Quote from: aerobatic on July 23, 2014, 11:40:17 PM

Quote from: tzortz on July 23, 2014, 11:20:51 PM

Quote from: aerobatic on July 23, 2014, 11:06:22 PM

Also, the companies who have already produced asics in a previous generation (kncminer, bitfury etc).. have already amassed huge cash piles, both of dollars, and bitcoins... and have the firepower needed to do their next asic without requiring huge pre-orders from punters. Also, some companies are raising external money from VCs or investors. Some may even IPO..! The irony is that the only way that customers can guarantee a supply of bitcoin miners is to pre-order them... because the companies that dont need pre-orders and can already afford to pay for their own NRE and production are the companies that can afford to build their own private mines and not ever need the hassle of taking customer money and all the associated customer support overheads. an asic company that doesnt have a customer support department is a tiny fraction of the size of one that has lots of customers!

Are you kidding us???

Knc did not require preorders to build their huge datafarms?

Be serious man.

KnC were the first to have a high end asic (28nm), and were taking pre-orders in June 2013, with deliveries starting in september. they took huge pre-orders.. and continued selling from stock after deliveries arrived. they had the benefit of being one of the first large scale companies who got most things right, and they were early enough to have very good margins. they were selling at $17/GH. Compare that to Spondoolies who are selling the SP30 at less than $1/GH ! the costs arent significantly different so they had a huge margin advantage. Spondoolies is operating with MUCH slimmer margins than KnC was operating at when it launched the jupiter (and even neptune)

then they delivered more or less on time with something that was more or less what people thought they were getting, so they got a lot of goodwill (and plenty of cash). When it came time for them to do pre-orders for neptune, they had significant goodwill and a rising bitcoin price meant people were eager to place big ticket pre-orders. for neptune, customer pre-orders helped them underwrite their production costs... but if they didnt have pre-orders they wouldve still been able to build a pretty sizeable private mine.. just maybe not as big as it is now.

it is also good to point out that knc failed their customers big time after the jupiter delivery, a lot of promises were broken, refunds for btc took on average 2 months, for wire took 3 months, the hash while you wait was sabotaged by the free neptune, and so on. Definitely not as bad as BFL, BFL is the worst. They even sold used equipment to super jupiter customers.
knc has never sold from stock, they always sold pre orders.

As a lesson to be learned it is good to stay away from all pre orders, we should limit ourselves to only buy from stock not pre orders.