Quote from: tempestb on June 17, 2014, 05:25:36 PM

Mining is affordable if miner manufacturers lower their prices. Everytime the difficulty rises by X percent, the manufacturer needs to lower their price by an equal percentage or risk being priced out of the market. The hardware company that can best afford to adapt to that is the one that will survive.

I think you are missing the point.

Over the longterm, the most important factor when calculating mining returns will be electricity price. If you are paying 20ct/kwh, you can get the cheapest equipment on the planet and still not make a profit.

Equally important is equipment and maintenance cost. This can be provided in the cheapest way possible, if the manufacturer builds a large quantity of (ideally)
efficient units and deploys them in a large scale to save on costs.
This could be an Allied Control Datatank container.
When building your miners for immersion cooling from the start, you save on costs for heatsinks, fans etc. and can deploy more chips per pcb.

Savings from scaling alone can easily account to another 20% cost reduction in comparison to sending individual people one miner at a time. (Which is the reason behind bulk customers getting better prices.)

The manufacturer can then plan his production more reliably, and offer the best prices available.

When negotiating for hosting of a 1MW container, which only needs electricity and internet connection, you will also be able to secure much lower hosting costs thand any individual at home.
(Think 4-6ct/kwh, or even less).

When hosting and purchasing equipment, the advantage lies in the numbers.
Therefore a fully maintained solution can have enormous advantages for individuals and peace of mind for manufacturers.