Re:Inside the Race to Build the World’s Fastest Bitcoin Miner
by gwern on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @12:16PM
(#5596044)
In a recent interview (the one that photo is drawn from), that CEO guy acknowledges that from a purely selfish standpoint, shipping the ASICs at all has a high opportunity cost, but http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/engineering-the-bitcoin-gol... it was more honest to ship:
> This is an obvious question, but why aren’t you mining your own chips?
> Like I said, the current reality is vastly different from what we originally had planned. We always figured we would be late to the party. Butterfly Labs and bASIC (another ASIC developer that ultimately failed to launch) were supposed to launch in succession. But due to various complications and delays, it didn’t work out that way.
>
. If they had delivered on their promises, they would have shipped months before our first batch. We wanted to start selling chips so people could make their own units, providing a hedge from a single entity becoming too powerful, and then move onto a new project. That was our main goal. We wanted to prevent this potential monopoly. As it turned out, we became the monopoly we tried to prevent.
> You aren’t doing any mining at all?
> Nope. Fun fact: none of the Avalon team have their own mining units (outside of test units)... We’ve had plenty of opportunities, such as keeping the technology to ourselves and simply mining, but that was never our intention. So how much is that trust worth? We think it’s worth $5000 by itself. Beyond that, the calculation is based on the current difficulty rate so that break-even point occurs in a month. Which, by the way, as an investment vehicle is a fairly unique proposition. It should be mentioned also that the cost of the batch two was also 75 bitcoins. That the exchange rate has moved is out of our control. And in the end, this was never what we wanted. If we wanted to maximize our profit, we could charge much more. For us, this has always been an ideal-oriented problem, not a business-oriented one. This is one of the primary reasons we aren’t clearly in the black. We’re lucky that we held onto the second batch of bitcoins because if it weren’t for the appreciation, we would be very, very deep in the red, which ultimately still isn’t that big of a deal.
(And presumably, they're airmailing the components. Why risk a boat?)
> This is an obvious question, but why aren’t you mining your own chips?
> Like I said, the current reality is vastly different from what we originally had planned. We always figured we would be late to the party. Butterfly Labs and bASIC (another ASIC developer that ultimately failed to launch) were supposed to launch in succession. But due to various complications and delays, it didn’t work out that way. > . If they had delivered on their promises, they would have shipped months before our first batch. We wanted to start selling chips so people could make their own units, providing a hedge from a single entity becoming too powerful, and then move onto a new project. That was our main goal. We wanted to prevent this potential monopoly. As it turned out, we became the monopoly we tried to prevent.
> You aren’t doing any mining at all?
> Nope. Fun fact: none of the Avalon team have their own mining units (outside of test units)... We’ve had plenty of opportunities, such as keeping the technology to ourselves and simply mining, but that was never our intention. So how much is that trust worth? We think it’s worth $5000 by itself. Beyond that, the calculation is based on the current difficulty rate so that break-even point occurs in a month. Which, by the way, as an investment vehicle is a fairly unique proposition. It should be mentioned also that the cost of the batch two was also 75 bitcoins. That the exchange rate has moved is out of our control. And in the end, this was never what we wanted. If we wanted to maximize our profit, we could charge much more. For us, this has always been an ideal-oriented problem, not a business-oriented one. This is one of the primary reasons we aren’t clearly in the black. We’re lucky that we held onto the second batch of bitcoins because if it weren’t for the appreciation, we would be very, very deep in the red, which ultimately still isn’t that big of a deal.
(And presumably, they're airmailing the components. Why risk a boat?)