Quote from: erk on September 18, 2013, 03:02:01 AM

Quote from: ssi on September 12, 2013, 05:38:14 PM

Quote from: cscape on September 12, 2013, 05:32:48 PM

Of course, you're not just paying for a piece of silicon wafer, but also for the months of design work, the cost of the mask set, as well as a risk premium.

Trust me, most of us are comfortable with that. I'm more uncomfortable with the fact that the prices are staying set right at the ragged edge of profitability, and they're higher than they were originally announced to be.

There is no headroom in the chip pricing, all sorts of unknowns creep in when you are trying to make boards, then you add the fact that the ROI mostly governed by the price of one component, and you enter a high risk scenario.

I think the future of ASIC is small home rigs with no aircon and other overheads, exactly where many of the independent board designs are focused. I may be wrong, but it looks like how BTC difficulty works, it leaves no room for the cost of aircon, data center rental, and staff all of which the small home rig avoids by subsidy of normal living. I don't see the big farms at Bitfury's future clients unless they intend to wind up chip production and retire when the farms eventually become unprofitable.

you seem to be completely dicounting power usage and price. A 'home rig' may cost $0.09-0.19/kWh while a hosted rig at a data center will cost $0.03-0.09/kWh. a few dollars a day per rig, plus shared AC costs, means that hosting a 100 units on cheap power provides enough savings for all your above gripes (rental, techguy, etc)

I know that by paying less than 10c/kWh where I am, that it gives me a decent leg up over much of the USA's home miners, because the power usage will become more important than the hashrate very soon