What are the conditions for a buyback of ASICminer
Here are the only conditions:
each ASICMINER share always owns 1/400000 of the company.
...Friedcat's contract with us isn't for life, it's for eternity.
I'm ok with that!
No issues here ^_^
We will grow old together haha
I'm curious about this no buyback clause situation. Does that mean that even if say, a huge company is interested in buying the entirety of ASICMINER's operations that the company controlling ASICMINER, Bitfountain, will not be able to sell, even if the offer were incredibly high for each share? Would this mean the company offering to buy back the shares would need to consult and negotiate with every single holder to buy out all the shares? Or would it simply mean that the majority holding of Bitfountain's shares would shift owners and the new owners would be obligated to continue serving the rest of the shareholders according to the initial IPO conditions?
Pardon me if I sound a little naive, but is this a good or a bad thing?
I think the whole "can ASICMINER ever be sold and under what conditions" is an incredibly high-priority question to ask friedcat. We all need clarification on this from the cat's mouth
I think that question is pretty self explanatory. Who do you think would buy asicminer as a whole ? If you think about what AM is, it only has good value for some lets say 1-2 years (and that is pretty optimistic), after that
there will be competitors with better and more efficient ASICs presumably. For what asicminer would be worth in BTCs that would be a huge gamble or even reckless investment to make. The only real possibility in my eyes is that BTC would explode to 1k+/BTC, some big mainstream company would take interest but even after that would such a company need anything from "underground Chinese" operation ?
That is one hell of a presumption. ASICMINER is light-years beyond any of the competition, and they are an extremely forward looking company... their next-generation of ASIC chips will likely be coming online before BFL ships half of thier pre-orders from last september.
The likelihood of any of the so-called competitors with their "pre-orders" actually producing real-world hardware that is more efficient than what ASICMINER is able to produce is extremely unlikely, in my humble opinion.
Also, they are not an "underground Chinese operation"... Bitfountain is a legally registered corporation operating legally in the PRC.
AM are only ahead of the competition in delivery time frames. Both Avalon and BFL have shipped or brought online more hashing power and every ASIC developer apart from Avalon are using more efficient ASICs than AM. Also, AM's next gen chips won't be coming online until November. There's no need to spread such misinformation and it just reflects poorly on AM.
What misinformation are you talking about?
Other companies have brought more hash power online than ASICMINER... are you high? That is simply false.
My opinion is just that... my opinion. Personally I can't imagine that any other company will be able to compete with ASICMINER over the next few months (who else is shipping ASICs??), or in November when their next generation of chips are ready. They have proven that they have the ability to manufacture chips on a large scale, and there is no reason to believe that some other company will gain and advantage on them in that respect.
The misinformation is you claiming that ASICMiner are light years ahead which is demonstrably false. When it comes to ASIC efficiency, AM is second to bottom, with Avalon at the bottom. That is an indisputable fact based on hash rate and and power consumption. When it come hashing power shipped or brought online, we have the following number for AM:
Mining Income: 102,041.82
BTCBlade Sales Income: 29,594.75
BTCUSB Sales Income: 37,524.00
BTCAccording to Friedcat, at least 5,000 USB devices were sold at 2 BTC and some the number was closer to 10,000. If we take 5,000 as the number, then that's 10,000 BTC, and the remainder would be from 27,600 USB sales at 1 BTC. If we take 10,000 as the number, then that's 20,000 BTC and the remainder would come from 17,600 USB sales at 1 BTC. So the number of USB sales at that point was between 27,600 and 32,600. At 336 Mh/s, that works out to a hashing power of between 9.2736 Th/s and 10.9536 Th/s.
Blades cost 50 BTC each for 10GH/s. 29,600 / 50 = 592. At 10 Gh/s, that's a hashing power of 5.920 Th/s.
So AM, have likely sold no more than 20 Th/s worth of hashing power to date. Asicminercharts points to AM's hashrate averaging about that 40 Th/s, giving AM a total of about 60 Th/s brought online.
Avalon batch 1 was 300 units, batch 2 and 3 were 600 units. They're currently shipping batch 3, which means they've shipped about 900 units. At 63 Gh/s per unit, that's 56.7 Th/s.
At the beginning of the year, the network hash rate was at about 20 Th/s. It's currently at about 315 Th/s. If AM and Avalon have brought online about 60 Th/s each, then where is the other 195 Th/s coming from? BFL is the only other company shipping units. 100TH is bringing units online but it's only at a few Gh/s at the moment.