I would say before they sold the used S5's they likely had the chip design ready for S7's and likely working prototypes. I thought you had a inside source or saw something we didn't the way you worded you saw something.
It's really speculating not "seeing" i think that you are doing. Just as I am doing.
I'm pretty sure the "used" S5s they were selling had already been replaced, or were in process of getting replaced, by S7 units, and a few of the early ones may have been replaced by S5+ units.
I can't say for 100% certain though, since I'm not working at Bitmain's farm facility(ies).
Strange that you now seem to have the same opinions you argued agianst in the Q7 thread.
I do? I've NEVER said anything about anyone deliberately restraining diff increases. What the heck are you talking about?
It IS possible with enough equipment to drill all the earths reserves of oil in a period of 20 years.
Untill the next oil technology breakthrough. Oil also has major economic limitations on how PROFITABLE it would be to drill it all out that fast, which is why it's never happened and is why we're not likely to "run out" of oil for a good century or more (though we might see more short-term shortfalls as we have done in the past).
There is some similarity of oil and bitcoin though, in that they are both limited in available product TO "mine" - the biggest difference is the artificial limits on how fast Bitcoin CAN be mined, but it still makes sense for a big miner (be that a manufacturer or not) to push to get as many as it can now BEFORE OTHERS BEAT IT TO THEM, and makes ZERO sense for a miner to try to "hold back the hashrate" - there are too many folks that WON'T collude to make that a viable strategy, unlike oil production where the number of significant producers is strictly limted by the HUGE PRICE OF ENTRY and the limitation of most major oil producing nations having nationalised their oil and access to it (The US and UK are the only significant exceptions to that last, and even the UK has been semi-nationalised for a lot of the time it's oil industry has existed).
P.S. - who do you consider the "big three" - there's more than 3 makers still around, though a few don't sell to the public any more.
D'Beers (sp?) is a very different situation from oil. One company in one country controlling the majority of the "reserves" of Diamonds is in no way comparable to the number of producers and countries in the Oil industry - even the Saudis and their "largest proven reserves of any country in the world" are nowhere near having the kind of control D'Beers has over diamonds (witness the current "oil price war", which certainly is NOT maximising profits for anyone).
Now if a new magic chip is invented like the gpu to asic chip jump
Closest we'll see to that sort of thing would be a "full custom" chip in 14/16nm - at this point the cryptocoin ASIC state of the art is too close to the leading edge of semiconductor technology in general for more than 1 more major efficiency jump in the next few years. The big jumps in ASIC have been about playing "catch-up to the state of the art", and there's only one more such jump available at this point and for the next few years.