I don't know how anyone does business in china - so damn corrupt.
Yeah, not like Wall St
Topic: ASICMINER Speculation Thread - page 154. (Read 808757 times)
Yeah, not like Wall St
This will be a short-term bounce for both AM and its competitors. Most of these investors will want to re-invest their BTC, the majority in another mining concern.
I'm more nervous about this threat and extortion stuff in China since this makes it Avalon and BTCgarden now two does not make a trend but within a short duration of each other, its worth noting and considering.
Personally I think Friedcat has proven himself well and has less to worry about that said it doesn't hurt to send in a shareholder question to update the status.
I agree it will be a short term bounce but the mining security concerns might be a short term factor for a while as well
This will be a short-term bounce for both AM and its competitors. Most of these investors will want to re-invest their BTC, the majority in another mining concern.
I'm more nervous about this threat and extortion stuff in China since this makes it Avalon and BTCgarden now two does not make a trend but within a short duration of each other, its worth noting and considering.
Personally I think Friedcat has proven himself well and has less to worry about that said it doesn't hurt to send in a shareholder question to update the status.
I agree it will be a short term bounce but the mining security concerns might be a short term factor for a while as well
This will be a short-term bounce for both AM and its competitors. Most of these investors will want to re-invest their BTC, the majority in another mining concern.
Quoting for Posterity and so it lasts longer 
Why we have the speculation thread to avoid walls of text on the main XD
And heck not sure if AM will get most of that boost as others are scared or competitors in for an interesting few days
Why we have the speculation thread to avoid walls of text on the main XD
And heck not sure if AM will get most of that boost as others are scared or competitors in for an interesting few days
IMPORTANT NOTICE
Due to some unexpected legal risks we met last week, we have to, cancel this IPO and buyback/repurchase entire two million shares of BTCGARDEN we issued at btct.co.
We will buy back all shares with the whole price of 32064btc. I.e,we will pay for commissions to let all shareholders get back their Bitcoin with the price of 0.016btc/share.
I would like to say thank you & sorry to all of our investors/supporters/ potential investors in advance before I explain the whole affair. Thank you for all of your trust and support, sorry for the final decision we have made.
The whole story:
In August 05th , 2013, a chinese BTCer posted threads/mailed us several times at btcman.com with extreme bad tone, threatening that he need to inspect and review our company to see whether we are real and trustworthy, otherwise he would do something bad to us. Being the nature of the business, such request can not be satisfied. So we agreed that we could buy back his shares on btct.co.However,he asked for a higher price and require us to transfer the Bitcoin to him first. We then searched for his email address and his account on net, what shocked us was that he has a long history of cyber-fraud activities in china, he did not even change his ID and email in the past several years and due to the terrible chinese laws, he has not been arrested.
With those information, we realize that we were being extorted and obviously refused to transfer first.We banned his account at btcman.com after he continued to attack us there. One day later, he opened a new thread at bitcointalk`s chinese board and post a reply at our official thread in chinese as you can find, saying full of lies and persuading other people to join his group to against us. Although he cannot even speak english, an english spoken shareholder still talked with him through IM software&google translator and helped him to find out some personal info of one of our staff of btcman.com. (not btcgarden). The racketeer then reported our staff/sites/this BTC-IPO to police with several completely falsified evidences such as:
* He accused us of asking people in China to first buy bitcoin from btcsea.com and then use those bitcoins to purchase shares from btct.co. This way, it would appear that we are collecting RMB almost directly from the end purchaser. Fact: we never did such thing, btcsea's traffic wasn't much different in those days of IPO as any other day before that.
* He accused us of ponzi scheme in our IPO, and claimed that he has lost of a lot of money because of that. Fact: when he first started the thread on btcman.com, stock price was slight higher than IPO price. After that, stock price stayed close to IPO price all those days, so how could he possibly have suffered massive lose because of this. And he forgot to mention we agreed to purchase back the share at IPO price as long as he would transfer first so he could avoid the "MASSIVE" lose.(BTW:he has only 1 share of BTCGARDEN at the moment)
After discussing inside, we decide to stay away from the IPO at this point as the fairness of laws in this area are full of big uncertainties. We hardly undertake such an undefined risk especially with many scamers out there seemingly targeting the bitcoin companies in China .
(Latest update: currently, a lot of teams in china are planning IPO at BTC community ,some of them do not even have an creative & original prospectus ,which in our side,make this even more dangerous.)
We therefore have to give up this IPO and repurchase all issued shares. Hope all of you can understand this.
Procedures:
We have already confirmed the whole process with Burnside (manager of btct.co),
1 We will lock the trading of BTCGARDEN at btct immediately.
2 We will then send the whole 32064BTC and submit the repurchase request to Burnside from backstage, he will then run the proper script to execute this request ASAP.
3 All current shareholders will get your BTC back into your account immediately,at which point you can withdraw it freely.
All of above will be finished in 24-48 hours from the time you see this notice.
Future plan:
1 .We will not issue any other asset until we can fully build up our new company oversea(hopefully soon), or laws in China become clear about bitcoin (not hopefully, imo, many laws are intentionally vague so they can interpret them in a way that best suit their interest)
2. Our ASIC project will be switched to a "self-miner+seller"mode,i.e. we will only use our own money and mining-income to invest our enterprise and sell chips/mining-hardwares with only BTC and B2B accepted. Needless to say, this will cause a huge funding shortage and we have no choice but to change our previous plan so much.
3. Btcman.com will be changed to an international site with english info included.(BTW:all english editors/journalists who are interested in this please mail us. We have almost finished the new layout of btcman.com, as some of our members might already knew.)
4. Any questions/suggestions from our previous investors are very welcomed, please mail me through your email of btct account. (FYI: messages/mails with regards to direct-investment to us is discussible but please keep in mind that this mode will be very hard to most of you because you can not sell it as easy as stocks)
5. We have backed up the list of our investors, we will think about what we can do for all of you later on. (a discount for our hardwares/other products might be possible)
Again, thanks to all our supportors.
Finally, special thanks to a big name at Bitcoin community, whom might not want his id be mentioned here despite he has already been well known as a nice & successful BTCer.
Due to some unexpected legal risks we met last week, we have to, cancel this IPO and buyback/repurchase entire two million shares of BTCGARDEN we issued at btct.co.
We will buy back all shares with the whole price of 32064btc. I.e,we will pay for commissions to let all shareholders get back their Bitcoin with the price of 0.016btc/share.
I would like to say thank you & sorry to all of our investors/supporters/ potential investors in advance before I explain the whole affair. Thank you for all of your trust and support, sorry for the final decision we have made.
The whole story:
In August 05th , 2013, a chinese BTCer posted threads/mailed us several times at btcman.com with extreme bad tone, threatening that he need to inspect and review our company to see whether we are real and trustworthy, otherwise he would do something bad to us. Being the nature of the business, such request can not be satisfied. So we agreed that we could buy back his shares on btct.co.However,he asked for a higher price and require us to transfer the Bitcoin to him first. We then searched for his email address and his account on net, what shocked us was that he has a long history of cyber-fraud activities in china, he did not even change his ID and email in the past several years and due to the terrible chinese laws, he has not been arrested.
With those information, we realize that we were being extorted and obviously refused to transfer first.We banned his account at btcman.com after he continued to attack us there. One day later, he opened a new thread at bitcointalk`s chinese board and post a reply at our official thread in chinese as you can find, saying full of lies and persuading other people to join his group to against us. Although he cannot even speak english, an english spoken shareholder still talked with him through IM software&google translator and helped him to find out some personal info of one of our staff of btcman.com. (not btcgarden). The racketeer then reported our staff/sites/this BTC-IPO to police with several completely falsified evidences such as:
* He accused us of asking people in China to first buy bitcoin from btcsea.com and then use those bitcoins to purchase shares from btct.co. This way, it would appear that we are collecting RMB almost directly from the end purchaser. Fact: we never did such thing, btcsea's traffic wasn't much different in those days of IPO as any other day before that.
* He accused us of ponzi scheme in our IPO, and claimed that he has lost of a lot of money because of that. Fact: when he first started the thread on btcman.com, stock price was slight higher than IPO price. After that, stock price stayed close to IPO price all those days, so how could he possibly have suffered massive lose because of this. And he forgot to mention we agreed to purchase back the share at IPO price as long as he would transfer first so he could avoid the "MASSIVE" lose.(BTW:he has only 1 share of BTCGARDEN at the moment)
After discussing inside, we decide to stay away from the IPO at this point as the fairness of laws in this area are full of big uncertainties. We hardly undertake such an undefined risk especially with many scamers out there seemingly targeting the bitcoin companies in China .
(Latest update: currently, a lot of teams in china are planning IPO at BTC community ,some of them do not even have an creative & original prospectus ,which in our side,make this even more dangerous.)
We therefore have to give up this IPO and repurchase all issued shares. Hope all of you can understand this.
Procedures:
We have already confirmed the whole process with Burnside (manager of btct.co),
1 We will lock the trading of BTCGARDEN at btct immediately.
2 We will then send the whole 32064BTC and submit the repurchase request to Burnside from backstage, he will then run the proper script to execute this request ASAP.
3 All current shareholders will get your BTC back into your account immediately,at which point you can withdraw it freely.
All of above will be finished in 24-48 hours from the time you see this notice.
Future plan:
1 .We will not issue any other asset until we can fully build up our new company oversea(hopefully soon), or laws in China become clear about bitcoin (not hopefully, imo, many laws are intentionally vague so they can interpret them in a way that best suit their interest)
2. Our ASIC project will be switched to a "self-miner+seller"mode,i.e. we will only use our own money and mining-income to invest our enterprise and sell chips/mining-hardwares with only BTC and B2B accepted. Needless to say, this will cause a huge funding shortage and we have no choice but to change our previous plan so much.
3. Btcman.com will be changed to an international site with english info included.(BTW:all english editors/journalists who are interested in this please mail us. We have almost finished the new layout of btcman.com, as some of our members might already knew.)
4. Any questions/suggestions from our previous investors are very welcomed, please mail me through your email of btct account. (FYI: messages/mails with regards to direct-investment to us is discussible but please keep in mind that this mode will be very hard to most of you because you can not sell it as easy as stocks)
5. We have backed up the list of our investors, we will think about what we can do for all of you later on. (a discount for our hardwares/other products might be possible)
Again, thanks to all our supportors.
Finally, special thanks to a big name at Bitcoin community, whom might not want his id be mentioned here despite he has already been well known as a nice & successful BTCer.
potentially enough btc to buy over 9000 shares! 
BTC GARDEN has been locked. IPO cancelled with and buyback occurring in the next 24-48 hours.
Expect the share price to rise with the extra BTC's in investors hands.
Expect the share price to rise with the extra BTC's in investors hands.
In a lot of ways Friedcat himself seems to take a long view, too... good customer service, over-delivering, hefty dividends, never over-promising. I suspect we'd get bought out before 10 years is up, though...
If friedcat and the folks at Bitfountain decided to accept a buy out offer at some point in the future, hopefully it would only be a buy out of the 236,038 shares that they own and not something that's forced on all shareholders.
Considering that 236,038 shares is a controlling interest in the company, you'd best hope they buy you out also, or they're gonna dilute your ass into next week.
If one individual was buying all of those shares and I was going to remain a shareholder, there would of course have to be an understanding that existing shareholders will not be diluted. Each shareholder should be free to decide for themselves if they want to sell their stake in ASICMiner based on their own judgement/criteria.
Personally, if Bitfountain does decide to sell their shares one day, I would prefer to see them sold to different buyers so there isn't one single controlling interest.
Typically you would just get cash or shares of the parent company in a buyout. Dilution agreements are too complex and restrictive for the company going forward. Theoretically, Bitfountain could already issue about a zillion in-the-money stock options to themselves and make all your shares worthless, so we're running on trust as-is.
I would expect a mass exodus from ASICMINER at that point - Friedcat is the glue that holds it together, and I would want nothing to do with a new parent company.
In a lot of ways Friedcat himself seems to take a long view, too... good customer service, over-delivering, hefty dividends, never over-promising. I suspect we'd get bought out before 10 years is up, though...
If friedcat and the folks at Bitfountain decided to accept a buy out offer at some point in the future, hopefully it would only be a buy out of the 236,038 shares that they own and not something that's forced on all shareholders.
Considering that 236,038 shares is a controlling interest in the company, you'd best hope they buy you out also, or they're gonna dilute your ass into next week.
If one individual was buying all of those shares and I was going to remain a shareholder, there would of course have to be an understanding that existing shareholders will not be diluted. Each shareholder should be free to decide for themselves if they want to sell their stake in ASICMiner based on their own judgement/criteria.
Personally, if Bitfountain does decide to sell their shares one day, I would prefer to see them sold to different buyers so there isn't one single controlling interest.
Typically you would just get cash or shares of the parent company in a buyout. Dilution agreements are too complex and restrictive for the company going forward. Theoretically, Bitfountain could already issue about a zillion in-the-money stock options to themselves and make all your shares worthless, so we're running on trust as-is.
In a lot of ways Friedcat himself seems to take a long view, too... good customer service, over-delivering, hefty dividends, never over-promising. I suspect we'd get bought out before 10 years is up, though...
If friedcat and the folks at Bitfountain decided to accept a buy out offer at some point in the future, hopefully it would only be a buy out of the 236,038 shares that they own and not something that's forced on all shareholders.
Considering that 236,038 shares is a controlling interest in the company, you'd best hope they buy you out also, or they're gonna dilute your ass into next week.
If one individual was buying all of those shares and I was going to remain a shareholder, there would of course have to be an understanding that existing shareholders will not be diluted. Each shareholder should be free to decide for themselves if they want to sell their stake in ASICMiner based on their own judgement/criteria.
Personally, if Bitfountain does decide to sell their shares one day, I would prefer to see them sold to different buyers so there isn't one single controlling interest.
I'll throw in a crazy speculation... hey, wouldn't it be crazy if ASICMiner ran a steady business for the next 10 years? Everyone here casually assumes, understandably, that the risk is high and everything that exists today could be gone in a year or two, but what if it didn't? Can you imagine collecting 10 years of dividends from ASICMiner if they held onto 10% of the hashrate? What if bitcoins are worth a $10,000 USD each? That would be crazy. Not impossible though... consider that although many competitors are emerging, electricity and labor is still (almost) the cheapest in China. After everyone gets to the 15nm process (or whatever), the price of electricity/labor/taxes will pretty much determine who the major players are.
There, that's some pie-in-the-sky speculation for you.
There, that's some pie-in-the-sky speculation for you.
hehehe
This is pretty much how I look at it too.In a lot of ways Friedcat himself seems to take a long view, too... good customer service, over-delivering, hefty dividends, never over-promising. I suspect we'd get bought out before 10 years is up, though...
If friedcat and the folks at Bitfountain decided to accept a buy out offer at some point in the future, hopefully it would only be a buy out of the 236,038 shares that they own and not something that's forced on all shareholders.
Considering that 236,038 shares is a controlling interest in the company, you'd best hope they buy you out also, or they're gonna dilute your ass into next week.
I'll throw in a crazy speculation... hey, wouldn't it be crazy if ASICMiner ran a steady business for the next 10 years? Everyone here casually assumes, understandably, that the risk is high and everything that exists today could be gone in a year or two, but what if it didn't? Can you imagine collecting 10 years of dividends from ASICMiner if they held onto 10% of the hashrate? What if bitcoins are worth a $10,000 USD each? That would be crazy. Not impossible though... consider that although many competitors are emerging, electricity and labor is still (almost) the cheapest in China. After everyone gets to the 15nm process (or whatever), the price of electricity/labor/taxes will pretty much determine who the major players are.
There, that's some pie-in-the-sky speculation for you.
There, that's some pie-in-the-sky speculation for you.
hehehe
This is pretty much how I look at it too.In a lot of ways Friedcat himself seems to take a long view, too... good customer service, over-delivering, hefty dividends, never over-promising. I suspect we'd get bought out before 10 years is up, though...
If friedcat and the folks at Bitfountain decided to accept a buy out offer at some point in the future, hopefully it would only be a buy out of the 236,038 shares that they own and not something that's forced on all shareholders.
- AM is working on 2nd gen chips which will be available in December
Well, according to this they will have "experimental products" in the November-December time frame; honestly, December might be optimistic in this case, as we've seen time and time again (even with AM) delays happen for months at a time.
ok, I see, now. Here's the quote from FC, if anyone wants to see it:
Quote
August-September: Deploy/sell all hashpower arriving in July and early August.
September-November: Deploy/sell the hashpower ordered at early July.
November-December: Experimental products of 2nd-gen chips and modular large-scale deployment solutions.
September-November: Deploy/sell the hashpower ordered at early July.
November-December: Experimental products of 2nd-gen chips and modular large-scale deployment solutions.
So, Nov/Dec is for experimental product and large-scale deployment solutions. So, yes, December is probably reasonable, January to be conservative.
- AM is working on 2nd gen chips which will be available in December
Well, according to this they will have "experimental products" in the November-December time frame; honestly, December might be optimistic in this case, as we've seen time and time again (even with AM) delays happen for months at a time.
- AM is working on 2nd gen chips which will be available in December
Hi, I've been trying to estimate future AM market-share based on current evolution, and I came up with some interesting numbers; I'm curious what everyone else thinks about this.
First, the assumptions:
I. Efficiency
Generally, every die shrink allows for a roughly 40% increase in the number of transistors; coupled with a more optimized design and potential increases in clock-speed, all while keeping the same overall architecture - we're probably looking at an 80% performance increase for the same power use. Given the two steps of shrinking (from 130nm to 90nm to 65nm) we would achieve about a 3.2x increase in performance.
Existing chips perform at 332MH/s, so this hypothetical 2nd gen. design would then hash at ~1.1GH/s. With overclocking that becomes ~400MH/s, or ~1.3GH/s for the 2nd gen. chip.
That would give us the following:
Of course, this all assumes a realistic evolution of the current AM chip design. At this very moment, significantly better designs exist on the market -- the BFL chips actually perform at a top speed of 3.75 GH/s and are also built on the 65nm process. It is possible that AM does a complete overhaul of their chip and approaches (or even exceeds) those speeds; however there is no way to predict that.
II. Difficulty
Far from being science by any definition, predicting difficulty is more like a black art. That said, it's safer to err on the side of caution here and assume a 50% monthly increase (and even that might be conservative). 4 months from now, in December, that would give us:
- Difficulty: 5x what it is now or ~190Mil.
Given I + II, the resulting price for a 2nd generation AM blade comes out between 4.5 BTC and 8 BTC - using e.g. the TGB calculator, a 40GH/s device would yield a maximum of ~4.5BTC if the difficulty keeps rising with the same rate, and even at 40% diff. rise it would not yield more than ~8BTC.
If AM can maintain a profit given the NRE and production costs for the 2nd gen. chips, they could still keep up selling them at the above prices. But what about self-mining? Given a difficulty increase of 5x and performance gains of just 3.2x, AM would need to increase their deployment area by 50-60% and replace all boards with the new chips just to keep their current share of network power; whether that will be possible or not remains to be seen.
Of course there are many unknowns that could influence the outcome for the better or worse (difficulty rising slower or faster, BTC prices increasing or decreasing, 2nd gen. chips having 10x performance, production/deployment delays etc) but overall I'd say the above analysis covers the middle ground, and if it comes to pass we'll be looking at similar profit levels in December compared to August. If anything happens and AM misses some of the targets, we could be looking at a 60% decrease in mining revenue as well as sales income.
As for impact on share prices, after a rise in the coming weeks due to increases in blade sales, they will likely level off and see a decline towards the end of the year, until production-level 2nd gen. chips start coming up en masse. What do you think?
DISCLAIMER: I currently own shares in AM as well as other mining ventures.
First, the assumptions:
- Difficulty is rising approx. 50% per month
- AM is working on 2nd gen chips which will be available in December
- AM 2nd gen chips will be built on 65/55nm, compared to 130nm for current gen
I. Efficiency
Generally, every die shrink allows for a roughly 40% increase in the number of transistors; coupled with a more optimized design and potential increases in clock-speed, all while keeping the same overall architecture - we're probably looking at an 80% performance increase for the same power use. Given the two steps of shrinking (from 130nm to 90nm to 65nm) we would achieve about a 3.2x increase in performance.
Existing chips perform at 332MH/s, so this hypothetical 2nd gen. design would then hash at ~1.1GH/s. With overclocking that becomes ~400MH/s, or ~1.3GH/s for the 2nd gen. chip.
That would give us the following:
- USB Erupters v2: 1.1 - 1.3 GH/s
- Small Blades v2: 17 - 20 GH/s
- Normal Blades v2: 35 - 40 GH/s
Of course, this all assumes a realistic evolution of the current AM chip design. At this very moment, significantly better designs exist on the market -- the BFL chips actually perform at a top speed of 3.75 GH/s and are also built on the 65nm process. It is possible that AM does a complete overhaul of their chip and approaches (or even exceeds) those speeds; however there is no way to predict that.
II. Difficulty
Far from being science by any definition, predicting difficulty is more like a black art. That said, it's safer to err on the side of caution here and assume a 50% monthly increase (and even that might be conservative). 4 months from now, in December, that would give us:
- Difficulty: 5x what it is now or ~190Mil.
Given I + II, the resulting price for a 2nd generation AM blade comes out between 4.5 BTC and 8 BTC - using e.g. the TGB calculator, a 40GH/s device would yield a maximum of ~4.5BTC if the difficulty keeps rising with the same rate, and even at 40% diff. rise it would not yield more than ~8BTC.
If AM can maintain a profit given the NRE and production costs for the 2nd gen. chips, they could still keep up selling them at the above prices. But what about self-mining? Given a difficulty increase of 5x and performance gains of just 3.2x, AM would need to increase their deployment area by 50-60% and replace all boards with the new chips just to keep their current share of network power; whether that will be possible or not remains to be seen.
Of course there are many unknowns that could influence the outcome for the better or worse (difficulty rising slower or faster, BTC prices increasing or decreasing, 2nd gen. chips having 10x performance, production/deployment delays etc) but overall I'd say the above analysis covers the middle ground, and if it comes to pass we'll be looking at similar profit levels in December compared to August. If anything happens and AM misses some of the targets, we could be looking at a 60% decrease in mining revenue as well as sales income.
As for impact on share prices, after a rise in the coming weeks due to increases in blade sales, they will likely level off and see a decline towards the end of the year, until production-level 2nd gen. chips start coming up en masse. What do you think?
DISCLAIMER: I currently own shares in AM as well as other mining ventures.
This is quite intuitive, but what about the reverse scenario where the BTC price climbs by a few orders of magnitude? I have a hard time imagining what effect that would have on BTC denominated stock prices for mining companies. It can't have NO effect...
Ok I'm not saying it doesn't have effects, I'm trying to say that USD exchange rate appreciation or depreciation shouldn't be taken into account into determining how much you gained or lost.Because you would have gained or lost the exact same % if you just hold the BTC without investing them.
On a related note, let's say BTC rises from $100 to $200 over the next 12 months. As it rises the increased overall market confidence would allow the yield on AM to fall to say 15% ie a doubling of the share price.
To the moon folks, to the moon.
Those who were/are shares for under 4BTC last week are insane.
Those who were/are shares for under 4BTC last week are insane.
Nice time for this
And for moderation haha
When they're more than 5% cheaper than the full shares, more shares/divs...
Exactly.It looks like people can't into math. Or they're in for the other benefits of full shares, of course.
From Havelock, yields:
AM1 32.76%
AM100 33.53%
In the near future AM1 shares should be convertible to direct shares. Maybe that explains the slight difference. AM100 shares should be multiplied by 100 x (100/95) for comparison as the 5% fee is priced in. That currently gives 3.789 vs 3.9 for AM1.
There will be additional buying pressure for AM100, since it's easier to get into as you don't need almost 4 BTC to get a single share. This makes AM100 much more attractive for smaller investors, which translates into increased demand.
I guess you will notice this more when BTC to $ goes up. When 4 BTC is worth something like $2000 it's more than likely that people will buy fractional shares. I wouldn't be surprised if Friedcat would announce an official stock split by then. It's crazy when a Asicminer share would be worth more than two times as much as a Google share.
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