I doubted that these ASIC rigs would ship any time soon. Wouldn't it be more profitable for the vendors to simply to delay/cancel orders and run the rigs 24/7 themselves?
Why would anyone wants to sell the goose who lays golden eggs while gold cost more than the goose?
They'll pile up cash from "preorders", mine bitcoins and when time is right - will dump outdated devices to customers.
From BFL's perspective if they don't release first they're dead in the water. They don't know where their competitors are compared to them but they recognize it's a winner take all situation. The natural thing to do would be to take pre-orders to fund the manufacturing and start realizing profits now. Also, if your competitors are offering pre-orders you should be too.
* Buy up $10K worth of devices
* Make your money while flooding the market with fast and easy BTC
* Sell off all your hardware after the profit margins have cratered
* Wait for new hardware and rinse and repeat
Personally I will be extremely glad when the first wave hits as the hoarders will start feeling the pinch of inflation.
Yes, buy these are 110nm v1 designes, it looks like they will be able to squeeze something like 10x per watt by moving to better process and iterating on design. And probably additional 10x in cost by ordering more than current quantities that are in the ballpark of the smallest possible order.
Right now entire network runs at speed equal to all hardware in first two Avalon batches (300 and 600 units). When batch 2 and 3 and BFLs hit in the future, everything else is going to be wiped out. But then it will be wiped out again by the next iteration.
Only if they're "long BTC". What makes you think they are? They're just providing shovels & tools to "miners in a gold rush". Historically, such providers have always done phenominally well.
At least they get the rigs at production cost to run them---selling them for good ol' USD may just be a hedge or sideshow, only time can tell.
If anything this is an extremely interesting time in currency experimentation. Side effect of this is massive energy cost, another awesome side effect is hardware/supercomputer miniaturization and evolution. Great for really hard problems like verification (as in mining here) and maybe brain research/processing or other really hard data crunching problems.
http://thenextweb.com/au/2011/06/23/abc-employee-caught-mini...
Doesn't mention anything about the computing capability of those servers though.
Can you explain this in more detail? I don't understand what decentralization has to do with miners' profit.
Miner's profits have to do with the stability of the network and the demand for bitcoins. At high bitcoin prices, their return is better than when the prices are low, other things (thing, mining difficulty) being equal. It's much like gold mining: it has become much more profitable of late because the difference between extraction price ($250 to $400 per ounce in most places) and sale price (roughly $1,500 per ounce) is how much the miner takes home.
Decentralization increases this price because it makes bitcoin sound. If there's no one door to knock down, or one person to subpoena, the cyberpunk currency can robustly survive losses in its network and still have enough computing power trained on it to prevent attacks.
That said, I've half-joked that probability of receiving my miner is probably about 0.98^(USDBTC).
- Are reciprocal judgements possible in a lawsuit such as this hypothetical example?
- What is to stop the defendent from liquidating and reappearing as a new legal entity?
Liquidation: Corporate governance issues are a matter of the country where the defendant is organized. So if the law there allows them to do it, they can. I'm less familiar with the process of chasing the money. Trying to remember back to law school here: In the US, the debt doesn't just disappear. It would either attach to the old entity (which would have to be paid a fair price for the acquisition of its assets) or the new entity (which acquired its assets and liabilities per the acquisition agreement). So if it has no assets to begin with, it's possible. If it has real assets, it's more difficult to do. Not impossible, just more difficult.