Topic: [Group Buy#1] Avalon ASICs CHIPS! Using JohnK as escrow! FINISHED! - page 30. (Read 150651 times)

Although I appreciate the wonderful sentiment, I'd prefer that we act like adults here.

I personally don't believe the recent hashrate spike is sustainable. I think it will level off and then progress linearly. A few months ago many predicted difficulty would be over 100 million in July based on exponential extrapolation alone. Soon after it leveled off. People speculate a lot here, and are usually wrong. I'm probably wrong too, but to have an x-petahash difficulty in December would require way too much capital and gives mining companies too much credit. Fact is we live in a cyclical, imperfect world and its not as easy as putting numbers into an equation. I recall reading somewhere that predicting difficulty with any accuracy is a fool's errand; I tend to agree.

Given the recent price bump and good press, it's possible the window may not have shut on profitability completely, but it's closing quickly. We need these chips very soon, or I'll be on the refund bandwagon too. (I'm not paying assembly costs so I'm willing to give it more time.) As others have pointed out it will be easy enough to buy cheaper chips elsewhere, however to take that additional gamble I need proof that Yifu is processing refunds quickly AND that prodigits/ragingazn will be on the ball to promptly refund everyone in the group buy the proper amounts.

We're not quite there.... yet.

moore's law applied to the $100,000,000,000+ industry of microelectronics and computers

The way I see it, very soon there is no financial incentive either to buy hardware or even NRE for hardware.  Fixed, sunk costs will be too absurd, who is going to buy $5,000 - $25,000 hardware (with an 8 figure NRE) that takes ~1-2 years to hit ROI even at a given constant hashrate?  Because that's the market for anything that delivers after 2013.

*WHAT* OTHER VIABLE INVESTMENT?

there is NOT A SINGLE ONE THAT LOOKS ANYWHERE NEAR AS GOOD AS THIS ONE FUCKING DID.  BEST CASE ROI WAS UNDER A MONTH

Obviously that was super-optimistic, but that was best case.  Expected case was supposed to be a few months for ROI.  Now it's never?

Run the numbers of anything else, your BEST CASE ROI is on the order of half a year,  what happens when THAT gets fucked over?  Do you think you won't get screwed over by another company, group, or person?

You run the numbers on a "refund", and stop doing shitty wrong calculations with never-ending hashrates being added (again, it's a fucking sigma curve not an exponential, all hardware is paid for.  Do you see people spending money on new hardware anymore?)

Something like 50,000,000$ was sent to BFL

Then 8,000,000$ was sent to Avalon chips.

The guys coming in later?  Less than that.

The money  invested is an inverse-sigmoid curve.  The hashrate is a sigmoid curve

That's a great link. It doesn't seem to factor in devices from any new / unknown manufacturers though. I'd assume there will be people developing their own equipment and keeping it to themselves as well.

It would be nice if it turned into a bit more of a sigmoid (i.e. leveled out) a bit before the end of next year, but at the moment it's still looking very exponential. It will sigmoid eventually, because at 28nm we're already nearing the edge of today's silicon tech (I think 22nm is best in production?) but the question is more what does Q4 2013 and full 2014 look like rather than what "eventually" looks like. I think we have pretty good visibility that it's going to get hairy in Q4 2013 because there are 3-4 major manufacturers pumping out kit in that time, and it shows no signs of abating.

Keen to see your results...

EDIT: keep moore's law in mind - computing curves are not limited to being sigmoids until you hit silicon's physical limits

Not possible to sustain, for HOW long? If your chips showed up assembled and hashing TODAY, you might break even and make a little money, but we're WELL past the anticipated delivery time with ZERO progress since the order date. What makes you think that the chips will deliver any time soon?

You guys are clinging to a false hope at this point. As others have pointed out and demonstrated, either way we're going to take a loss. You can either take a loss that also involved giving the assholes who screwed us a ton of money, and just bending over for them, or you can take the option of telling companies that this won't be tolerated, and work on finding another viable investment.

Honestly, anybody who chooses option A is a fool, and Yifu's bitch.

76%/month is not possible to sustain.

the absolute MAX is 6-7 petahash/sec at the end of the year

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/estimate-of-asic-pre-orders-13-to-15-phs-diff-18b-to-21b-by-end-of-2013-283820

What difficulty is that.. ~1 billion at the end of 2013 diff

2 billion at the end of 2014 diff.

Hash rate will be a sigmoid curve.  it's not exponential except for a short window.  I have not found a calculator that correctly does this, all do an exponential curve.

Let me try a few things

1 Million diff / 2 million diff still exceed electricity costs.  It's extremely doubtful any ASIC will ever fall below electricity cost unless BTC/$ plummets.  the $/hash is simply too massive, especially for anyone who doesn't directly buy chips from the fab themselves.

Just to elaborate -

Here's an example of the kind of calculations I'm running (this is for a single board - you can multiply it up - same answer but more so):
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/0d1bb81811
Hash power: 5.6gh/s
Power use: 15w
Cost of hardware: (we want to know whether it's worth a refund, so)
- chips: 0.078*16*$120 per btc (i.e. full refund in btc) -> $150
- assembly: c.$100 per board, 50% refund, plus $30 for shipping (full refund) -> $80
Total: $200

Even for overclocked boards (with burnins going for EUR 105):
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/0af9373781
Hash power: 9
Power: 20w
Cost
-chips 0.078*16*120 per btc -> $234
-assembly (in usd) 140 -> $70 refund
total $300

In both cases you're in the red, and by the end of 12m it gets worse not better. So if you're "paying" your refund to get those boards, your ROI is negative, therefore it makes sense to take the refund (assuming you can get 50% refund from assemblers). That is, unless you believe the difficulty projections are bunk, or my other assumptions are BS (if so, please let me know, because I'm basing my decision on these!!)

This also assumes that there's no other delays, you boards aren't broken in the mail (some of burnins customers have had this already with batch 1 chips), no config problems etc.

Even if you get them a bit earlier, you're in the red deep enough that a refund always wins at this stage.

No problem - I think we're all a bit on edge. The current hashrate trends are insane (probably not sustainable long-term, but long enough to crush avalon chips I think).

Are you assuming delivery of assembled boards today? I would assume anything sooner than late September / early October is pretty optimistic at this stage. I would be overjoyed if I thought I could get assembled boards 2 weeks from now, but when you think that chips need to be dispatched (we still haven't received confirmation of tracking info - could be we get them without, but we shouldn't assume we will) ship from China to the US, be repackaged and distributed by ragin, sent to assemblers, assembled then sent to us.... I *really* can't see this happening in less than 3-4 weeks.

In terms of difficulty, mining.thegenesisblock.com shows a 76% monthly increase as the default value at the moment. If you think that's aggressive, look at their past performance table:

Once the ROI starts getting worse each month (due to electricity costs) not better within a 12 month period, you can tell that ROI over forever is not that useful a metric unfortunately...

Sorry a bit on edge, coming back from 2 weeks of being too occupied to follow the market, things changed a lot.  I knew chips were late, but suddenly there's a massive influx of unanticipated hashrate, a shit ton more promised and enroute.

Trying to make sense of it all.

Even putting in 150m diff with 60% increase per month (30%/2 weeks seems to be the upper bound thus far) it still makes ROI in under 3 months.  I don't understand what calculations people are using that show negative ROI over 1-2 years

Depending on your assembler, there is normally a partial refund for assemblies (burnin will give >50% for example) which gets you up to 75% of your money. If you run the numbers, full refund for chips + partial refund for assemblies still gives you more coin (in most instances) than building and mining, given the surge in difficulty. I ran the numbers assuming the chips were a sunk cost, and found that at this stage, even the cost of assembly is more than my expected return (negative ROI on assembly cost alone).

And that analysis was ignoring the elephant in the room. I'm assuming you're 100% confident that bitsyncom and ragingazin628 will deliver and distribute in a timely fashion? Did you get your sample chips?

Please do let me know if I'm missing something - this certainly isn't a point of principle for me. I'm not trying to be facetious (just trying to get to the right outcome) and I don't think anyone is asking for a refund for the sake of it, so if there is a way to improve ROI by taking delivery, I think we're all ears... we just can't see one


Bitfury early Oct could make ROI. Personally, I don't plan to mine with my refund from this group buy (if I get one) - I plan to hold the coins. There's no point in mining with a negative ROI and I agree with you that there are no obviously good mining investments at the moment.

What the fuck are you going to do with your refund?  Bitfury Oct won't make ROI.

Where the fuck do you think you can put it and have a better shot for mining?

AND THERE IS NO REFUND FOR ASSEMBLIES.  THAT'S HALF THE COST RIGHT THERE

Literally a 50% ROI is the same as a ""refund""

Vote my 572 chips AGAINST refund.

We all entered into this knowing the state of Batch #3.  It was late.  Anyone who didn't expect this thing to be late didn't do their homework. 

At this point I'm betting our chips are already shipped.  What happens when the chips show up?  Still get a refund?  Send them back? 

And anyone who does want a refund should be forced into not getting one? The contract is in breach, trust has been breached at EVERY LEVEL of this thing (except for JohnK, who still has his integrity intact). The whole thing was a clusterfuck even BEFORE Yifu went off the deep end: Customs issues (allegedly); Ragin is clearly mentally unstable, unreliable, and untrustworthy; we were already trying to figure out who was even going to take on responsibility for getting these things shipped to buyers, since Ragin can't be trusted to follow through.

Stick a fork in it. This thing is done. Time to accept it and move on. As I said before, the original contract that we all signed up for has been breached. The ONLY reasonable thing at this point is a full refund. If you still want to ride the roller coaster, there are still people who are selling their orders on other group buys at a discount. Get the full refund, and then buy MORE chips at a discount. Either way, refunds on THIS group buy are win/win at this point.

If people want to continue with a contract that is in breach (which creates NEW terms, and therefore a NEW agreement) then those people who want to continue with the new terms need to buy out those of us who bought into this thing in good faith that the terms of the contract would be met.

And a buyout means FULL purchase price too. So don't offer to buy my 85 chips for 2 BTC... I'll accept the 6.83077137 BTC I paid, or the highest bid OVER that amount. 

I just sent you a PM

I think John K is mia cause he's on vacation.

Anyone interested in my offer? 42 btc for 592 anyone?

I propose we do a vote and if 2/3 want a refund, we do that, otherwise we continue. If anyone wants to manage a spreadsheet for the votes, I'll pay a few bitcents...

I would like to put my vote towards getting a refund. It seems like it is still going to be awhile till we get the chips.

Most chips being sold are in large lots.  I had 20 in this group buy... what am I supposed to do?  My refund won't cover the minimum for most of the resellers minimums.

And if you do want chips, as erschiessen says, take the refund anyway. There are tons of them for sale at discounted prices from people who know they won't make any ROI. I know it's painful having waited so long for these to not get them, but it will be better in the long run to get hold of cheaper chips.



I hadn't realised that CH - we definitely need to act now.