Topic: Starting a new FPGA mining farm/contract! Cognitive Resurrected on[Havelock] - page 118. (Read 300686 times)

Seems like the BFL asic are starting to show up in the wild. BFL has pic of a single or little single hashing with a chip next to it. There is also a list of people with orders and delivery status here. http://bfl.ptz.ro/

Good to hear Garr, did everyone see this? https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/692-bfl-asic-status-3.html

Just to provide full disclosure here, this is how I've distributed my votes:

Auction of two SC Singles  - Yes
Purchase of Avalon Chips  - Yes
Purchase of Blade            - No

Dear fellow Cognitive shareholders,
     Please Vote against buying a Asicminer Blade. The chances of us making the 49.99 Bitcoin back ever is a hail marry long shot at best with little to no reward for the risk. They have already sold over half a TH/s that has been confirmed and is most likely much higher than that. Even if BFL and Avalon Both fail to deliver any considerable quantity of asics and the network keeps expanding at the rate is has for the last 3 months we will never break even on our purchase. There is also a lot of other projects in the wild some privately funded that are trying to build mining devices (I heard some engineers from one of the big computer chip companies are doing R&D on a mining device). So even if only a small fraction of these people succeed the network growth rate is going to grow 50 percent at least. There is also the fact that Asicminer can make these chips for a fraction of what they are selling them for and there is nothing to stop them from ramping up there own in house hashrate. If your really keen on getting the hashrate up for the same cost you could buy GPUs get a bigger hashrate and would have equipment with a resale value of at least 40percent of USD paid that could also be used for mining of script based languages. So all in all my fellow shareholders I ask of you to way your options with a sense temperance and to realize that the difficulty is only going to increase to a point of somewhere between little profit or sizeable loss.

To me is seems like the only people who benefit from buying blades are asicminer shareholders. Asics are very cheap to produce once the initial R&D is done. So buying a blade gives asicminer lots of capital which they could use to make a lot more chips. If we can get more than 60 bitcoin per bfl order I am all in favour of lessening our exposure to bfl.We need to be careful now that were late in the game not to over react and end up shooting ourselves in the foot. At this point I don't see to much reason to assume bfl won't start shipping within the next 30days.

I tell you what I voted with my one (1) share:

- Lets get rid of that BFL shit while we still can.
- Lets wait until there are some of those DIY Avalon miners actually available.
- Lets get one of those blades. At least they deliver and a mining company gets something to mine with. Disclaimer: I have ASICminer shares.

The is one of the few times I don't know which of the motions to support. 

On one hand I don't think we should just sit on funds when they could be working for us, but the quickest option is buying an over priced ASICMiner blade.

Or do we purchase a relatively cheaper device with companies which have unknown and unreliable delivery schedules as the clock ticks.

Would have been nice if the fund was in ASICMiner shares though.

A motion has been raised to sell two of our seven SC Single upgrades.

See motions tab of https://btct.co/security/COGNITIVE

Be sure to note the last few posts as well: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.2139430

If there enough interest in selling some BFLs (for buku bitcoins), you could re-diversify your risk by purchasing Avalon (which you've already posted two motions for to gauge interest).

In other words, instead of the Cognitive portfolio being 100% BFL, 0% Avalon, you could adjust the weights of each investment (while immediately seeing an ROI as well).

Yes, we might be able to sell these for quite a bit.

Just as a reminder: Cognitive's BFL order is #3277 (which is extremely early on) and is for seven FPGA Single -> SC Single upgrades. Shareholders: as Investr suggested, what do you think of selling some or all of these?

You're spot on, Zapeta.

I've been looking in to all of our options quite extensively this evening, and I've concluded that first of all, based on the scattered feedback via this thread we need to have a formal vote on whether to purchase a Blade.

Additionally, I believe purchasing Avalon chips is a good choice right now. If both of these motions pass, we will still have 60+btc on hand to purchase whatever new hardware shows up. Overall, these motions will put us in a good spot.

See motions tab of https://btct.co/security/COGNITIVE

--Garrett

6) Sell the Cognitive BFL preorders, realize a 9 month ROI

It sounds like our options are roughly the following:

1) go with the Blade right now, have something mining at 10GHash/s in 2-3 weeks - not sure on the actual turnaround times but these have shipped quickly.
2) Go with some sort of Avalon solution - having to get the ASICs from some sort of group buy and have the actual miners assembled somehow.  I haven't kept up with exactly how the Avalon scenario plays out and what sort of cost/performance to expect, but it sounds like it would take longer to get the chips and have something assembled than going with ASICminer although performance would be higher.
3) Wait "just a few more days" for our BFL order - who knows how much longer "a few more days" is.
4) Keep our powder dry and see how it plays out.
5) Other options I'm missing?

I think the key is that we have a lot of reserves - we can buy a blade and still have plenty of capital to deploy on an Avalon solution or whatever else might be around the corner.  If we were able to get the blade in a couple weeks, difficulty should have only adjusted upwards once between now and then.  Obviously we don't know what it will go up to but probably in the neighborhood of 12 million and we'd be able to earn a couple coins per day.  The ROI might not be super attractive based on what difficulty might become but if we don't add additional hardware one way or the other our earnings are going to dwindle until they're next to nothing.  They're already about half as much as they were at the beginning of January.  The purchase of a blade could help tie us over until BFL gets it together.

We should all band together (everyone who pre-ordered BFL) and pick a date (May 31st?) and request refunds.  This could be a strategic move to put BFL out of business and purchase ASICs from other companies.

Wouldn't avalon batch 2 alone make these things take almost 6 months for ROI. So are we betting that Avalon is not going to ship batch 2 soon and that they won't do a 3rd batch?

Who said Avalon is selling another batch?  Also, how long are you willing to wait for BFL? 

I vote no too. I would rather wait an buy some BFL or Avalon miners.

Remember, if COG.F shares are used to purchase the blade, as soon as it starts mining, all the those COG.F shares will be 20 new COGNITIVE shares.
It's just something else to add to the calculations.

even an expensive blade will ROI eventually and start to turn profit (at current diff we are looking at over 3.5 months for ROI). 49.99 btc will remain 49.99 btc so I say buy now if it is the only deliverable option open to us.

You do need to implement a cooling solution as Friedcat is no longer supplying fans with the blades.  Currently there is no other ready to ship ASIC option.  It's also 49.99 bitcoins, not $5500.  A blade will be profitable for a long time with Cognitive's power costs.