An interesting way to make money at the expense of customer naivety.
Why does Bitmain not want to send Antminer on a regular basis? https://shop.bitmain.com/ (sold out)
If they would send the devices up to date, then they would have sold a lot fewer devices, because day by day it would be a noticeable mining difficulty.
However, it is better for them to sell the maximum number of devices two months earlier, because it will not immediately increase the mining difficulty. Mining will fall drastically when the devices they send are connected to the network.
If the customer sees that it can get a lot of money, then he buys many devices right away and sends money two months earlier. If the same customer would see the day-to-day difficulty of mining increase, then he bought much less because the mining difficulty would increase dynamically with each sent device.
Why does Bitmain not want to send Antminer on a regular basis? https://shop.bitmain.com/ (sold out)
If they would send the devices up to date, then they would have sold a lot fewer devices, because day by day it would be a noticeable mining difficulty.
However, it is better for them to sell the maximum number of devices two months earlier, because it will not immediately increase the mining difficulty. Mining will fall drastically when the devices they send are connected to the network.
If the customer sees that it can get a lot of money, then he buys many devices right away and sends money two months earlier. If the same customer would see the day-to-day difficulty of mining increase, then he bought much less because the mining difficulty would increase dynamically with each sent device.
I don't think you understand what is really going on. When they make the S9 or D3 they DON'T sell it. They mine with it for months making a large amount of money. Only when the difficulty increases to the point they can sell it with what appears to be a decent ROI does it go on the market to the rest of the world. Selling the miners is kind of the icing, not the main profit.
Would you do it any different? If I had a miner for ETH why would I ever sell it? I would be making far more mining with it than paying to produce it in large quantities only to make 1k for each unit. I have the only one, no competition. Once the difficulty naturally gets to the point that I can make more profit selling the units, only then would you offer your "new" tech to the masses.
The large bulk of miners that Bitmain makes DO in fact get sold fairly quickly - days or weeks at most NO MONTHS.
Most of the rest are part of their Hashnest operation.
If they mined with them for 2 months then sold them, we would have seen a HUGH hashrate jump 2 months ago on X11 (for one recent example).
If they WAIT to sell it, they have to DROP the price quite a bit BECAUSE the diff increased in the meantime - and the capitol investment in those miners is TIED UP SO THEY CAN'T USE THAT MONEY TO BUY MORE CHIPS FOR THE NEXT BATCH TO MAKE MORE MONEY WITH.
YOU are the one that doesn't understand the economics of the situation for Bitmain.
They don't have infinite cash to work with - and foundries don't do "credit" with small operations IF they do "credit" at all (I doubt even AMD or Nvidia or Apple get "credit" terms with the foundies - Intel and Samsung don't need to worry about it as foundry owners).
