Q: Now, what kind of company announces an amazing product but does not suggest a price for it?
A: A company who is uncertain of demand and price points
IMHO, Spondoolies has a small number of working prototypes of the SP50 and is trying to figure out how to gear up for production. They may have just barely enough demand from their hosting/merger partners to get production off the ground, and are naturally looking for ways to milk the wider market beyond at the highest price it can bear (with optimists leading the way of course).
This is marginally better than KnC, who's been stuffing every ASIC at hand in their Swedish facility guarded by buxom blondes with machine guns
Technically, I trust Spondoolies to deliver. I have looked at the guts and firmware of all their machines extensively. As an EECS myself, I think their implementation is indeed best in class (better than Bitmain and KNC). One suggestion - do not affix the heatsinks with an epoxy bead (a la SP20).
Economically, I would not pay much more than 1.0-1.2 BTC per TH for ANY new miner. At present BTC rates, this puts the economically feasible price for the SP50 around $25,000 per unit.
Pay more than that, and you are unlikely to see any ROI - which is kinda the point of the whole thing if you are a professional operator with access to low cost electricity.
Everything comes down to price, price, price...
Hi there,
I didn't know you cared for mining. Nice to see.
I think producers are forcing customers to realize that ROI in less than a year is not realistic any more. But with cheap electricity these new machines should be profitable for far longer than previous generations of asics. The nm race is grinding to a halt, and even if there is a breakthrough in that field it will take 2-4 years for it to make it to production.
Thanks.
Would you invest your money in mining if the baseline ROI was 1-2 years or more?
The VCs who are funding the large mining ops are definitely looking at much faster paybacks. The rational ones at least....
I'm worried about a new difficulty race. Spondoolies needs to sell only ~3000 SP50 to double the network difficulty and halve the yield (that's on top of the reward halving in June).
On the semi side, it's not that hard nowadays to step down to 20 or even 16 nm. The fab capacity and technical expertise is there, readily available.
If I had a good setup I wouldn't hesitate. That is, if I had a guaranteed access to a low cost facility and guaranteed cheap electricity. Now is the best time to do it, as the network will grow and the halving will keep overinvestment in the field at bay (I hope) you have a good chance to ROI (in terms of BTC) most of the costs (depending on the price of the blimmin miners, of course) before the halving. I do believe the BTC price has hit bottom. And I do believe it will pick up within the next 6 months. But if it stays sub $1000 for the next couple of years I would be much more comfortable with mining than speculating.
With regards to 20nm I don't know if it's relevant anymore. As I understood there were some minor efficiency advantages over 28nm, but its main advantage was the ability to run chips at higher frequencies with less leakage. I guess that's attractive if your chip designs focuses on a few massive chips, like with the KnC Neptune, rather than lots of smaller ones. But with the 14/16nm chips it will be interesting to see, if we ever get some confirmed power specs on Bitfurys, KnCs or LKETCs 14/16nm machines, how much there is to squeeze out of those processes.
I think Bitfurys claimed 0.06J/GH figure is not strictly down to fab process. They've been tweaking their chips for efficiency since day 1 and clearly have an advantage in this regard. But if it is mostly down to fab process it's worth to note that the difference in efficiency between 0.07J/GH and the specs for the SP50 is as large as between the antminer S5 and the first KnC machines, percentagewise.
In any event I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on the matter.
Disclaimer: I am not an EECS or anything like that. Just a plain good old overreaching nerd. Anything I say, hear or think may be cr@p.
