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Bitmain is the only company selling retail mining equipment and their miners are shitty, overpriced and inefficient. 21 could compete with them profitably without much effort, but they are too greedy, wanting to keep the miners for their own micropayments channel. Bitfury is doing the same thing overseas. They are not investing in a distributed network. They are investing in making it less distributed.
Bitmain is the only company selling retail mining equipment and their miners are shitty, overpriced and inefficient. 21 could compete with them profitably without much effort, but they are too greedy, wanting to keep the miners for their own micropayments channel. Bitfury is doing the same thing overseas. They are not investing in a distributed network. They are investing in making it less distributed.
You got maybe one out of three there, overpriced.
Aside from the S2... all my bitmain gear has been rock solid [s1 through s5]. They even supported the S1 well longer than expected by offering safely packed upgrade hashing boards/controllers to convert to S3 on the old frames, heatsinks, and fans.
The S7 is pretty efficient, and got to the retail market for this gen well before a bunch of the other's chips were even fabbed. Of course they were/are priced high, pretty much the only game in town for joe retail. Hopefully that will change once the big guys have their own mines humming, probably after the halving, amirite?
Bitmain/Antpool mined the first classic block by a major pool today... that alone is a big + in my book.
Jihan Wu, co-founder, seems to get it:
https://twitter.com/JihanWu/with_replies
You're crazy. You think a S7 28nm can compete with 14nm chips? You're eating what? 1,293 watts? Unless you're getting free electricity, it will take you a year just to recoup the cost of purchase, and by then who knows what the difficulty will be? We know for sure the block reward will be halved.
You have to speculate that the price will go up to compensate, but if you're doing that anyway, why not just buy coins? It's a much more liquid asset than mining gear.
Look, I like Bitmain. I just wish they had some competition. It seems like free money for chipmakers, but those greedy bastards wont sell to the public.
