Quote from: dropt on February 04, 2014, 06:08:18 PM

Quote from: Augusto Croppo on February 04, 2014, 06:04:28 PM

...plus, other ASIC producers are already building their "mining" farms. This is certain and there is no deterrence to stop them to do it. There is, indeed, a very attractive incentive to rise the margin of profits and shift all the risks to the customers. When KnC delivers their customers will have to compete with a difficulty generated by "mining" farms from all ASIC producers.

There was a school of thought at one point that there would be a rise of these massive farms and a massive decrease in the involvement of small-time personal miners. Eventually however, it is believed that these farms will essentially kill each other off. As margins become razor thin the only ones still able to mine at a profit will be the small time miners who have significantly less overhead.

This! ^

Caution! Extreme FUD below.

I have been an optimistic/glass half full miner from day one. Not any longer. In fact, the glass is 3/4 empty. All ASIC manufacturers are now "Black Hats" with maybe the exception of BitMain.

- I'm now quite aware that most of the "delays" are not actual delays but pre-mining time for the "guys with all of the money" to gorge themselves on profits the should have been our's.

- It's obvious to me now that the presale of ASIC miners to the public was never anything more than a way for these shysters to fund their own massive mining farms. I actually knew this before but it's just so freaking obvious now that "presales" were never meant to go beyond the first generation of miners.

- And I suspect that all other 2nd generation miners that were to be released to the public (Neptune, Monarch, etc) will never actually reach consumers hands. They will all be in datacenters whether we want them there or not. And most of us will end-up abandoning them because of their unprofitablity after hosting costs are deducted. And just plain forget about 3rd generation ASICs. They will never reach consumer's hands.

I sincerely hope that all of the MASSIVE "cloud" mining operations will soon be eating each other to survive. With all of the billions of dollars of ASICs about to hit the network, it will soon be unprofitable to mine (even with free electricity) because the overhead just to host the miners will be astronomical.

My only hope now is the collapse of mining doesn't cause the collapse of bitcoin.