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One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

dvhardware.net

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Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#101

Post by wmf »

baddox wrote: post #93
wmf wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynical answer is that customers are willing to pay more than the hardware will ever mine over its lifetime. The non-cynical answer is that setting up gigawatts of data centers is not trivial and not Bitmain's core competency. Also, selling the hardware upfront locks in the profit even if the price of Bitcoin later crashes.

Of course. That's the same non-cynical answer to the question "Why would TSMC sell the hardware instead of mine with it?"

TSMC also gets some benefits from being neutral; they don't compete with any of their customers. Bitmain has never been neutral.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#103

Post by tfha »

guiomie wrote: post #42
wmf wrote: post #28

Note that Bitmain is mostly a hardware vendor, although they do mine using their own equipment. Most of these chips will be sold to other miners, not used by Bitmain themselves.

I was wondering about this, why do they sell them instead of mining them? They could sell the older model once the new chips they designed are ready no?

A large percentage of the units shipped in January had clearly been in use for a while prior to shipping.

So to answer your question... they do mine their own hardware, and a lot of it.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#104

Post by Simon_says »

esmi wrote: post #68
guardiangod wrote: post #2

From the article- Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin miner on the planet, is now buying a whopping 20,000 16nm wafers a month from TSMC! That's double as much as in the previous quarter and a higher volume than what NVIDIA orders from TSMC. Related material- https://www.gmo.jp/en/news/article/?id=764 A competitor to Bitmain just finished their prototype 12nm Bitcoin mining chip and is moving forward to their target 7nm min…

Where is the source for how many wafers nvidia buys? That's usually confidential information.

Well, it's bounded above by how many GPUs are sold, no?

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#105

Post by jen729w »

nimos wrote: post #54
guiomie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering about this, why do they sell them instead of mining them? They could sell the older model once the new chips they designed are ready no?

The % of the network they would control would be too high maybe? Fundamentally the value of their product is based on the price of bitcoin. A single miner that gets close to 50% might be seen a a huge risk and drive down the price.

Let’s say some party/group gets 51%. Now they “own” the blockchain. Doesn’t its value drop to 0, thereby making the whole effort pointless?

I’m not going to buy BTC (or whatever) from that system, therefore the owners take no cash from it. Yeah they have all the BTC, but so what?

Everyone loses. What am I missing?

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#106

Post by gambiting »

amalag wrote: post #99
gambiting wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are banknotes worth anything? They are just pieces of paper with some ink on them, after all. They are "worth" something, because people are willing to do work or trade you stuff for them. The same with mining bitcoin - instead of printing banknotes, you make a "thing" that you can then trade for services and objects, because people want to have that "thing"(this part is crucial). Most importantly, people are wil…

Do you see people printing banknotes out of feathers or some other randomly expensive material? No, and similarly mining bitcoin is some randomly expensive process. The process of securing a "coin" can be done very cheaply with minimal computing cost and the world will shift to that.

The issue is not that the process has to be expensive. You are correct - we could generate billions of crypto coins within couple hours and beat bitcoin right away. But people want bitcoin. The same why people are willing to pay the price for a labour-intensive painting that took years to make over an identical reproduction that took 5 minutes to print.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#107

Post by nullbyte »

zwieback wrote: post #96
wmf wrote: post #28

Note that Bitmain is mostly a hardware vendor, although they do mine using their own equipment. Most of these chips will be sold to other miners, not used by Bitmain themselves.

So they are like the saloon owners of the gold rush - huge profits made off of short term insanity of the masses.

Sort of, but they also represent a massive amount of Bitcoin's hashrate themselves.

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#108

Post by TD-Linux »

guardiangod wrote: post #2

From the article- Bitmain, the largest Bitcoin miner on the planet, is now buying a whopping 20,000 16nm wafers a month from TSMC! That's double as much as in the previous quarter and a higher volume than what NVIDIA orders from TSMC. Related material- https://www.gmo.jp/en/news/article/?id=764 A competitor to Bitmain just finished their prototype 12nm Bitcoin mining chip and is moving forward to their target 7nm min…

Keep in mind, though, that the constraints for Bitcoin mining are a lot different. The Bitmain chips are far smaller than the NVIDIA ones to increase yield, so the absolute chip counts will be higher but NVIDIA is probably still ahead in terms of area shipped (latency is totally unimportant so no reason to have gigantic chips).

Re: One Bitcoin miner is buying 20,000 16nm wafers from TSMC per month

#110

Post by Viper007Bond »

Animats wrote: post #43

On top of that, Etherium mining is eating the graphics board market. The price of NVidia's higher end boards has doubled in the last six months.[1] Etherium was supposed to require a general purpose CPU to mine, but now it's done on GPUs with large RAM. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/cryptocurrency-b...

As a gamer, it sucks terribly. I want a 1080 Ti but they're impossible to find for a reasonable price.
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