Hi,
as I cannot yet post in more appropriate sections, let me start here.
Recent relatively high volume rushed Avalon bare chip sales have left me wondering what is the real reason behind inventory dumping.
At first glance one might suggest board manufacturing capacity limitations, chip manufacturing limitations (large minimum amount of chips
in one batch), the wish to calm 51% attack fears or other fairly benign reasons. However, at the current moment Avalon has almost
monopolistic hold of the market - why should one rush to inventory dumping in this kind of situation?
I can see but only one actual reason - to further leverage monopoly, they chose cheapest way to kill arising competition - flood market with
promise of reasonably cheap ASIC rigs. There is no better way to do it than dump already known working chip design to multiple vendors. Anyone
interested notices either chips now or in later phase, the readymade boards just because the publicity. The use of distributed parallel manufacturing of rigs still containing Avalon chips is brilliant in at least three ways:
*Avalon can have reasonably high price per chip now, with the water written promise of high ROI of rigs made from the chips later. Buyer's fallacy is to expect ROI on current projections of difficulty rise that are !mostly linear!.
*Avalon pretty much stops new orders made for competitive products that cannot hope to compete with numerous board manufacturers as a single entity. Assume BFL preorder sell or cancels appearing en masse. I would suggest, that selling the first generation Avalon chips this way is actually the most significant event since the announcement of ASIC chips.
*Avalon has a extremely fast way to raise capital for second generation shrinked die faster and bigger chips. One might be surprised how soon the second generation can arrive.
Any thoughts are welcome.