So which BTC ASIC company is more successful than KnC?
Bitfury, Bitmain, Avalon, Asicminer, Lketc..
Nobody wants to buy a giant chip that requires $150 worth of cooling when you could use smaller chips with ~$30 worth of cooling.
Bitfury...maybe. KnC already has like $20 million in the bank, while BitFury is borrowing $20 million in venture capital.
Let's not forget BitFury also had "problems actually building working miners" even with its tiny chip. They had to run it at half speed, remember?
Do you really think Bitfury has no money in the bank? They raised $20m on a $270m total valuation. The only reason KNC/HF didn't raise $20m is because nobody wants to invest in them.
Even with a chip that never achieved the full 5GH they still managed to sell/deploy enough hardware to account for 40% of the network.
The rest? Not a chance. Avalon pissed off at least as many customers as HF. Bitmain is still a baby. And AM's latest chip is a dud.
Avalon still managed to sell 9PH (not including self mining) worth of overpriced hardware after "pissing off as many customers as HF" and their first gen was hugely successful.
AM already turned a profit of 210,000 btc and their latest chip is more energy/cost efficient than HF/KNC's chips.
Bitmain has managed to maintain 20% of the network for around half a year now. If Bitmain is a baby does that make KNC a fetus?
I don't know how you can say KNC is the most successful company while they have an incredible amount of pissed off customers demanding refunds and yield issues so bad they can't even ship to the few who still wanted their neptunes.
When you have to pay for electricity and rack space, the trivial increased cooling cost is overwhelmed by savings accrued by much higher density.
The savings on cooling are not nearly trivial when they make up ~25% of your production costs. Also the most dense miner to date (sp30) uses cheap extruded heatsinks.
Regardless, leaving KnC off your list that purported to demonstrate the non-viability of big hot chips was a silly mistake to make.
I agree he should have included KNC in the list of failures.