I don't doubt. I imagine US miners much prefer to deal with a US company - much easier shipping and suing!
I agree about that, most especially the shipping--3 days ship time vs dealing with customs. I'll be honest, if I had money to spend I would've placed orders with Cointerra recently. I had an option to get some early January orders, but couldn't cough up the money.
Kinda explains why knc sold their stock of rma boards - they know they are going to be useless in a month or two, why keep them on hand? Who is going to rma a board when it'll then be the mining equivalent of a 5870 gpu in a few months?
Well, they owed it to the customers to sell the boards either way. I'm sure if an RMA issue comes up in the near future, KNC will do what it's been doing--overdelivering, and simply give them a new something or another, or will make it right. I've got a Mercury, would love to get another module for it, and I can actually afford the module, but they all sold out. Sucks KNC has no way to help out folks like me.
They aren't going to hold on to equipment that will be redundant and no one wants in 4 months time.
As long as people are willing to shake money, they will provide a product lol. Just like BFL, still providing essentially bricks which consume electricity.
I wouldn't be surprised if they retire and get out of the game after that. They are obviously gamblers, but they aren't stupid. It looks like their gamble will pay off, but probably not for their customers who gave them the free loan of millions (pre-orders).
I think they'll be in for awhile since they have most likely recovered all of their start-up costs and are maintaining operations in a self-sustaining fashion. They're going to focus on scrypt solutions when the BTC mining rush has subsided a bit. They would only get out if BTC suddenly went belly-up. This is true about any of the companies.
I'd still be right about the last part if BTC had stayed at $120. But now it's quadrupled, everyone feels they are going to break even by doing fiat calculations. But if you paid the equivalent of 70BTC for a jup, if you got your order after the difficulty change on 16th October, you'll never see anywhere near 70BTC back through mining a jup.
That's a really good point some people don't think about. 70BTC back in the day was, let's say, 100USD = 7kUSD. Now it's 500USD = 35kUSD. So unless their miners have provided that, they lost "in the long run" against BTC.
It depends on their focus though. If they wanted mostly free/cheap mining equipment, and they had already mined a bunch of coin, then in reality it cost them very little, and they can use the machine for another month or 2 and still dump it for a few grand.
If they used BTC they'd been holding for money, they lost the fiat race for sure.
So I wonder if the fire-sale of boards was an indication they are planning to clean up and clear out? They might have one more go with a multi TH/s miner, but would they risk losing everything if they f it all up?
I doubt they're going to vanish. They're going to come out with some more amazing die-power. My guess is they're trying to get their current chip design to push 250 per chip, and then they'll call it "good". Their next design they will likely try to push 750 per chip, if not 1TH, as the current tapeout of competitors is over 500GH per chip with room to spare.
KNC could be the first to deliver a 10TH mining unit, and I bet it wouldn't be a stretch to say 4th quarter 2014 to see that in the works.
Big kudos to KNC's continuous efforts to make the current systems run even better. I had faith their chips would be stout, and I have not felt left down. As I posted a few pages back, my Mercury jumped over 10GH stable going from .96 to .99, and it's seeing 175-200GH for short bursts now.
Such an increase from JUST a firmware update is phenominal and people seem to ignore it. That's a $300 value based on 10GH mining capabilitis from products out there.
Also, I love the popcorn meme. That is definitely one of Moss's best scenes.