Topic: The ASICMiner wow. - page 2. (Read 3914 times)

Same thing that stops them from not paying anything I guess, since everything works on trust currently. This can (partially) be remedied though, but it would take some effort.

I could even invest $crazy_amount into asicminer, what I don't understand is, what stops them from taking away the knowledge they have now to start another company where they own 100% of the shares?

Seems doable to me. Within a week, it's expected to increase its hashrate 6-fold, and then up to 36-fold in a few months. There is very little cost to producing these devices for them and this could continue until electricity costs become a significant expense. So it's likely that they will make far above those numbers initially, then the profits will gradually go down. Assuming they make new breakthroughs in the coming years (superior chips, cheaper power sources, an innovative sales strategy, etc.) they can keep that average for a long time. I think it has a better future and competitive advantages in its area than Satoshi Dice.

Sounds like attention whoring for S.DICE and your master. But, it's your job.

So, doing a little off the cuff calculation, if ASICMiner actually maintains hashing power online sufficient to produce 15 blocks a day (they are currently doing a little under that, but are also saying they're using only part of their gear, and also difficulty is bound to go up so it's a mixed bag), they will be making about 15 * 25 * 30 ~= 10k BTC a month.

That is about what S.DICE averages, or half a S.DICE good month. Of course, unlike S.DICE ASICMiner actually has debt, which from what Friedcat declared is to the tune of about 5k BTC (smart having liabilities denominated in fiat, by the way, the recent lift slashed the servicing bill significantly). They will also be spending some resources on electricity and maintenance. There is also the risk that the chips blow up too soon, which is hard to estimate (good chips last for decades, bad chips may burn out in fifty hours).

All these things considered it is perhaps not unreasonable to judge ASICMiner revenue generation ability in the 5 to 15k BTC a month range. If this is in fact correct it's also not unreasonable to judge ASICMiner's market cap roughly equal or a little under that of Satoshi Dice, in which case the 400,000 share company would be worth on MPEx somewhere between 3 and 600k BTC, or between .75 and 1.5 BTC per share, making Bitfountain the third multi-million dollar Bitcoin public corp in Bitcoin history.

It's unclear how much risk discount investors would be wanting to apply to that valuation, and it's also unclear how much discount will willy-nilly end up being applied in the event ASICMiner actually foregoes liquidity and lists on some marginal venue. But in any case things look pretty bright at the moment, so well done!