- How will Gen 3 be divided between mining, franchising and hardware sales?
It depends on the users of our chips. It is a safe bet that we will be moving more to pure chip distribution. But if the edge of low cost on whole devices and deploying still exists in 2014 on our side, we will do more mining/franchising/hardware sales ourselves.
He said it himself. Notice even the word "pure".
I don't know why are you guys so keen on dismissing that.
I'm not saying it will be in this next deployment, but it will happen.
AM value proposition might be good as a vertically-integrated mining hardware manufacturer today, but when planning for the future and looking at the company numbers, things may be different.
So what are you implying, that FC is expecting and planning for a future in which AM can better design and more cheaply manufacture Bitcoin ASICs than a major player like Intel, AMD, NVIDIA or Marvell? Even the smaller players like Cypress are likely to outperform in terms of both chip efficiency and cost per wafer (and are likely to jump in sooner).
Bitcoin mining is within spitting distance of becoming a serious market for the big players.
I would suggest that it is actually in ASICMiner's interest that Bitcoin does not grow beyond it's current market cap for many years.