Thanks for the update Garret. When will you merge cog1 and cog2? Is there a bonus for current cogf2 holders compared to the upcoming 600 batch? Or will it be cancelled? Do you have an update of the financial status report?
Terabyte, i would expect a few steeper diff increases. What will happen when 1 or 2 next gen chips become available.. knc, am, bfl.. Look at the steep rampup in the gpu era...
This is a fair point and completely valid criticism of my maths. I used just one possible value for the network growth rate. The reason why I am still ok with sinking money into the mining market is because I believe exponential growth is short-term, not long-term. Whether the network grows 60% a month or 120% a month during the next 6 months, it must eventually level off. My reasoning follows.
I don't think anyone will produce chips better than 28nm any time soon. My understanding is the top-of-the-line CPUs are 14nm but to produce chips at that size costs billions of dollars of setup, and is very unlikely until the entire bitcoin economy exceeds a couple trillion dollars at least. (see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabrication). Similarly, 22nm only became practical for CPUs this year (according to that wiki page, though I kinda thought they had them in 2011 or 2012). 22nm is also very very expensive still. For that reason, 28nm is probably the last die size we will see bitcoin asics in for some time.
Now don't get me wrong, there will still probably be "second gen 28nm" chips which are more optimized than the first gen (by spending more time optimizing the layout / gate logic / etc) but the gains are going to be bounded, and we aren't going to see "many orders of magnitude power improvements" like we have in the past. When Hash per Watt stops growing exponentially, after a short lag, so will the network because people will turn off old hardware, and keep the new gen hardware, and hardware will take longer to pay for itself (but become less likely to be obsolete). Your device makes 1btc per unit power which costs 1btc to buy. btc increases in value 10%. Your device is profitable. You buy more devices, the diff increases, your device now only makes 0.7btc in the same amount of time, and costs 0.7btc to run - it isn't making profit anymore. This is the "steady state" the network should eventually reach (probably not at break-even, but at a small profit, whatever profit the market is wiling to bear for running hardware). Mining companies like COG will make the most profit because of their already-sunk-hardware costs, their economy of scale, and (related) lower power costs.
I would like to hear alternate opinions, especially with the reasoning behind them - I am a computer engineer but I do not have expertise in markets or financial stuffs. But it seems to me like when network goes linear (or flat) and the steady state I have described above is achieved, the value of cog will be in the hardware they own (that is new enough to continue to turn a profit), and the steps Garr is taking now are going to secure that value.
