Interesting discussion on the ActiveMining thread about some of the "competition" out there in mining land.
What they are saying is right. If you want 10% of the network in September, you will need almost 900kW of power lined up and ready to go. I don't think people realize how big of a deal that really is to get that much power online in that time frame. It's not going to be easy and/or cheap.
If you already have a datacenter and power infrastructure in place, then expanding is much easier than building from scratch. AM's first mover advantage may last longer than anyone anticipates because of these limitations.
At the very least, you won't see a new entity taking 10% of the network in the next 2 months.
tl;dr - getting the chips is the easy part (and they still don't even have that)
This is a very interesting topic. That is why I wonder. It is highly likely that the network is 1,000 Th/s (1,000,000 GH/s) in 45 days from now.
So, say you want to be a player like friedcat and have 20%. With avalon chips drawing 9W per Gh/s, you need 900 kw just to power the avalons to get 10% of the market. How you going to do that? lot's of buildings with that power coming in? How you going to distribute the power? Oh, and guess how much heat 900 kW of power puts out when it goes into something that basically just heats up? But to get 20% you need 1800kW PLUS cooling. Even at 1W, it is an enormous undertaking. It will be cool to see how people over come these hurdles. Someone is going to have 500 TH/s rolled out by November? They best call the electric company now because ordering new transformers takes a while.
So, say you want to be a player like friedcat and have 20%. With avalon chips drawing 9W per Gh/s, you need 900 kw just to power the avalons to get 10% of the market. How you going to do that? lot's of buildings with that power coming in? How you going to distribute the power? Oh, and guess how much heat 900 kW of power puts out when it goes into something that basically just heats up? But to get 20% you need 1800kW PLUS cooling. Even at 1W, it is an enormous undertaking. It will be cool to see how people over come these hurdles. Someone is going to have 500 TH/s rolled out by November? They best call the electric company now because ordering new transformers takes a while.
What they are saying is right. If you want 10% of the network in September, you will need almost 900kW of power lined up and ready to go. I don't think people realize how big of a deal that really is to get that much power online in that time frame. It's not going to be easy and/or cheap.
If you already have a datacenter and power infrastructure in place, then expanding is much easier than building from scratch. AM's first mover advantage may last longer than anyone anticipates because of these limitations.
At the very least, you won't see a new entity taking 10% of the network in the next 2 months.
tl;dr - getting the chips is the easy part (and they still don't even have that)
A major player would just rent datacenter space. I fail to see the infrastructure problems, since datacenters already exist.
Here's a simple example - http://os-legacy-images.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/Seattle/wastatedc/wastatedc.pdf. 2.25 MW critical load.
If I had $10M and I wanted to be a serious first mover, I'd probably talk to Cointerra about getting 50% of the hashrate on silicon and get a deal worked out there, rent a data center in Washington where electricity is very cheap (as low as $0.01/kW-h in parts of the state), and strike a deal with the Winklevoss ETF for volume coin sales.
It's value will never be comparable to oil because it's not a necessary resource.