Yes, let us bask in the moral high ground of not taking preorders. KnC has already shipped 28nm. But it's okay, we are superior to KnC.

Even the most fervent ASICMINER believers don't know what Gen 3 is going to be? Blind faith at its best.

15 @ 0.31

Put your tinfoil hat on, I never understood why ASICMINER never said anything official about Gen 2, and then we find out it was canceled because it was "unsatisfactory".

Yes, I'm aware it's not the unique source of income. I already said that diversifying makes sense, when it works. Right now we have no good hardware and no "meaningful" mining, so "not being dumb" isn't working out that well.


I will leave it to you to exit the ASICMINER echo chamber and do some research of their competitors. I'll give you a hint - the network hasn't reached 5300 TH because of blades and cubes.


I never said I bought in at 5BTC, and I'm not "dilusional" about it's value, in fact, I'm quite realistic. There's no need to resort to personal attacks if you feel I have a strong argument.


It's not "complaining" - it's being realistic. I have no idea why you uphold Friedcat as some deity that cannot be doubted and that we should all worship and never slander. And anyway, shareholders have all the right in the world to "complain" about a company they are invested in - I was part of the original IPO and I can say whatever I want because it was partly my money that allowed Friedcat to do what he did. Most of this thread, especially in the last few weeks, is for emotional support, where you guys keep convincing each other "yeah it'll go back up! Friedcat knows everything and this was his plan! to da moon!". Friedcat is what Americans call a "one hit wonder", if that is the correct terminology.

@ pankkake - yes I did read all the pages, ASICMINER started as a mining company and there are 100s of pages with people being obsessed with the hashrate. Only when it fell into irrelevancy did you start conveniently calling it "meaningless", but it is in fact not meaningless. Expanding to hardware is ok - when it makes sense. Gen 1 made sense because a large number of factors came together at the same time.

BFL and all the other competitors failed - there was no one to compete with. It was still the "gold rush" period for bitcoin - difficulty was still believably low and individuals were buying miners. Old technology was still relevant - let's not forget that Friedcat was basically selling a few chips using 10-year old technology for the price of a decent used car.

Now everything has changed, but for some reason no one realizes this. There are a ton of viable competitors who have actually overtaken ASICMINER and shipped better, faster hardware. ASICMINER is now the one playing catch-up. It is not the gold rush anymore; it is easier for individuals and individual newcomers to see that mining is hardly profitable, hardware becomes obsolete within a month and barely buys back it's buying price if lucky, and all of this will be doubly true come March, when the difficulty will be immense. Friedcat can no longer sell old chips - he must use more modern silicon, which means more manufacturing difficulties, higher costs, and lower margins.

I know all of you want it to go back to 5, I do too, since I put a lot of money into the company. But it's time to stop being delusional and use logic - ASICMINER is not the king anymore, and will likely never be.

@ empoweoqwj, okay, I will admit we can't know what he has been doing. However, how could he have been so successful on Gen 1 and then completely failed this generation? If he has been working his ass off for 12 months, why are we still at 60TH/s after all this time? Why did he go from the most reliable and leading-edge supplier to someone with no relevance whatsoever in the current market? I have read all 798 pages of this thread so I know how fanatically people believe in him being all-knowing and do-no-wrong. But even you must admit he has little to show for in the last few months. Whatever happened, we can't even know, since he is so poor at communicating. Unless you buy 5000 shares, you will get vague updates and numbers once a month, if you are lucky. A far cry from detailed updates every week when we started this venture.

PS expanded out of mining - really? You think immersion cooling is his own product that he's going to sell to people? You think USB hubs and backplanes are good products that will make money?

I think the future of ASICMINER now is really not in their own hands anymore, but depends on the competitors. We now have a vague timeline for Gen 3 chips (how "Gen 3" they are is up for debate); they will probably ship in March or April (providing Friedcat keeps to his promises). This is a huge amount of time in the Bitcoin world... if any competitors were to release a comparable product that actually shipped and was reliable, 1 to 2 months before ASICMINER gets finished, Friedcat is done for. I really have no idea why he sat on his ass after 'winning' Gen 1, but there you go. I'm not even sure who buys miners anymore when the difficulty is jumping so fast, if we could just go back to owning 10-15% of the network and getting good dividends every week, I would be more than happy. Focus on making good hardware and mining instead of packaging all this stuff, shipping it out, customer support, etc.

15 @ 0.29

Cryptographic proof-of-work systems must use strong algorithms to ensure trust. How could Bitcoin be improved to not use resources "unnecessarily"?

Yes, they may be "burning up planetary resources" - but you need to look at the big picture. First of all, not using electricity in this day and age is impossible, so you can't complain that some new technology uses too much planetary resources - you need to go to the source of electricity and complain that we are burning coal/etc. instead of using wind and solar. I think you would have a lot less to contemplate if all bitcoin farms were powered using solar panels and turbines. Secondly, the amount of electricity used for bitcoin pales in comparison to the waste from other sources which have far less pleasant effects on the world than bitcoin.