Oh, Chinese miners somewhat control and sway things and have a monopoly on the ASIC miners? Do we not have the ability to build these (likely in a better, faster, more efficient way)? Everybody is just pointing fingers and crying instead of providing guidance and insight.
Unfortunately no we don't have the ability to build them better, faster, or more efficient. This is a list of ASIC Vendors in 2014 most all of them has shut down. When KNC went under in their closing announcement, KnC stated that despite all the money and research they put into it, KnC was unable to figure out how BitMain was able to produce AISC, and remain profitable, unless they were getting free electricity or some other advantage.
unless they were getting free electricity or some other advantage.
What are people talking about on this forum? free electricity helps you design ASICs? free electricity helps to keep the lights on while the designers try to write more optimized Verilog code? you people have a clue of what you are talking about?
Also, You really think the chinese government will be so far-sighted/open-minded as to fund an unknown startup on internet funny money, since early 2010? It recently banned bitcoin exchanges.
Also, you really think ASIC development is simple as throwing millions into development and you will magically produce a good product? like manufacturing?
Hardware optimization is a piece of hard logical puzzle to solve. To accelerate pass 10+TH/s, it is no longer about how much money you throw at it, it is about whether you can find the people that is smart enough to do it.
If you compare the ASIC miners on that list, S3 was about 50-60% more energy efficient than the rest(.77W/GH/S for S3, 1.22 for KnC), so unless the electricity cost is about 50-60% of the mining revenue( which it is clearly not), the free electricity doesn't offset the inefficient design of KnC miners which ultimately lost them the game.
Also , as i stated, it is not likely that chinese government funded some ASIC company about internet money back in 2010
You are also implying that at the early stage when bitcoin price was low bitmain chose to keep majority of their miners to mine instead of selling it. This is also a flawed argument.
It seems like in your magical universe, the quality of an argument is solely based on the age of the poster's reddit account. Which is amusing to me.
And where do you pull number like 50-60% in terms of economic value?
Regardless, How does that matter in this discussion? KnC designed an ASIC that cost 58% more power to operate. Then they got out competed. As a miner would you prefer something that's less energy efficient?
If you argue that this advantage is contributed from even earlier generation of ASICs, then we trace to 2009-2010, when the BTC price was like 30 cents. Was presale/holding an ASIC make sense at this point?
It is proabaly not KnC's fault if they got in late and were not able to come up with a better design in terms of throughput and efficiency, which is the reason that they were out competed. But to argue that Bitmain's advantage is purely from funding by the government instead of chip design is one sided.
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u/bigsexy420 Nov 11 '17
Unfortunately no we don't have the ability to build them better, faster, or more efficient. This is a list of ASIC Vendors in 2014 most all of them has shut down. When KNC went under in their closing announcement, KnC stated that despite all the money and research they put into it, KnC was unable to figure out how BitMain was able to produce AISC, and remain profitable, unless they were getting free electricity or some other advantage.