No problems dude, I was never gonna do this so it's cool someone was willing to. The history of the ASIC race was intense, at least for me. I was dying to get into ASIC mining but for the life of me even being a newb I could not understand giving out an interest free loan to complete strangers on the internet without any kind of record. I also couldn't figure out why they would sell me a machine for less than they could use it themselves for.
I actually coined a new phrase, investomer. Which is someone who invests in the company but only has the benefits of being a customer of the company. It was wildly unpopular back in the day, I took a ton of heat for being to "establishment" but whatever, I didn't get scammed but I was so close literally a click away once!
Black Arrow was another one I forgot to mention
The Original Avalon story and them being the first ones to produce a commercial ASIC miner was interesting. I remember an article where the kid (yifuguo sp?) was sitting in a car with the first ever wafers of chips, I forget the percentage but it was a large percentage of the network hashrate literally sitting in his hands!
Hashfast was another intense one.
Jesus most of these deserve a post of their own LOL.
Thanks for doing these I love history and you're other threads were great as well bro!
The new "investomers" are heavily throwing their crypto at ICOs
I've thrown a bit of $ at cloud mining at Genesis Mining which didn't work out too bad (did it at the right time)
Generally I like buying near end of life Asics and getting the last bit of value out of them before they become uneconomical. No real ROI required because I can buy them for the cost of the PSU and not have the risk and worry of having them shipped or losing $ due to permanently delayed shipping. The mining margins are quite small. I learned from when I sold some miners and bought BTC with the proceeds. I made more gains from the BTC purchase than I would have if I used the miners for the next 2 years.
I do quite like the idea of mining and kept my foot into it most of the time. Even if the miner functioned better as a bathroom heater than mining crypto.
In the early days having a few decent miners meant you could take over 51% of the network hashpower of a smallish alt coin.
I've often thought of picking up some museum pieces along the way. Oldest retired ASICs I have is a U3 and some Gblades.
My current favorites are the Innosilicon miners. Bitmain just has too much control.
You are right - each of them could have a thread dedicated to them. I do try to link as much as possible to the old threads that are "as it happened".
Thank you for the compliment. If I hadn't discovered the rich history on here I'd probably still be a once or twice a month poster.
I think you'll like this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140099.0 It was the first avalon miner to be delivered to a customer.