Topic: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It - page 1169. (Read 3917543 times)

They are not completed yet

couldn't find where I could order / preorder one of these or equipment did i miss a link?

Update

Deploying
At the same time waiting for the new place's power supply system and our second batch's assembly, we have tested the fully enclosed rack approach, which turned out to be denser and has better cooling over the devices.

The projected earliest date to start installing new hardware and releasing brand new hashrates is 22th this month. The whole deploying process will take at least two weeks, with the final hashrate decided by how much we are going to sell to consumers and how much we will keep for ourselves.

Device Selling
Apart from the same boards we use for mining, we also have an adapted version of the mini boards which we used at early January for our first arrived chips that are nice as small gifts. Here is a picture of a not-yet-assembled one with 300MH/s. It can be powered by merely the USB port:



Since the most important mission of ASICMINER is the maximization of profits for shareholders and the security of the network (hashrates should be in hand of good people and decentralization has to be preserved), we will balance the ratio of kept and distributed hashrates based on our portion and the market price of devices.

Financials and Business Plan
We are always aware of the openness and transparency of how we operate. We keep almost if not all the agreements, trading receipts and bank/exchange records, which could be used for restoring a full history of financial report when put in the hands of an accountant with some knowledge of Bitcoin and some of our help. Sooner or later it has to be done, and most likely it would be in the period between the next batch and later batches, during which we will expand our core team with both technical and financial people.

We will start a google-doc-based business plan for us and all board members to edit and update. I will make a stub version as a basis for extending and modifying first this week.

No, we can't. That's the fallacy of democracy, that more people are more right than one. There's a reason the most effective entities in the world are not democratic; it simply slows everything down and kills efficiency.

If you do not trust the people you give your money, then you may very well be in the wrong line of money management.

.b

We can collectively be Steve Ballmer here.  Just sayin...  I bought my shares to have the interest enough to at least point out the obvious.

This thread is not the place.  Its already clogged up with too much commentary, making it very difficult to follow actual asicminer project developements.

The following auctions of blades will be after the collection of the feedback and (possibly) the modification and improvement of the design/manufacturing. But before that there will be auctions of USB sticks as soon as they are available. Shipping will also be immediate.

The users of the first round of auction are granted a free upgrade option to the blades of the improved design with the timescale the same as the free replacement warranty.

I didn't buy shares in a company to run it. I buy shares in a company because I trust the management to care for my interest in the same way their decisions would care for their interest.

As such, I do not feel obliged to critique the week-by-week operation of AM by friedcat any more than I would critique the week-by-week operation of Microsoft by Steve Ballmer.

.b

So, no flooding the market with erupter blades. That's good, I think.

It wasn't my intent to sound completely bonkers.  My main intent was to draw attention to the fact that 10 blades a week doesn't sell the 200 TH worth of hardware quickly enough.  And if, there cannot be more sales than that a week, then we just need to be thinking up creative ways to get the hardware into the world.  I agree that chaos would ensue if we tried to set up groups of shareholders; so shall we instead settle upon disposal at an arbitrary price, or trickle the hardware out in weekly lots of ten blades? 

The following auctions of blades will be after the collection of the feedback and (possibly) the modification and improvement of the design/manufacturing. But before that there will be auctions of USB sticks as soon as they are available. Shipping will also be immediate.

The users of the first round of auction are granted a free upgrade option to the blades of the improved design with the timescale the same as the free replacement warranty.

This is at best throwing money out the window and at worst completely bonkers. A shareholders group would have no idea how to run a stable mining operation and the mere discussion of such an option would take months during which time we'd lose a truckload of money, and by that I mean a big, big truck, one of those massive Australian ones with 5 or 6 trailers. Carrying bits.

Selling hardware that cannot be used immediately realizes a huge part of their potential earnings at no cost and instantly, and considering the relative short lifespan of these units, it would be much better to get them in the hands of customers so the customers get as much value as possible before the relative value falls too.

.b

I don't mind that there is chatter in this forum.

The 200TH paid for and on the way for AM cannot quickly be disposed of in weekly auctions of 10 blades each.  The hinted flood of ASIC hardware, with the speculated 150TH in bulk Avalon chips, with whatever BFL can ship, makes my mind boggle.

If AM cannot place all the hardware online due to the "51% issue" -- and cannot wring the last bit of profit out of auctions in an efficient way, then perhaps it is time to think along different lines.

The hardware, somehow, needs to be in the hands of shareholders, be it mining in the yet-to-be running data centers, our in our hands, directly.  Be it 1 blade per xx shares, whatever...  We can mitigate the chaos a bit by forming shareholder collectives that take possession of the hardware and mine with it; entities that are totally separate from AM, for example.  A fair bit of logistical work, sure...  It is worth thinking about "other solutions" though, as we may very well find that soon enough, we cannot effectively sell or bring online all the hardware that is made.

I believe the question of how many devices to sell versus how many devices to mine with is essential to optimising profits.

Miners aren't necessarily insane just because they disagree on what the difficulty will be in the future. In theory, the amount a miner/investor is willing to pay is directly related to his/her expectations of future difficulty - and different people naturally have different expectations! Those with optimistic forecasts are willing to pay a higher price than those with pessimistic forecasts. If you sell devices to those with more optimistic forecasts compared to your own, you will make more money by selling it than you would expect to make by mining.

I believe selling or mining isnt the question. Mining has to be more profitable all the time because any sane miner only will buy the miner when he see the chance to meet ROI in a certain amount of time. Otherwise mining is only something for fans of a product or contributors to bitcoin but not for investors. So even if one could guess the difficulty so good it wouldnt help much because if selling would be more profitable you need buyers that lose money. And there arent endless that doesnt matter if they will break even. Of course when one is after the fast money its another thing.
I believe here is a good guess: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/analysis-of-asic-earnings-device-agnostic-178051

I think I might not have been clear in part - the exchange rate affects what people are willing to pay (in fiat) for the rig. We know this to be true watching BFL orders, which (presumably, based on order numbers) spiked considerably when the value of BTC went over $200. That's because they were buying based on current promised hashrate vs. expected difficulty vs. (then) current exchange rate. But you're correct in that it shouldn't matter at all when looking purely at BTC values... it's just that it's demonstrably NOT restricted to miners paying with BTC. Everything else I think we can agree on... just different pages from the same book

You may be right, but I think you are overthinking it. For instance, the BTC exchange rate is of little importance, since the choice is between mining and selling - both of which are paid in BTC.

After you have a difficulty forecast, you easily estimate many BTC a particular device will generate over its lifetime, for example, 50 BTC. Then say someone is willing to buy the device for 55 BTC. What do you do? Sell it, of course - you'll make more money!

And you can simply repeat this procedure for every device until the highest of the two values is below the marginal cost of producing the miner - at that point production is no longer profitable.

Of course some of the profit needs to go to R&D for next generation technology, but even then the basic principle remains the same. And you have to be good at forecasting difficulty and always keep the forecast up-to-date. And you need to know how much people are willing to pay for the devices. I assume AM has a difficulty forecast, and with the recent auction, AM has also learned more about what people are willing to pay for the devices.

PS: Even if your mining earnings estimate for the device is 50 BTC and someone is willing to buy it at 50 BTC, you should sell - because having 50 BTC in your wallet.dat today is much better than maybe having 50 BTC at some point in the future (because you eliminate uncertainty and you may re-invest it the 50 BTC from the sale).

Instead of throwing around percentages with little basis, I believe it is better to think in terms of net present value:

First step: make a forecast of difficulty.
Second step: make the choice: if (current price that a miner can be sold for) > (forecasted net present value of the mining profit from the miner), then SELL IT.

Of course, this relies on forecasting difficulty somewhat accurately. More importantly, if there are currently space/power limitations on deploying the miners, it is very likely that the choice of selling a large amount of miners immediately is the most profitable one.

With some more numbercrunching, one could also work with a probability distribution around the forecasted difficulty, and use portfolio theory to hit the risk/reward sweet spot.