Quote from: stripykitteh on May 25, 2013, 12:50:18 PM

Assuming that AM haven't gone higher for the reasons you've articulated, what do you think the fix would be? Deploying kit in separate data centres? Having multiple pools for solo mining? I think I've read that they are in 2 data centres at the moment, or at least they switched from one to another.

It appears that the hardware selling, while reasonably successful, is not going to shift vast quantities of blades (unless the price drops over time), so AM are going to have to solve the problem of deploying vast quantities of blades, if it is in fact the issue that they have at the moment.

Without the details of the psu and network problems, I'll assume them to be solvable. At 40% AM would receive 2400 a day on average (40% of the average of 6000 coins per day), this would be worth $288,000 USD ($120 USD market). Lets make this easy math and say we are currently doing half that $144,000. It seems feasible to scale this out to multiple data centers or separated network racks in a single center. Essentially find the stable network, power and hardware levels and duplicate. For the additional $144,000/1200 bitcoins this seems to be profitable scenario.

An additional solution, that would assist with time to deploy as hash rate/network luck changes, I would keep a 10% (or whatever makes sense) additional hash rate capability deployed (to be explained momentarily).

I have bitcoind running on my desktop monitoring the blockchain inside of hand-rolled workflow framework interfacing with json rpc api of bitcoind. It is easily doable to monitor the number of blocks being generated and (assuming there are soft controls for the mining hardware) ensure that you are receiving on average 2.4 (40%) Blocks of 6 Blocks generated per hour. As the 10% additional hash becomes utilized consistently due to network growth, you deploy more hardware to maintain the 10% buffer. This avoids reactionary deployment and potential loss of income. It allows dynamic adjustment to the network and stable income. It also saves power and wear on hardware, by powering down unnecessary hardware when not needed and maintains the bitcoin network integrity by not surpassing 40% (or whatever) targeted income goal. Also, it should allow you stabilize buffer hardware deployments prior to the need to utilize them to maintain income. (you can test them by re-prioritizing them in the hardware pool, let me know if you want a brain dump on that)

So that being addressed, you can satisfy the core business needs (mining with hardware for BTC) with math. Anytime hardware arrives and is not need to maintain the hash rate buffer, it can be sold. The price should be set in a way (which again is math against supply and demand) that ensures all surplus units are sold. This would additionally allow a certain level of SLA to be maintained with the channels producing the hardware. My understanding is this hardware (didn't I read it costs around $100 USD to make) can be produced and priced competitively to compete with the other vendors who seem to be coming online.

Anyhow, that's how I would do it.

Edit: grammar and clarity