Re: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

My statement wasn't a value judgement on the choice to pay more per Ghps than a device is likely to earn, just that this seemed to be happening - and not just with Blade customers either. I'm certainly not saying that the decision to buy was stupid, just that the choice was apparently not motivated by profit.

Either that, or they have different assumptions about the likely future income of such a device than you or I or others do.

Although I agree with other sentiments - if a device is deemed to be worth more to asicminer as a miner rather than as a sale unit, then we should mine with it. However that assumes we have the ability to deploy all our units - and given that that's not the case, as I understand it, selling them seems wise from a shareholder's perspective.

If ASICMiner only adds 100Ghps to the network over say the next 100 days and the network hashrate remains the same forever after, a Blade would take ~550 days to pay for itself, assuming constant uptime. So the Blade is worth far more as a sale unit than a mining unit, if people are willing to spend more than the device is likely to earn over a lifetime.

Not sure how you got that. Using those numbers I get that a Blade pays for itself in 148 days. Obviously unrealistic since everyone knows that more TH is going to come online everywhere.

That was total back of the envelope stuff. Using a larger envelope and a better pencil, I got a slightly better result:

The estimate is for a linearly increasing hashrate from 75 to 175 Thps over 100 days, and then 175Thps from then on starting at 75Thps on day 1.. That means about 8.5btc in the first 100 days, and then 0.2 btc per day thereafter. 76btc in 440 days. What did you get for each section?

Now I have my retina screen envelope and electronic clutch pencil so I don't have to try and use log tables from memory, it's 33.9 btc for the first 100 days and 0.2btc per day thereafter - or a total of 76btc in 310 days.

Much better, but still not fantastic. Especially since the chances of the hashrate only increasing by 100Thps and then maintaining 175 Thps from then on is pretty remote.