Topic: Avalon batch #3 approaching "NO ROI" point - page 2. (Read 4376 times)

If Avalon Batch3 is approaching "NO ROI" you would think folks would opt for the refund that Yifu is offering.
So far as I know, NO ONE has taken him up on this offer (maybe B1-er anti76... but it doesn't look like it).

My guess is that if we really were approaching no roi, people would be heading for the exits with Batch3 and that doesn't seem to be the case.
At this point, I believe most folks will get their BTC investment back over the course of the next year.... and precious little after that.

I am so glad I've missed the batch 3# order! 

Batch#4 coming soon. Who's foolish enough to go for batch #4?

"Avalon" almost tripled hash rate this week at BTCGuild. Are those our unshipped batch#2 and batch#3 units?

+1

People should consider this exactly like a business, not a fire and forget operation. If they do, they'll get burned.

I will cross-post something I wrote in another thread and I think is relevant to the current discussion:


Not really. This is true for a short time, when there is a disruptive change in technology, as it just happened with the first ASIC - those machines create such an unbalance in the network dynamics, that the profit in running them is HUGE. Thus, you either sell them at a crazy price, or you just mine yourself.

If you were around before ASICs, you will know that mining has always been only marginally profitable. It's a very competitive business, where the profit basically lies in having free electricity and free storage, if your operational costs are above average you mine at a loss - because the market self-regulates itself.

Most of the time selling spades is more profitable than digging for gold, with some notable exceptions, as we had since February for the few folks that had the ASICs. As soon as the ASICs spread, network difficulty will balance, and everybody will be fighting for pennies again, as we did with GPUs and FPGAs.

If you have the luck to be in the front line during the change to a disruptive technology (FPGAs -> ASIC), of course it's more profitable to mine yourself. But once the market settles and difficulty adjusts to this new technology, long-term is much more profitable to sell the hardware and let the miners fight for their pennies.

The fact is that the (short) window in which mining with ASICs meant huge profit is finishing.

Even just 6 months of 8% exponential growth is enough to triple the difficulty and therefore reduce any profits by 66% from their current level.

Even if the difficulty growth completely flattens out to zero (it won't) after this growth, it still doesn't make most mining investments that profitable.

Good luck with that exponential growth of yours ;P We might see 6 months of 8% but once the market is saturated or unless BTC price increases massively growth will slow down a lot once current backlogs have been delivered.

I made a mistake earlier as my spreadsheet was still using the 15 million difficulty numbers.  

Plugging the 19 million difficulty, and assume a 8% per week compounded network difficulty growth for next 2 years.  A 50GH/h machine, will make 112 BTC in 52 weeks (and 113 BTC in 104 weeks) if you receive the machine today and start the mining. With this model, if you don't receive the machine in the next 5 weeks, you will miss the break even point.  If we change that to 10% compounded growth rate, the 104 weeks earning will only be at 90 bTC,  and you must get the machine in next 3 weeks to break even.

However,  I also had a model that is more optimistic, which assume the network difficulty will taper down in 20 weeks, and will only grow at 3% compounded per week after that.  In the optimistic model,  you can suffer up to 8 weeks delay in the shipment, and are still be able to break even, and still had a life time earning of close to 105 BTC.

BFL machines are cheaper, and hence can suffer a few more "2 weeks delay".

avalon is a legal scam, stop feeding them

Mmm... What kind of delay are you considering? If it arrives with difficulty above 35 million it won't break even. That difficulty will arrive in a few weeks.

You have nothing to worry if you pay less than 2BTC/GHs (in the case of batch 3 Avalon).

Even with the difficulty rising, you should still have no problem making at least 120BTC in the life span of the machine.   

I don't know what other investment can give you that kind of ROI these days.

Why u no can math? What is a "ASIC device" for a damn unit?

So we are quickly reaching the point where even making a sizeable investment in bitcoin would involve purchasing coins or running a service.

Actually this will only apply to the least power efficient ASIC's, which currently is everything not manufactured by BFL.

If no one creates a ASIC chip less then BFL's 65nm using less power only BFL ASICs will be left hashing the network as all others will be forced to mine at a loss, go bust and be forced to stop.

Avalon's , ASICminer self pool, their blades and usb sticks, will all be forced to quit as no commercial enterprise has free power.

Right now the smart choice is nothing to do with quick delivery, it's the quickest delivery for the lowest power consumption. This is why I have orders with BFL until someone produces a working competitive product that is proven to use less power. Then I will order that at that point.

I did not order my BFL until the first working jalepeno was on youtube showing it hashing @ 5G/H for under 30w.

M

On average. My ASIC is better than your ASIC anyway, so I'll make at least 0.2 while won't even make 0.1 :p

I hope that we could quickly reach the stage that ASIC devices are barely breakeven, so that development in bitcoin will again become more stable and healthy

It takes only 36000 ASIC devices to make each devices's daily return drop to less than 0.1 bitcoin, or 100 mbtc 

I agree, but I think think time around there are far more garden variety miners then institutional miners. The institutions that have a large setups are probably already by and large up and running (or will be soon). It's the rest of us home-miners that probably make up the vast bulk of the ASIC sales. These individuals are more likely in my opinion to mine at a loss simply because they aren't mining from a rational background in the first place. They are mining because they think one day they will be more valuable, and they are willing to keep sinking more money into their investment for the same reason people keep gambling when they are losing at the table.

I think it's going to be similar to the "mining rush" that happened during the 2011 bubble. Everybody hopped on the bandwagon expecting huge returns to then bitterly realize that without almost free power and no storage costs (some miners do not mine home but rent spaces to host their operations) it was very difficult to make any money at all. In fact we had a drop in the hashrate because mining was quite a big loss for many folks.

I expect the same situation to happen just now. The big winners were Avalon batch #1 customers and ASICminer first shareholders, the ones coming behind will just "pay for their party", unless until a new very superior technology arrives to the market.


No, they will just resell them for peanuts if they are unprofitable to run. Many people (most of people) cannot afford to mine at a loss.

The difference this time however is people won't be turning their ASIC's off like they did with GPU's. These machine do but one thing- and users aren't going to let them sit idle.

isn't it actually the same situation when CPU->GPU change was made?

Well of course.  Nothing can grow exponentially forever.