Quote from: wilth1 on March 15, 2015, 07:10:24 AM

It's clear that retail sales are not in the manufacturers' best interests for the near term unless they are done with big markup. SP's sell out and Bitmain's S5 price ramp-up demonstrate this. Their margins are good now, but aren't big enough at the moment to make the considerable investment required to go the new chip route over graduated underclocking, either. What's more is that we've nearly hit an efficiency wall short of huge investment.

Of course, if the exchange rate were to bounce up to 5 or 600 USD we'd see a large rollout of current gen equipment from all of the builders at the very least, probably paired with expedited chip dev and production as well.

Now that efficiency has nearly plateaued, do you think we'll see another huge (latent) hash rate climb with the next price hike, or will it be much flatter?

Interesting question. I think price stagnation will result in dramatic changes in technology rollout, it takes millions to fund a new architecture. We will see improvements in power consumption before we see massive leaps in total hashrate in my opinion.