I'm seeing a lot of posts on the boards and chatter on IRC from people that just really don't understand what's going on with Bitcoins. While we don't mind helping folks out, after a while it get's to be a bit tedious to answer the same questions, over and over. Sorry to burst your bubble, but...
Great post, I rarely concur with everything anyone says, but this is about as close as it comes.
It's pretty easy to ignore the sale of 50,000 cards...
Really? The people at AMD getting paid millions to ensure each little % of the market is just going to 'ignore' 50k+ cards? .....
why?We've already had this conversation, and I've explained it in detail. So I'll add one final point, if you don't expect them to change their development process for bitcoin, then you can only mean for them to aggressively market to miners. This also costs millions of dollars, to tap into a relatively non-expanding market, which essentially doesn't matter. If the OPs numbers are right, 50,000 / 35,000,000 = 0.14%. That's using 200MHash/second as your card rate, which is assuming miners are buying 5770s, $100 cards (or an average of about $5million of influx). Not to mention this assumes that 100% of all cards mining were purchased new specifically for mining (and not used). Assuming every miner bought the most expensive possible AMD card generating the most money for AMD, a 6990, which gets about 800MHash/sec (generous), 13THash = 16,250 6990s, or 11Million dollars at retail rates. Now assume AMD spends 5 million dollars to promote bitcoin and AMD cards for mining, it doubles the bitcoin market, to 16,250 more 6990s, AMD has now lost money, as unless they have a 50% markup, the 11million dollars is not returning 5million directly to AMD. They have also now doubled the hash rate and/or difficulty (to 26Thash and 3.4million respectively) causing huge resistance to mining in the future and likely a huge drop off of people interested in mining.
How about
you answer
why? they would do this then?