Topic: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It - page 730. (Read 3917468 times)

Litecoin ASICs are much less lucrative for technical reasons (Scrypt is memory-hard)

why everybody is jumping into bitcoin ASIC. If cointerra team is the best, they should invent litecoin ASIC and become AM of litecoin.

FC said the Gen 2 product is planned between Nov and Dec. So you have to be patient.

Yes but can they use that money? What would happen if Bitfountain just started selling shares worth million $? Market capitalization would decrease a lot more then that amount.

If you include the company's value by share price, then asicminer wields hundreds of millions of $.

Sry but were do you got the information that AsicMiner has hundreds of millions $ ? In the last financial report i see
Total: 169,520.57BTC most is send to the investors as dividends.

So 85000BTC at todays price are ~11million $. They have money, but not that much.
Also bitfury is making over 100k$ a day now and i dont think they will stop the development of there chips.

Higher technology doesn't necessarily translate into market dominance.
It is really about marketing and competence of the management.

Betamax is the prime example.
Or BeOS
Or Digital Audio Tapes (DATs)
Or MiniDiscs
Or the Apple Newton PDA.

Apple has been selling crap phones, and people still buy it.
Some may argue that it is because they are targeting their userbase of idiots, but what I see instead is a company that actually understands the market and adapts itself towards what their targeted community needs.

The question is if these mining companies will have the skills to do the same towards the bitcoin community, after all it is really about understanding their clients and offering them what they really want.

FriedCat was competent enough to deliver exactly what he promised at the time he promised, and that is extremely valuable.
FriedCat was innovative enough to attempt tackling the problem of centralization in a spectacular way that nobody really expected: tiny usb miners. This move was both a commercial success with a symbolic message.

Past performance not necessarily reflects future performance, but past behavior rarely betrays future behavior.
It is humanely almost impossible, even if you consciously want to, to change one's principles, habits and personality.
That's why I trust FriedCat, and I laugh at the FUD on AsicMiner.

Regarding to CoinTerra, they seems great on paper, they have potential, but they could also be the next BetaMax.
This is not an engineering task, this is about running a business.
Also, just like a poker game, it is really not about your cards, but the amount of chips that you have left. In the long run, the one that has the more money wins the game. The same with every other aspect in the real world.

CoinTerra has roughly 1.5 million USD in investments, AND they are asking preorders, delivering late after the difficulty jump.
AsicMiner has hundreds of millions ready to bully anyone who wants to mess with them, hire anyone they want, and they never asked preorders AND always had a impeccable track records of deliveries.

The biggest commodity in the bitcoin world is trust.
AsicMiner is bringing trust by an excellent history of flawless performance.
CoinTerra is attempting to gain trust with a pretentious CV.

If I had to pick a horse, I would stay with AsicMiner.

this will be settled very soon knc and the other players will have the gear out soon and am will suffer.  or knc and the rest will have delays and am will do okay.

  To quote "bfl just give it 2 weeks time will tell".

The difference is that AM customers get what they order on time. No pre-ordering is the key.

BFL always ends f*** up. They just sell because they lie (especially BFL)
Avalon now is doing almost the same, at least their not that bad.
We will see what happen with KNC, CoinTerra, etc....

Honestly, that was one of the funniest things I have read all week. And a good counter-point as well.

Well, that's ridiculous.  Designing a bitcoin ASIC is easy.  You could do the basic logic layout in an afternoon. The future is figuring out how to make it more space and energy efficient.

Avalon sold out of everything they produced.
BFL sold out almost an entire year of product before shipping.
And the rest of the companies with no product that have collected millions of dollars?

These products would sell out if you encased them in a pile of dog shit. So for this industry, selling out has no weight.

I'm really looking forward to the announcement of the Gen 2 product. Can't wait. I have high hopes. Hopefully it will come at just the right time....  I'm holding shares long, and hope they rebound to some extent to somewhere close to what they were going for last month...

I got faith in F. C.

28nm  will finish the mining game for almost everyone... NO ROI

Oh boy.

If you think past performance guarantees future return I've got some bad news for you.

There are better ways to evaluate future performance. Even if there is truth to the argument that AM is less risky than its competitors,  it is not enough to explain the massive valuation differential.

AM has released no plans that suggest it will remain particularly competitive.  You are all operating on misguided hope.

I'm bearish on misguided hope.

The perceivable reason is dividends with a track record. 

So, wait, what's the argument here? That FC has no advantage over the competition because his experience is no greater, or that he has no advantage because his experience doesn't matter?

(As I said before, it's the industry connections that will make CoinTerra successful at 28nm)

No matter how you slice it I see a company trading at a significant premium to fair value for no perceivable reason.

No, they didn't significantly drop the price relative to the value (which is inverse proportional to difficulty).  Actually, the previous price drop (50->10) was even greater by absolute value.

And FC still has some room to drop the price through the next couple of months; I'd estimate that production costs are somewhere around 30 to 60 USD.

The notorious counterexample to what you said is Bitfury.  The guy had NO prior experience, NO special education, and yet somehow managed to develop a quite successful and well-optimized chip from scratch, within less than a year (including self-education), all by himself!

Now please don't imply that superstar engineer can make orders of magnitude difference.  Bitcoin ASIC is not a CPU core, it's just hundreds of small and simple identical SHA256 calculators, not really much to optimize there.

Normally, when companies sell out of product,  we assume it was because they failed to maintain enough stock, not because it was "more lucrative". I am quite fascinated by these arguments.