Topic: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It - page 798. (Read 3917468 times)

Corruption follows money as day follows night. All organizations suffer from this, the ones that survive are those best able to produce in their particular environment. In the USA, you have to buy politicians and regulators. In China, you have to grease different palms. But grease money must always be paid, or you will suffer from the grease money paid by your competitors. It is how business has always been done, and always will be done. To believe otherwise is to have have the luxury of never having been in business.

sounds like there's a good amount of Mafia in China. I bet friedcat already has a few bodyguard surrounding him.

eventually the blades will be the new USBs, especially once they hit the $200 value..
overpriced can be a good thing when you're on the selling side

FC has enough money to bribe his own govt people to make extortionists disappear.

Very interesting!

I guess it makes sense since the Blades were out of stock for a while. And it seems like the USB miners really were the perfect plug-and-play solution for many geeks.

It's vital that serious security measures are in place, but for various reasons it would be a bad idea for Friedcat to make public exactly what they are.

Do you have a source for this? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just had the impression it was the other way around, so I'd really like to see some figures if they exist.

I remember the legendary blade auction that yielded $1M in 36 hours: http://thegenesisblock.com/the-worlds-first-1-million-bitcoin-mining-auction/

No. AMD's yearly revenue is around $5.4 billion: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AAMD&fstype=ii&ei=MI4IUtjNIuT5wAPxAg

Also, how do you estimate the mining market to be $100M annually? I mentioned the $1M USD auction above. I don't think that there has been sold for more than $50M this year, probably less. And if AMD were to enter they surely wouldn't get 100% market share, they'd be competing with other companies - for $50M in revenue.

So that means they'd be able to increase their revenue from $5,422M to - at most - $5,472M. A whopping 0.9%!

+1

First Avalon and then BTCGarden.
Relevant Sources
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2914929
http://www.avalon-asics.com/

I know its not the time to pose shareholder questions but I want to ask how is Friedcats security in China pertaining to threats and extortion.

Formats to a proper question
In regards to the recent extortion threats launched against Avalon and BTCgarden in China, what steps has Friedcat taken to protect the security of his team and operations in China.

In case not already posted - near term competition just got smaller.

BTCGarden IPO cancelled, 32000 BTC about to hit the market, expect a chunk of this to land in AM, although possibly offset by jitters around the sustainability of mining ops within the Chinese political environment.

Note - they are down but may not be out, they self funded their initial hardware order and may still get some of it online, the IPO money was primarily for Gen 2 chip investment.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264696.0;topicseen

Not working at either of those co's, I'd vote that that's false. The biggest reason they're ignoring it is theyre not familiar with it. A) They'ed hate to invest a ton of money into a project and find out that interst in BTC evaporated, leaving them with a ton of product with no other conceivable use. B) It really is just a drop in the bucket for Intel. AMD, though might be more inclined. They were beneficiaries of the Bitcoin craze, and probably sold tons more GPU's than they otherwise would have, and are now seeing those sales dry up. Not only that, they're seeing a huge second hand market developing which'll lower demand for their cards. So they might sit up and take notice.

But the legalities are of no concern. They'ed simply be selling sha hashing chips, what the customer does with them is their business. They're not dealing in the currency or anything else where there'd even be a question of about legality. The last issue would be whether they think they can be price competitive with everyone else out there. Remember, AMD has been hemoragging money. Their shareholders will make heads roll if they spend fifty million on a new chip line, only to see nothing happen and the losses deepen.

Lots of dynamics at play. Nothing that I can imagine that intersects with Bitcoins legality.

Only an idiot would believe that ROI. You're racing an exponential curve. These sales will last a few weeks, at most, and FC would be foolish to push all of the proceeds out the door at once, since the following weeks would look horribly anemic and crash the stock.

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

Good calculator that factors in exponential growth (use expert mode): http://www.coinish.com/calc/

From volume. AM products now have 60-90 day ROI, instead of 6-9 month ROI. They have literally fallen 90% in price and are still very profitable to manufacture. This ROI timeline exists despite the recent massive difficulty increases of the last 2 months.

More importantly, because they ship, they are now literally the only game in town and will be for at least the next 2 months. Blades bring in much higher dividends than USB devices, and AM has maintained high dividends despite not selling blades for the last month.

TLDR; I think they are about to absolutely crush it.

Perhaps, though it's hard to see where the record dividends will come from as hardware prices crash and AM's share of the hashrate shrinks (http://www.asicminercharts.com/live/).

Remember, also: markets are forward-looking.

And my point is no, its not.


Edit: I'm not saying that a worthy competitor won't emerge. Maybe one will and maybe it will be Cointerra. They state that they will be shipping chips before the end of the year. I'll make a prediction that before that happens, AM posts record dividends and the price rises beyond 5.2 BTC.

My point is that the concept of a company being "ahead" in market positioning is being misapplied to this situation. Customers have little brand loyalty in the bitcoin miner space - it's all about the best cost to GH/s and power ratio. And the ability to deliver, of course - but that is easy to demonstrate if you've got the hardware.

ASICMiner is developing next-gen 28nm chips - but so are the competition, including people who have much more experience in ASIC design than AM (Cointerra is my bet here). That will effectively erase the lead that AM has built, which is not something that typically happens with established companies. AM has not been around long enough to have any "lead" to speak of.

In Cointerra's case, the fact that they have private equity means that they probably have a real, honest-to-god plan for their supply chain. They haven't already raked in the cash from pre-orders, so the success of their business is completely dependent on shipping units. Their investors knew this and still dumped a very generous amount of cash into their company. Odds are that their angel investors are going to make absolutely sure that they have the resources necessary to succeed.

28nm tech already exists, and is open to these companies for use. AM has undoubtedly gained lessons in design from their last iteration, but Cointerra brings an overwhelming amount of practical experience out the door. Check these bios - seriously.

http://www.cointerra.com/team/

The ASIC market is waking up. My advice: do not assume it will continue to belong to AM. That is a risky bet you will barely profit from winning, and you will greatly suffer from losing.

The basis of my argument is that you are ignoring the advantages that AM currently has and continues to strengthen because of their current position AND that there have always been a number of competitors who have failed to execute (for whatever reason). Bitfair did a nice job of highlighting some of these advantages.

I'm not saying that AM will maintain their current market share (and I also don't think that their current stock price requires that they do, unless someone else can return better than 30-40% APR for six straight months), but I am saying that the NUMBER of competitors is largely irrelevant.

ASICMiner is ahead to this day and thus in superior position.
But as You say, boo can happen if they fall asleep or slow down.

Currently I don't see any problem since everything is going according to the plan.
Even rise of the competition is anticipated already.

So the basis of your argument is that ASICMiner is a miracle, and all the other companies are going to go the way of BFL/Avalon?

That's a bold gamble, considering the starting cash that some of these guys are getting (Cointerra, for example, has experienced industry professionals and $1.5M in private equity, not preorders). And the "2nd or 3rd gen tech" argument is silly, since the new startups are going straight for those nodes, they're not starting at gen 1.

The reality is that the barrier to entry for new ASIC companies is quite low. In my opinion, either ASICMiner was a lighting strike, or things are going to turn sour for them.

But hey, I've been saying this since 2.5 BTC a share. I'm wrong so far.

There is room for more players in the ASIC market. In the end, I expect the production costs to determine "the winner(s)" in the ASIC market, and I think AM can achieve the lower production costs than the competitors: low labor costs, no need for external financing, excellent logistics, proven supply+distribution-chain (and products), established reputation, perfect location, etc.

TLDR; AM has an excellent market position, competitors will need to work their asses off to dislodge FC.