You guys had plenty of time to place an order before the bitcoin price tanked. Seriously stop complaining and acting as if the sky is falling if they raise their prices. If you are a serious miner, you already have your S3's, or ordered them already. If you are a casual miner, you shouldn't care about .01-.1 price fluctuations.
I'm getting really tired of people coming in this thread and flaming the only reliable mining company in the business that constantly gets better and better. Seriously. Stop it.
Remember the price was on BTC, and the ROI the miner makes is in BTC, so theoretically the value of bitcoin is out of the equation it does not play a role in your ROI, unless the real price of the S3 is really based in dollars, which it is but this is deceptive and unethical because you are being made to believe it is priced in BTC.
and like someone else mentioned they are priced at the max price that most of us are willing to pay, which again is not right.
most of us are professional miners in the sense that we been doing this since the days of CPU/GPU mining, casual in the sense of the scale that we operate.
And believe me a 0.1 BTC is a lot when that is your entire margin of profit, and it takes 3 or 4 months just to break even, then to make that 0.1 BTC at profit after break even it can take months.
I have mined in the CPU/GPU days and made profit lots of profit, but since the ASIC days it has been only losses, with the S1 I broke even.
Bitmain is currently the only reliable vendor as far as sales go and I would agree with you on that, but seriously they are not reliable in the sense that they care about your ROI or you as a customer, if they did then they would care about you making ROI so that you stay in the mining business, you could argue that no one else cares about you making ROI, and that is also true, but just because you are in a bad situation it does not make your best choice a good choice.
If you do not believe me simple run a Bitcoin calculator, and you will see that 0.1 BTC is all your profit, take that away and you run into a loss.
And I would like to point out that this is not flaming, the goal is clear and precise, Bitmain is currently the best we have without a doubt but they seem to be headed the path of KNC, many guys like you on this very same forum would say "I'm getting really tired of people coming in this thread and flaming the only reliable mining company in the business that constantly gets better and better. Seriously. Stop it." about KNC, and seriously a year ago they were the best, but look at them now. The goal is that Bitmain does not follow the wrong path
and I see exactly the pattern I see with KNC.
KNC a year ago could have corrected themselves, now I see it a little late for that.
BFL, they hit bottom, no correction is possible here.
Bitmain can correct the path, they are not late, all the have to do is put themselves on the miners position and think what actually creates a win win situation, not do the bare minimum to stay on top.
I mine not only for the ROI, but because I trully believe in Bitcoin, and believe that decentralization is essential for its survival, in the days of CPU/GPU mining it was very much decentralized, but it is being centralized, the only way this decentralization will occur again, is that we the small miners can start mining massively and be able to compete against against the huge data centers, and currently no one is helping us achieve that goal, it is a sad situation because as time goes by mining is more and more centralized, but I strongly believe in the near future some new hardware vendor will step in and provide us with cheap hardware that can ROI in a month or 2 and make Bitcoin mining decentralized again.
But as long as the hardware is priced so that you barely ROI things look ugly, and the only reason Bitmain is the best is because with all the other guys you have huge pre order windows with are almost a good guarantee that you will not only not ROI but have huge losses, so clearly between huge losses and breaking even there is a big difference, but patterns in the hardware vendors are extremely important.
good patterns:
1. selll from stock.
2. ROI in 1 to 2 months at most.
3. money back guarantee.
4. The vendor does not mine, othewise you are in competition with him.
5. price in BTC ( not dollars converted to BTC like Bitmain, but having the price base on BTC).
6. honor all promises.
7. sell new hardware
bad patterns:
1. pre sales.
2. no money back guarantee
3. No ROI, or possible ROI in 3 or more moth which is not predictable.
4. comments from the vendor, like saying I am better because with the other guy you get more screwed.
5. broken promises.
6. vague promises.
7. The vendor mines.
8. you buy new equipment but get used equipment.
9. the vendor does other stuff with the money of your pre order, like buying a datacenter instead of building the miners.
10. price based only on dollars, since the miners only make bitcoins and this reflets not having faith in the Bitcoin economy, when I say price based on Bitcoins, I do not mean dollars converted to Bitcoins, I mean Bitcoins period.
Well it is not about flaming, it is to point out some bad patterns that can be corrected, weather they are corrected or not is a different story,
If this was about flaming I would not be pointing out Bitmain is the best we got, the purpose of the post is to avoid Bitmain becoming like the others guys which seems based on patterns could be happening, only time will tell for sure, and that Bitmain takes into consideration that it is important not only that they make a profit but us miner too deserve a portion of the profits, if you take out ROI of mining some of the fun is lost.
Finally in regards being a serious miner, we minimized the risk by making a lot of small orders, having one huge order is bad, bad with customs, bad with shipping, bad when it is a pre sale, it is like having all your egss in one basket all at the same time and something going wrong, it is much safer to have several small gradual shipments, and also this way if Bitmain happens to correct the problem of not mining at 478 GH/s you get to enjoy the correction. But seeing the price continually go up when difficulty goes up, is seeing ROI on future purchases go to 0 or negative which is bad, really bad, if you can not understand why thats bad, then you are not a professional miner.
And as far as mining is concerned, I disagree with you, and yes the sky is falling, since with price raising you have no ROI, the only ROI is at the large datacenters from the guys that make the hardware, and that centralizes mining like it has been happening on the last 1.5 years, so yes the sky is falling, but it will not fall forever, eventually some hardware vendor will come to the rescue, I though that could have been Bitmain, but it looks like it might be someone else who knows only time will tell.
If you follow the posts because of this very situation many miners, small miners have quit, and that is not a healthy situation and does not help in decentralization.
