Topic: [ANN] A public company will build a huge Bitcoin Mining Operation (ASIC). - page 13. (Read 27064 times)

Too much faith in free market detected.

I don't think anyone will be able to invest another 1+ million USD when the BitCorp ( copyrighted name Vladimir, you have to pay licensing ) already did so and has their 10 ghash/s for $10 design and owns most of the network.

no need to worry about the future of bitcoin, eventually other companies will
come with ASIC's offers and will be selling them also

no but it could scare GPU miners away, and making him a monopoly.
im all for the ASIC mining, but do it slow, and give people time to adjust.

I would expect he means 100-1000 times more energy efficient, not price efficiency. 200MHash/J-2000MHash/J would be incredible but possible. 150Mhash/$-1500Mhash/$ seems a lot less likely.

It doesn't need them, but the only point of Bitcoin is that it is supposed to be able to survive such developments. Otherwise it's a bad idea to begin with.

"Huge," publicly held mining operations is another example, along with Botnets, of capitalistic "progress," that is exploitative of a system designed to be generally fair and distributed.
Now, I might have a different opinion on this if compensating market forces allowed for a reasonable level of competition with any huge entity.  This is not the case, so I reject the premise of "One cannot stop progress," as a good faith rationalization.  This move is not in good faith for Bitcoin.  A more accurate assessment of these efforts would be that capitalistic profiteering nearing monopoly is hard to stop without limiting principles, regulation, etc.

Why does Bitcoin need enemies when you have supporters like these?  

Like I've said before Bitcoin does not need Botnets and huge mining operations to secure the blockchain.  That's silly.

Here's a suggestion, both you and Vladimir are in the UK, maybe you should pay him a visit IRL and perhaps learn a few things about being profitable. Bring your wallet too, no point missing a good investment.

So how would an algo change happen ?

Start a new chain ?

Vote with hashing power in blocks like now ?

Gavin has the last word ?

Thanks for letting me know, memvola !

There is no mechanism to either enforce or deny algorithm changes, so it really doesn't matter when you do it. Miners may use their political power, but not hashing power, in this case. I myself don't think that this will ever be needed, just wanted to point out the weakness of your argument there.

Maybe it was a limit on how many users could buy them half off, not at full price.

I even doubt that. They were really going for large scale purchases, at least that is what Ken (ttul) said to me over the phone.

Cool, they mentioned a per-user limit at one point but that must have been lifted.

They are not capped.

Indeed. I misunderstood. Corrected.

This really is bad news for BTC and decentralization.



So if he has a device for $10 that does 10 ghash/s then with with a measly amount of money he owns the network very easily. Initial costs for ASIC are high but afterwards it is very easy and cheap to replicate the design.

Vladimir said 2-3 orders of magnitude or 100-1000 times more efficient than GPUs.

You guys are forgetting that this isn't the only game in town. Even if he was to set up and run --lets say-- 2 Thash/s  of ASICs, that isn't a monopoly or even 50%.

While it may be correct that GPU/CPU miners may be forced out of the market, I do not think that so many will be removed that the network rate drops to where he has 51%.

Besides that, do you remember Largecoin? They have been selling like hotcakes, arbitrarily capped at 5 units per customer, to customers that obviously want more than just 5. 5 Largecoins is 100 Ghash/s, and so only 10 users with 5 units each is a whole terahash. Not to mention the multiple orders for FPGA based devices, while admittedly being the worse for power consumption, are much better than GPUs and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

This isn't Vladimir's fault, but I do wonder if BitCoin transaction processing isn't inevitably going to end up centralized and controlled by a small number of companies, just because there are going to be big economies of scale. You'll want the right kind of hardware, which will be cheaper in bulk, the best designs, which you won't want to share, and a presence in places with really cheap energy, which will also be cheaper to buy in bulk.

Added to that when you've got a small number of companies controlling a business, they have an incentive to buy each other up or form a cartel. They'll also be profitable businesses with a lot of assets and contracts with other big businesses, so they'll be very easy for governments to regulate.

Nobody was talking about Vladimir not reaping the rewards, but about one entity potentially taking control of the network. Any and all vulnerabilities of that entity then become vulnerabilities of the Bitcoin network.

So don't invest money with him. I don't plan to invest because of the above reasons. I prefer to own my hardware.

Exactly what I was referring to. Nothing to do with bottom line ( my rigs are long paid off and with cheap electricity my GPUs will be humming still for quite a while ).

Lots of people can buy a $200 CPU or a $850 GPU and start mining right away or a $600 FPGA but how many people will afford to buy a $500 000 ASIC farm ?

This is centralization and as soon as the ASIC starts running the other miners will be phased out, ending up in him controlling about 70% or more of the network.

He is not selling ASIC to the public but instead he is using investor money to get himself ( and only himself ) an ASIC farm that can totally outcompete everyone else on the network.

Not sharing the ASIC design and passively attacking the network this way, who cares if it is Vladimir or the NSA because the outcome is the same : one company ruling BTC and doing as it pleases without anyone having any impact.

By ASIC I think he means something that costs millions of USD to develop initially but after that this investment will give him devices like 1 ghash/s for 10W for $100 and he can use approximately 12000 of these devices at a cost of 1.2-1.5 million USD to get more than 51% of the network.

LargeCoin is NOT a real ASIC and I have not seen anything that looks like a real ASIC so far just maybe a sASIC. He says it has twice the magnitude of GPU efficiency which sounds bad for everyone else not having access to this device.

Phrases like "I am forming a new company that will engage into large scale mining. We have concluded a deal with subcontractors to produce a significant amount of ASIC based mining hardware (up to 2-3 orders of magnitude more power efficient and dense comparing to GPU based Bitcoin Miners). Our target is to build multi Thps (X 000 000 Mhps) bitcoin mining operation" and "We, however, have no plans to engage into manufacturing and sales of bitcoin mining hardware." tell us his real intentions in regards to this corporation.