chips on boards. The board development and the pick and place process are being handled by a third party engineering firm that has been spoken highly of. I'll try to track down the name. Ken specifically told me that the pick and place process would be handled outsourced to the engineering firm. It would seem that what the assembly area is actually doing is placing pre-made/placed boards into the cases, firing them up, burning them in, boxing them and shipping them out.
I'll think about assembly time/volume for enough Platinums to compete. I think we're mostly limited by money in this regard though. It all comes down to the reinvestment strategy.
I agree with the heart of your post: "We need to be hashing."
