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When I was starting a BTC ASIC company (don’t worry - it failed to attract investment) in 2011, one of the things that always spooked investors was the slide sh
by ttul 8y ago
When I was starting a BTC ASIC company (don’t worry - it failed to attract investment) in 2011, one of the things that always spooked investors was the slide showing transaction volume. Even in those early days, one had to really stretch one’s imagination to believe that Bitcoin could one day take over from Visa/MasterCard as a payment method of choice.
But we did understand its value as an alternative store of wealth, and potentially as a way to transfer money across borders more cheaply. I think the former utility has been somewhat dented by the steady drop in value since its peak. And the latter isn’t really all that amazing of a value prop when you consider that regular old PayPal isn’t that expensive and the set of situations in which it does not work is really small.
Not to mention that SWIFT is really ancient but also works well and can be endlessly improved...
- amelius 8y agoWhat does it take to actually make BTC ASICs? In my understanding, the hash functions are quite simple and just do things like XOR, and SHIFT, and perhaps ADD/SUB, but not multiply or divide. So the main difficulty would be to do everything at the lowest possible amount of power. But I could be wrong.
- gammateam 8y agoyes, we stopped making application specific integrated circuits (ASIC) back in 1980 in favor of general purpose processors that do all applications decently fast. there is no rocket science to making an ASIC because we already know how to, and its economically viable again to dust off that knowledge
- ttul 8y agoYou are correct. The ASIC engineering was routine. It was all about justifying the enormous NRE costs... back in early 2011, BTC was a curiosity and not well known at all. Investors were not easy to convince.