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If they had enough to build one, they could bootstrap themselves up from that. (It takes about 6 days for an ASIC to generate enough money to make a new one.)
by dbaupp 14y ago
If they had enough to build one, they could bootstrap themselves up from that. (It takes about 6 days for an ASIC to generate enough money to make a new one.)
- wmf 14y agoYou can't build one ASIC; you have to order a batch of thousands and you have to pay over $100K for the masks weeks before you receive the chips.
- pifflesnort 14y ago$100K is nothing for the kinds of profit numbers I'm seeing here.
- mrb 14y agoFirstly, their true NRE costs are closer to $200-300k IMHO. Secondly, $200-300k is not "nothing". I bet they tried to raise investor money, but didn't find any. $210/day/unit is a lot, but Bitcoin still remains relatively a risky investment.
- pifflesnort 14y agoIf these things can print money, then they're worth $200-300k. If they can't, then they're not worth $1.k/ea.
- wmf 14y agoThe problem is that they can print money if they are released before their competition, but we don't know when the competition will ship. (In retrospect we can see that Avalon batch 1 shipped before BFL, but there was no way to know that ahead of time and batch 2 is still unknown.) So I can understand why outside investors would refuse to touch it and why the Avalon developers might have decided to reduce their risk.