does nobody ask friedcat via mail/PM what happend with the AM Hashrate?
Pretty much everyone tries not to bug him incessantly. Highly doubting he's going to respond to PMs unless they're from someone like TAT or a well known forum/exchange member.
Black Lilac Financial has a red phone direct to friedcat's office.
*note: the above may or may not be a totally made-up fantasy of mineI think everyone here, do not start panic selling, in case both assumptions are not pessimistic.
correction: do start panic selling, Im waiting @ the bottom for your sell orders.
Yes...I should change it , everyone start panic selling right now...I am waiting @ the bottom...
This exactly... everyone SELL SELL SELL!!! (until I am finished buying at least)
Please check my math, tear my argument to pieces, come up with other ideas.. but try and help me answer this question. How the hell are we out of blades with how many we have sold?
I don't think AM is out of blades.
This is just supposition on my part, drawing inferences on how friedcat has behaved so far.
I think friedcat knew that the blades weren't a good deal for buyers anymore at 50
BTC so he pulled them and will either sell them in bulk in private at a discount or deploy them to keep the network share up (or a bit of both).
The alternative would have been to drop the price the public pays every time the difficulty went up. The problem with that is that it encourages people to hold off on purchases to wait for a bargain. I think friedcat is a smart enough businessman (smarter than basically everyone, heh) to know that mining is a classic repeat customer business. If you screw over your customers the way some other vendors are doing at the moment, they'll think twice about dealing with you again. However, if you under promise and over deliver, they'll beat a path to your door, again and again.
So he puts blades on sale for a while, then takes them off when they're no longer a good deal. People will learn that if they want AM products, it's best to get in early when the rewards are best, as they'll offer the best return early and won't be on sale forever.
In a few weeks, a refreshed product will come out at a lower price point with better features. Demand will have built up again, and early purchasers will have had a few weeks of less competition from other sales.
EDIT: Dimly recall from some marketing seminars that products are all about a "promise" - shinier hair, whiter teeth, attractive to the opposite sex, etc. Most other vendors doing pre-orders are selling a "gamble". AM is selling (relative) certainty. "Order this product today, have it in 5 days and start using it." That's a clear point of difference that no-one else has yet offered.
EDIT #2: That's also why I've noticed a lot of AM haters coming out of the woodwork. They look at the AM offering and scoff "how can you pay that much per Ghash? I can get xxx Ghash for $yyy from Company ZZZ. AM customers are all stupid." Those people are not in AM's target market (they really want a gamble, or they are possibly just self-deluded about when they will get their hardware) so they mock anyone who doesn't think the same way they do.
I think this is a terrific analysis and most aspects of what you said are likely very accurate.
The edit about the "haters" is dead on. People call those of us who are happy with our ASICs making a profit in 8-12 months "insane" and "stupid", we "can't do math". Betting that kmcminer/bitfury/BFL/Avalon will deliver on a pre-order that will make a huge profit in a matter of months is a gamble. Buying ASICMINER devices that make a steady profit is a business.
If they wanted to reduce price regularly, they could use a formula that factored current difficulty. This would make it "fair" to previous buyers quite dynamically.
You stole my idea! I posted that idea a few (dozen) pages back and no one noticed it, or commented at least.
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