Quote from: RenHoek on December 03, 2013, 07:57:35 PM

Quote from: reactor on December 03, 2013, 07:47:05 PM

Quote from: kendog77 on December 03, 2013, 07:38:37 PM

Quote from: rocks on December 03, 2013, 07:26:54 PM

Quote from: RenHoek on December 03, 2013, 07:04:34 PM

A reasonably priced batch of Saturn/Mercury type units would sell out no problem at this point since KNC is 'proven', but all their store shows is the Neptune.

I can not understand this either and KnC makes no sense in not offering Saturn/Mercury miners "in mass".

Any ASIC business usually develops a chip and then runs it for at least 1 year. Now that their first design is proven, bugs are worked out and NRE costs recouped, KnC could do large volume runs of the older line and price these things at levels that blow the competition away. Everyone will flock to them since they are proven. Or they could just offer the ASICs and let the 3rd party board developers run with it.

In the ASIC business the high-volume player always wins in the long run, it makes sense for any successful bitcoin ASIC vendor to take this route early to establish themselves. IMHO KnC is opening the door for Black Arrow or other similar ASICs to take a higher volume route with 3rd party board developers.

Doing that may kill the goose that lays the golden egg. I think the reason Knc is doing limiting batches is to avoid driving up the difficulty to the point where it is no longer cost effective for them to manufacture new ASIC devices.

Every machine Knc delivers effectively pushes down the value of their future devices, which is one of the great paradoxes of the zero sum bitcoin mining game.

Yeah, but with that in mind...

KNC just sold X Neptune units to returning customers. Lead time is 3-4 weeks before the (more expensive but same f'ing thing) Newbie Neptunes ship, per their site. Newbie Neptunes will see 2-3 diff changes between the original N ship date and the NN ship date.

The later shipping units are more expensive, returning customer discount or not that is bullshit in the ASIC world. Butterfly Labs raised prices for basically the same exact hardware and the community shit a thousand bricks at them. KNC does it and it is "Fa la la, KNC loves their first customers that much!". *head scratching*

So don't say KNC isn't in it for the money (tactical and ethical?), rather, they seem to have a good sense on how to maximize their profits while minimizing their own workload to avoid the scenario of "we sold more than we could make". Tactical - yes. Ethical - er, don't vendors generally lower prices in accordance with difficulty + later shipping window considerations? Or am I missing something here?

ethical... eg. they promissed to not flood the hashrate and dont ship new machines till march/2014...

Agreed, they appear to be living by their miner protection statement:

https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-24