Quote from: casascius on March 07, 2012, 06:30:58 PM

Quote from: Holliday on March 07, 2012, 05:42:50 PM

Quote from: casascius on March 07, 2012, 04:46:05 AM

I am surprised that as a legitimate offering, this would even be offered for sale.

If I were in a position where I thought I'd be able to have a head start on manufacturing ASICs that blew all other miners out of the water, I'd be highly motivated to just keep it all to myself as I pretty much dominated mining. I'd score 7200 BTC a day (with it halving soon, of course).

Or perhaps I could have my cake and eat it too. I could sell rigs for a healthy $30k, knowing that I alone had the upper hand in deciding how productive those rigs were going to be. If for every 10 rigs I made I ran nine and sold one, I'd effectively guarantee that all my customers were competing for 720 (360) BTC and nothing more. The customers I sold it to would have 10x the expectations - in the end, 9x of their expected yield I'd be keeping to myself with my supply of "unsold" rigs that I was running for, um, "extensive burn-in testing" before being sold. (What, you think I'd let them sit idle on a shelf in a warehouse?)

If this product results in centralization of mining, I bet there will be cries for Bitcoin to switch to a CPU-based algorithm!

What about the already existing network of approximately 10 Thash/s? And if they only have 25 units and they meet their expectations, they have 500 Ghash/s. Certainly a nice farm, but nothing that will "dominate mining". Just because they are more efficient doesn't automatically render existing miners unprofitable, especially considering miners that have already passed the break even point of their investment.

I completely disregarded the 25 as I don't see it as any meaningful limit, and my argument would apply to anyone doing ASIC mining, not just these guys in particular. I assume that the only reason that they'd do 25 is for prototyping to keep the risk manageable in case there were any bugs to be worked out, and if everything works as planned, nothing's stopping them from making however many they want.

Right.... if they have 25, the hard part is done. Now, it's just set up the machine and press go.