Quote from: dakelv on April 14, 2013, 04:46:35 AM

I like your approach. You are a very scientific person

Thanks. I have a couple of other posts I'm working on. I redid the growth rate at a weekly basis, added in the BFL reported initial ship date and the fact that they're saying that all current orders will be shipped by June - to estimate the flow of new ASICs. For that one we just used the assumption of the mid-line from all of these calculations. And then charted it. When I have time I'll post the rest.

Here's the one take away though. For 2500$ you could purchase X BTC today, right? Today that would be about 25 bitcoins. So the break even point on the cost of the miner is 25 bitcoins. But your time, effort, and electricity have to be worth something too. If over the life of the miner you can't break even on all of that combined, you might as well just purchase the coins outright and watch movies.

I find the whole thing very interesting. Because the whole market of BFL miners was that for a relatively low cost you can process a lot of hashes. But then if everyone buys them, at a fairly quick point they become worth less than that low cost. BFL responded to the frenzy by doubling the price. But by our estimated this only encouraged more people (including me) to buy.

Here's a good question... Would BFL be willing to tell us the total number of THs in all of their orders? Because this directly relates to the value of their boxes. If not, why not? Avalon didn't hide how many THs they were going to be adding to the network. They let the community know. But BFL isn't talking. Their silence makes some think they're not going to ship anything. I don't believe this. I think they'll actually ship in a couple of weeks. I think they are silent because they know they've already reached the saturation point. And coming out with the info now would stop their sales and maybe get some sales cancelled.

My theory is that instead of saying "hey stop buying" they raised the price to try to get people to stop buying. But it sort of backfired in one way and not in another, because orders shot up from 600 a day to 1000 a day. Maybe they need to double the prices again.