- 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.
What makes you think that a "major player" can just jump in to this untested industry that has been around for only a year. And even if they did it is not like they have a huge advantage over the cost efficiency china can provide. Many mobile cpus from china are extremely cheap and powerful.
If intel decided to put as much resources as they put in to cpu development in to creating an asic then surely they could create the best device around I have no doubt about that. But it is complete speculation to assume that any of the major players will jump in to the asic arms war so early and by the time they do, asicminer will already have a firm grip on the market.
Whatever the case I believe FC knows what he is doing and will decide the most profitable route when the time comes. I am just hoping that they come out with a cube v2 using next gen chips so I can buy one.
I have no doubt that dividends from now until the time AM is overrun by intel will be more than 0.3btc.