Who buys this crap? If I a company builds hardware that can profitably mine bitcoins, it will keep the hardware and do the mining itself rather than selling it into the market.
ASICMiner does run its own mine: http://asicminercharts.com/
ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
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Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
#22Who buys this crap? If I a company builds hardware that can profitably mine bitcoins, it will keep the hardware and do the mining itself rather than selling it into the market.
For example, Butterfly Labs built their first big batch of miners using money from pre-orders. By the time the devices existed, they already owed them to customers.
Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes of course: https://btct.co/ https://bitfunder.com/ http://mpex.co/ https://www.havelockinvestments.com/ It's all risky and low volume, as you might expect. Then there's also OTC with people doing auctions on forums, etc.
> * This is a virtual stock exchange using virtual currency. Virtual goods utilized on this site are for entertainment and educational purposes only. So the favorable interpretation would be that this is a toy exchange... The other possibility being a conveyor of unregistered securities.
> The other possibility being a conveyor of unregistered securities.
ding ding ding
BTCTC also announced they were considering blocking all U.S. users to avoid confronting the SEC, even though I believe they run in another country.
Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
#24Who buys this crap? If I a company builds hardware that can profitably mine bitcoins, it will keep the hardware and do the mining itself rather than selling it into the market.
I don't know that this automatically follows: lots of companies produce equipment for other companies to use on making profit in markets they themselves don't work in. It's entirely possible for a company to want to manufacture ASICs/boards and not want to run a server farm and deal with that level of IT for bitcoin mining.
I think the intersection between such hardware companies and companies with enough domain knowledge of Bitcoin to make a bitcoin ASIC, is zero.
The most plausible explanation I've heard is that these hardware companies need deposits to pay the development costs, then plan to run the chips themselves. Anyone who doesn't use such a strategy, is not expecting their customers to break even on their investment.
Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * This is a virtual stock exchange using virtual currency. Virtual goods utilized on this site are for entertainment and educational purposes only. So the favorable interpretation would be that this is a toy exchange... The other possibility being a conveyor of unregistered securities.
> The other possibility being a conveyor of unregistered securities. ding ding ding BTCTC also announced they were considering blocking all U.S. users to avoid confronting the SEC, even though I believe they run in another country.
A few days after they posted they were considering it, they said they decided not to and will be continuing operations to US citizens with an added disclaimer.
Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
#263.5 bitcoin is roughly $450. If you bought one now and started it running in September, you will likely never break-even or make a profit: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/a65c154190
Yeah, no kidding.
I got an opportunity to buy (10) USB BE's at 0.11BTC per and even had enough coin purchased at well under $100, and I'm still worried about break-even. Even if I make my money back, I know in the back of my mind the opportunity cost of selling the miners now makes mining with them a theoretical loss. They'll make great mementos of the early ASIC's anyway.
People are getting rich quick (not a good thing) off of selling hardware to quick-to-decide geeks that like the idea of btc, and making money from a terminal line. I'll be the first to admit that I'm one of those geeks.
Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
#273.5 bitcoin is roughly $450. If you bought one now and started it running in September, you will likely never break-even or make a profit: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/a65c154190
Someone with a better understanding of Bitcoins please correct me here if I'm wrong. But if I understand things correctly, mining is one way (the only way?) to get untraceable Bitcoins because they're created out of thin air by the network. By paying your electricity bill to run a miner, you're effectively converting your local currency into Bitcoins.
As as long as you credit the mining reward to a wallet that has no connection to your real-world finances, and take other safety precautions, those coins would not be traceable to you. So this could be used to launder money through the Bitcoin network. The only evidence that you were doing something would be an abnormally large electricity bill.
Mind you, without this turning into Office Space, I'm sure there's more effective ways to launder money...
But if that's true, then I would expect the supply of mining capacity to settle above the point where it's profitable, because some fraction of miners don't really care about being profitable as long it's a reasonable loss.
Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's the point though right? Its an arms race with a nearly perfectly efficient market that will (in the future) not be a get-rich-quick scheme for miners. If there's profit to be made easily, the some people will react by mining more and then it 'fixes' the market. Assume that some people will act irrationally and mine inefficiently, or with the hope that the market will skyrocket- these people will bring…
Not really. If you're trying to sell a bitcoin miner, you want at least the chance for the operators to make money. If you can take the specs of the box and calculate that you won't make a profit even if it was running right now , why would you buy it? The company selling them is going to do badly. It's like trying to sell shovels to gold prospectors, but for more money than the price of the gold that they'll dig up.
> It's like trying to sell shovels to gold prospectors, but for more money than the price of the gold that they'll dig up.
So, IOW, exactly like selling shovels to gold prospectors during a gold rush. Which is why the people selling shovels, or assaying services, or everything else that supports prospectors always, on average, do far better than prospectors during a gold rush.
That changes when the rush starts to end and become more of a rational market.
Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
#29> After reaching an all-time high of 5.15 BTC per share on July 3rd they have dropped 48% to 2.71 BTC per share as of today. Pardon? Is there a stock market that trades in BTC?
It looks like Bitcoin has risen in value about 30% during that time period compared to stable currencies, so the share drop is not really that dramatic.
Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's the point though right? Its an arms race with a nearly perfectly efficient market that will (in the future) not be a get-rich-quick scheme for miners. If there's profit to be made easily, the some people will react by mining more and then it 'fixes' the market. Assume that some people will act irrationally and mine inefficiently, or with the hope that the market will skyrocket- these people will bring…
Not really. If you're trying to sell a bitcoin miner, you want at least the chance for the operators to make money. If you can take the specs of the box and calculate that you won't make a profit even if it was running right now , why would you buy it? The company selling them is going to do badly. It's like trying to sell shovels to gold prospectors, but for more money than the price of the gold that they'll dig up.
It's actually selling the shovel and the mining grounds, you just have to invest the time to use the shovel. A good question is: if the miner is so good, why don't they just use it and profit? This actually happens, as many bitcoin miner sellers only deliver them after a waiting time.