behold drunken analysis ahead (possibly flawed):
imo the biggest problem is the change of main revenue in btc last year to fiat now during a rising bull market.
Last year the advantage was that AM devices were sold directly in btc and on top the farm was mining along at a decent rate.
so if AM isn't instantly converting shareholder's part of profit to btc it's a loosing game in the current phase,
because the delayed payout of divs (which are constantly shrinking this way) will hardly cover the recent loss in sharevalue esp. if rising btcvalue gets priced in. (i hope this makes sense
)
even if every shareholder gets the somewhere mentioned 0,1-0,15
BTC divs for sales of gen3 this would represent at minimum a payout of 26mio$/40.000
BTC (btc@650) for 400.000 shares atm (of which divs for bitfountain's part will probably drip back into AM to some extent).
i can't imagine such a big part of profits is payed out esp. not with the rising competition and a possible bubble phase knocking at the door.
now there are also costs for gen4 development...i picked up a number around at least 4-5 mio for 28nm on the forum and a lot of the other companies are already manufacturing that size.
ergo the mining aspect seems really important to balance out lack of btc income and bridge the gap between gen3 and gen4.
i decided to stand on the sideline and watch closely as long as i don't see the rollout schedule for the datacenters and updates on the magical containers.
so far friedcat is selling chips like a champ and expanded the circle of contractors (rockminer, xbtec et.al.) while the datacenters - compared to last year - degraded more to a nice gimmick of the company.
don't get me wrong i still see huge potential in AsicMiner it feels more to me like the mining cycle isn't perfectly blending in with the bubble cycle this time. (or did it match similarly during april 13 bubble?)
disclaimer: panicsold all shares but one
, recent btc investment cut in half. If i price in some overvalued shares bought for 1-3btc, i burned around 9 coins holding AM shares since last summer
and the divs until now were a joke compared to trading profits with my gambling stash. So much for longterm investment...funnily i haven't lost too much in terms of original fiat investment.
...well i learned another lesson of btc economics and got a nice shirt out of it as a reminder instead of loosing one.
(thanks to nubbins at this point, several washings and the print is still in mint condition - great quality!)
let's see what the cheshire friedcat is cooking for the future...