The story so far | Hacker News Reader

The story so far

avalon-asics.com

32 pointsalphydan12 comments

If I were manufacturing what are essentially money printing machines, I think I'd put some serious efforts into security.

On second thought, if I were able to produce machines which can create more currency than I'm selling the machines for, I'd probably think twice about selling them at all.

During a gold rush, you better be selling shovels ;-)

Except that the shovels are also the workers... and they are cheap workers too.

Creating these required huge amount of initial investment. That's why all these companies were taking preorders - to cover up initial expenses. It would of course be ideal for them just to manufacture the machines only for themselves, but if they had money needed for that I doubt they would be interested in some Bitcoin thing in the first place.

Now, I'm pretty sure that they left a considerable amount of chips to theirselves and are mining with them for quite some time.

Pretty good business idea. Solicit back-order to mass produce your own bitmining ASIC's. Use them to mine for awhile until they become obsolete, now dump the trash onto your customers. And onto the next one!

To be fair, it's also possible that enthusiasm for bitcoins would be much lower if the Joe Randoms of the internet didn't feel like they could get in on the gold rush. I suspect that is a big part of why people are interested in it. From that perspective, it seems like a good idea to sell some of the ASICs, even if that is a loss under the constant-demand assumption.

I don't understand why knowing who the team members are IRL is such a huge "security threat". Can someone please explain that to me?

Mostly for the reasons specified in the story - people started showing up at other people's houses.

If some sketchy folks know how to get ahold of someone who produces powerful mining machines, why not kidnap the person and hold them for ransom in exchange for large amounts of bitcoins / large amounts of machines for mining coins.

It's more a security threat to the persons involved than it is to the business as a whole.

That was my understanding of it, at least.

Yeah but why is that unique to bitcoin? How is this different than if people started showing up at Google employee's houses because they know they're well paid? How is this different than people showing up at any wealthy person's house to kidnap them?

My point is that keeping their address secret isn't how wealthy people protect themselves, so why is this so different for the avalon team?

Because they are perceived as wealthy, and are not really wealthy, meaning people will target them for their perceived assets, but they are not wealthy enough to hire extensive private security (And most likely, the parents of that employee don't live in a reasonably safe city either).

The difference here is that they aren't perceived to be wealthy now, but perceived to have the means to generate significant wealth quickly in the future.

Being able to mine anonymous income is attractive to many groups of people. If you kidnap a Google employee, there will be a record tied to names etc.

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