hi everyone
i want to get my hands on any hardware - bulk - group buys whatever... it just seems so complicated. trying to chase up the resellers, they're in business one second out the next.
Who is in the UK and sells mining equipment in bulk?
I've had about 30 tabs open trying to find out the last few hours...
That's because it is complicated. The ASIC chips are over priced and have to be made or aquired in bulk that means you need a lot of cash upfront hence the group buys.
A whole bunch of ASIC vendors have sprung up essentially with no money for R&D so they get crowd funded with pre-orders that have to wait for months. Most other industries don't work like this. I don't think it's a good thing, because normally to get venture capital you need to present a strong management team and business plan. The pre-order caper bypasses this quality assurance, as we have already seen, you end up with many dodgy ASIC vendors.
The chips simply cost what they cost to produce. ASIC development is very, very expensive from design to production, they must reclaim their costs to make them. The fabs don't really care if the chip price is good for your bottom line or not, it is what it is. Not to say the demand for them isn't adding to the price a bit somewhere. Though at current market valuations, the chip price isn't so bad anymore generally. As these see more consistent mass production the cost decreases along with market competition which is now heavy.
Much of this gear is batch run by small groups of designers, in that finding consistent sources of mining gear is difficult at the moment, and demand for them ensures these small batches are sold out quickly. Only ASICMiner seems to have a full production with gear generally available consistently. Some say their stuff is overpriced, but at the moment you are paying more for availability in being able to order gear and get it in a few days, opposed to waiting for a fresh batch of something else for weeks or months.
Otherwise I agree, for the kinds of volume some on this board are capable of I don't understand why almost none of them seem able or willing to set up a basic online storefront with something like Bitpay to accept transactions. I know myself this only takes a day or two to set up something basic because that is how long it took me to develop BlockBurner's online store (currently not live). There seem to be more shops online than there were though. This is a cottage industry still, more time will see more maturity as we have seen so far.