Quote from: RoadStress on September 02, 2014, 10:57:01 PM

Quote from: jjdub7 on September 02, 2014, 10:42:40 PM

Do you know how much DC contracting costs for an operation this size, from wiring and meet-me rooms to ISP fees and WAN maintenance costs? Do you know the costs FC's contracted for any custom-built hardware used for mining? You're assuming they sold 20-30PH of chips? Including those they sold to their affiliates and franchisees along with the tubes?

Damn, man, you must have some special privileged access to AM's books or be financially clairvoyant. Why are you wasting your time here? You and NotLambchop should just skip the little league here and set up shop on Wall St. Surely you'd make a better return on trading real equities instead of the chump change listed within these shadowy forum threads.

I don't know the costs, but I know that the electrical stuff is expensive and I'm thinking that electrical stuff for 40MW must be a bit expensive.

Since FC doesn't want to share anything then I can only assume yes. And I got my numbers by looking at the big chinese farms. Hashratio(4PH?), RockMiner etc. It seems that I am paying more attention than you as shareholders. At least I am trying to figure stuff with what piece of information I can get, while you as shareholders only wait for FC statements and nothing else.

Yes, the chip numbers are up in the air, but remember that they include sales to Rockminer, BTCgarden, HR - many of whom assemble and resell miners across the customer segments I mentioned this morning in addition to mining on their own or as franchisees. Ergo, the entire 60 PH isn't necessarily coming from ASICMINER alone, but rather its now been split both vertically and horizontally across the transfer (chip) and miner markets along the resale and company mining channels.

As for the DC: cabling is expensive, especially with the prices of the associated metals these days. However, this pricing is usually included as a deferred portion of the normal fixed-fee agreements used to contract data centers. They don't require many staff members for operations, either, so the cost to contract a DC itself is largely structured to maintain an operator's margin over depreciation within these types of commodity contracts.

Additionally, if you're trying to peg hosting costs to any large-scale fiat commercial IT operations, think again. While most large companies have multi-module applications ranging from SAP (HR/finance/accounting) to internal marketing/sales, R&D, and metadata mgmt functions (along with the relevant databases - a key point) hosted on virtual servers (VM's), ASICMINER by comparison has to host one very simple mining application alongside a stratum proxy (which, depending on the network configuration/miner firmware combination used, may not even be necessary either). A lion's share of these costs comes from the need to host servers on servers solely for the purpose of maintaining databases in the closed/private cloud, which mining really doesn't require on the scale of a global business's DC needs.

TL;DR: mining DC's don't cost as much as you think they do.
- due to massive improvements in IT scalability, DC contracting has become a commodity service,
- in countries like China, where both the per capita GDP and level of regulation is less than 1/10th of what it is in the US, DC contracting costs even less
- AM doesn't need additional sites for disaster recovery/failover/redundancy
- DC requirements (rack space, even cooling needs, et al) for a mining operation pale in comparison to reference contracts used by larger global businesses
- chips/hardware scale widely to individual servers via controllers, minimizing the bulk of the assumed costs in a reference model

The point that I repeatedly feel the need to drive home is to use the DC hosting to operate a public pool with a nominal fee to both standardize pool server output and help defer the costs of running the operation. If this is done efficiently, it would greatly contribute to profitability from both a cost reduction and marketing/product reliability perspective.

ASICMINER's value in the market is not solely derived from it's role as a chip or miner manufacturer, but rather from the degree of vertical integration which friedcat has achieved across the mining space from chip production to mining to hardware assembly.