Last week I challenged anyone who pre-ordered a knobtune to show me their numbers, their data, their projections, based on realistic difficulty, on why this was a sound investment? You know, some FACTS.
No takers. It's obvious most people gambled and ordered blindly, based on the faulty image of knc being a "good" company.
Here's the way I see it:
Imagine you could loan someone bitcoin with the option of being paid back in USD at the value bitcoin was on the day you loaned it or you could be slowly paid back about the same number of bitcoins you loaned them sometime in the future. Unless you knew for sure that bitcoin price was going to increase, you would loan the bitcoins and try to guarantee yourself against ending up with less than you started with. In fact, I would make this deal even if the bitcoin return option was significantly less than what I loaned if the value of bitcoin skyrocketed.
Obviously, if the value of bitcoin skyrocketed, one would have done better by simply buying and holding. If I knew the future and knew that bitcoin would significantly increase in value, I would buy and hold.
By now, you should have realized that pre-ording a miner with the promise of USD refund at any time prior to manufacturing is the exact same scenario. Assuming you could get about the same number of bitcoins back as you spent, it's an attractive offer and many will see it as such.
Now the fun part - Trying to guess the future difficulty! I predict that difficulty will be between 10 and 15 billion when the Neptunes ship (
based on 30% increase per jump - with the increase decreasing by 3% on each adjustment). I also speculate that the power requirements will be higher than advertised and will consume 0.8 W/GH.
With these numbers,
I expect a Neptune to generate 7.5 BTC before it stops being profitable. I had no illusions about receiving more BTC than the ~12/each I spent. And yet I still bought three.
Maybe I'll get lucky and KnC will deliver Neptunes that are more powerful than advertised, or arrive sooner than expected, or BTC will skyrocket in value. One of more of these hopes needs to happen for the Neptune to be profitable. The good news is that I have a few months to see what happens before I have to make a choice about a refund. Of course, I'll likely be able to sell the miner for a considerable amount regardless.
Other possible risks include::
- KnC decides to stop honoring refunds
- BTC value plummets after receiving the miner
- Difficulty is significantly higher than I predict
- Delivery is significantly later than hoped
Aren't we all going to feel guilty when time goes by, difficulty goes sky high, Bitcoin never tops the value of an ounce of gold in the next few months, the math tells us then as KNC prepares to ship that we'll never make back ROI and we all request refunds.