Quote from: Vycid on August 22, 2013, 08:48:37 AM

So, now that I'm behind a real keyboard and things are calmed down a bit (yes, I was on my phone - all my posts today were made from a Galaxy S3. Samsung should put me in a commercial), I'm going to share my thoughts on the update. While the fact that FC hasn't gone incommunicado is definitely a positive sign for longs, I believe that the content of the message is markedly less bullish than the reaction implied.

Quote from: friedcat on August 22, 2013, 05:14:24 AM

Update

We have collected several shareholders' questions for answering.

Could we have an official live hashrate meter from ASICMINER?
We have an internal one, mainly for troubleshooting when some of the racks going down. The hashrate meter based on the blocks mined reflects more of the real speed (plus luck of course). We will buy more bandwidth before making it accessible by the whole internet. It also requires more commitment in maintenance.

For more transparency, is it possible to share a wallet address for depositing income from ASICMINER hardware sales?
We use a different deposit address for each payment transaction. But a centralized nexus address is good. Then people could see how the funds are separated as dividends and expenses.

This is a good thing. Any movement of AM toward transparency is positive, in my book, although longs should be aware that transparency can be a double-edged sword. If things are going well, it will get noticed. If they are going poorly, it will get noticed. It may end up increasing volatility.

Quote from: friedcat on August 22, 2013, 05:14:24 AM

Besides mining, hardware sales, and franchising, are there any other potential sources of revenue?
There are many possible ones considered, but none can support serious sound business model based on a 1-2billion dollar total market value of Bitcoin: selling patents, offering solution for mining farm construction, assembly service, etc.

I've talked before about AM and its refusal to grow beyond an ASIC company. Certainly the upsides of expanding their business with the BTC market in the 1-2B USD range are limited, but if BTC never grows beyond 1-2B USD then AM is in deep shit to start with (FC loves to talk about transaction fees to justify valuation). Their cashflow should allow them to explore and capitalize on new business prospects far better than a start-up. Why is AM so lacking in vision?

Quote from: friedcat on August 22, 2013, 05:14:24 AM

Why has the hashrate dropped the past weeks?
It dropped in different few days. Some of them are internal hardware/network glitches, some of them are luck based. We haven't identified any form of DDOS attacks recently though.

This is a bad sign. Sure, their hashrate hasn't decreased, but they're having trouble managing their hardware at 50 TH. On the bright side, they managed to maintain a stable hashrate for a pretty long period of time, so it's not something they're incapable of, but it's not the trend you want. Downtime was more expected and forgivable close to launch.

Quote from: friedcat on August 22, 2013, 05:14:24 AM

There hasn't been a huge hardware dividend payoff: is it because of reduced margins, or delays?
Because we are collecting funds to get ready for the exponentially increased devices to be assembled in September and October.

How are things going regarding your business plan? Did you account for the sudden network hashrate increase? How is the international expansion of ASICminer coming along?
The business plan is unchanged. The network hashrate increase was still under our projection. The total hash target originally set for the end of this year would probably achieved earlier.
The ASICMiner expansion via franchising is still much within China border. The internationally deployed portion will dominate when the gain of operation cost outweigh the delay and cost of international shipping/assembling abroad.

I'm gonna address these two at once.

Quote

The network hashrate increase was still under our projection. The total hash target originally set for the end of this year would probably achieved earlier.

This is CEO-speak for "we didn't expect this, but we have a plan". Which is unsurprising, since there's still something like 500 TH of Avalon chips still due for delivery, god knows how many BFL units, 100TH/Bitfury firing up, et al. (One must wonder where AM would have been if Avalon and BFL had delivered on time.)

The reason I know it was unexpected is that FC is curtailing dividends to save up for more devices in Sept/Oct. If things were exactly as expected, competent leadership would have known the amount of money required in advance, and smoothed out that deduction over many dividends. Instead, FC decided to cut deeply into this dividend, and the next few (apparently).

So that's either a management failure, or AM recognizes they are in a tighter spot than they expected. Take your pick.

Either way, I suspect that the market was operating on the assumption that AM had already the funds they needed for new devices, so these reduced dividends are a negative surprise. A correction is to be expected.

Finally,

Quote from: friedcat on August 22, 2013, 05:14:24 AM

The internationally deployed portion will dominate when the gain of operation cost outweigh the delay and cost of international shipping/assembling abroad.

This means "we plan to play catch-up when other firms have finished localizing in the regions where electricity and rent are cheapest."

tl;dr - Friedcat is making all the right moves and has great vision, so please implement these crappy ideas so I can execute my put options. Also here is my best attempt at negatively spinning the good news.