The 60P of Gen3 were completely paid upfront from withheld dividends. No financing was needed. That is clearly visible in the last financial report (almost no liabilities).
What was the cause for the negative cashflows then?
To pay for Gen3. If you have more money flowing in than flowing out during a certain period, your cashflow is negative.
More flowing out than in, but no, obviously I get what you mean. Is lithography generally paid for as a lump sum or in payments?
I guess I'm just caught between understanding that a gen lifecycle requires a massive amount of capex (ergo you'd need to drop bank on the lith) and wondering why R&D financial allotments and forecasts aren't spread out across generations instead of compacted into a single cycle. I've felt before as though AM has just been a succession of loosely coordinated design projects rather than the full-scale company it should represent, and I've expressed my desire for AM to consider expanding service offerings to diversify its businesses. FC and co. certainly have niche expertise that reaches beyond just the realm of
mining coins.
IBM Global Services (business IT strategy unit sold to IBM by PricewaterhouseCoopers in '02) just announced their "internet of things" model for cloud device management based on blockchain technology (i.e. "private" blockchains in enterprise clouds that function similar to NMC as a registry system). IBM itself makes excellent CPUs (on an i5 now actually), but their proposal forecasts
billions of devices operating in the quasi-private cloud by 2020 - CPUs, no matter if they're based on 5/14/20nm architectures, aren't going to be able to secure the enterprise divisions of corporate IT in the model, as it will likely be based on SHA-256 or similar. This may end up creating a situation in the future where hashing ASICs are included in end-user computing devices alongside integrated CPU/GPUs for identity access management (IAM) purposes as the concept of physical storage fades into the realm of virtual machines. These types of partnerships would make revenue from current mining/hardware sales look like a damn pittance, and would be quite marketable in a room with the right people.
Source:
https://gigaom.com/2014/09/09/check-out-ibms-proposal-for-an-internet-of-things-architecture-using-bitcoins-block-chain-tech/The hardware consulting work would be zero capex, and any chip sales that follow would just be gravy and could eventually lead to enormous contracts. I'd suggest that this and other similar ventures leveraging the company's blockchain know-how are ideas well worth exploring. Oftentimes I feel like this thread gets a bit too acutely focused on AM's products' ability to create cryptocurrency that we overlook the other uses of the blockchain.
Has anyone else thought about this type of diversification or had any similar ideas for growth? I think they'd be worth communicating to the board, and perhaps in a town-hall setting (shares = opportunities to speak?)
lol I see you trollin', Stress.