i wonder what the production cost is on a line of ASICs

curious what the margins are for new machines

ASIC sellers claim to adjust prices to current bitcoin prices but surely there’s a limit there

when you think about it, a good % of current “miner rewards” are repayment of the equipment cost

so the total “new supply” value capture is actually flowing pre-emptively to chinese ASIC vendors/makers

I wouldn’t be surprised if a decent chunk of miners never break even on equipment costs either; the difficulty spike is a real depreciator

ive heard rumors that new manufacturers hook up the miners and run them for a bit before shipping them out. not that this is necessarily provable but it’s incredibly smart

a new, more efficient miner is eorth the most before the additional hashrate is priced into the difficulty

*worth

i mean i get that it takes a few months to build a new machine but the 2-3mo deposit setup most ASIC manufacturers use is

you send them money in advance and they ship out machines in a batch a few months later

couple this with the fact that hydro energy is supposedly free for certain times of the year — I should really look to see where this lines up with ASIC production schedules

anyway, that’s a huge value capture by equipment makers. the pre-priced in earnings before shipment plus an “estimated 3mo” return on the machine; which inevitably is way longer because the hashrate increase isn’t calculated into that

net net, I wouldn’t be surprised if some huge % of block value is actually captured by the ASIC industry

anyway, buying 2nd hand machines is probably where it’s at but also yikes that difficulty spike

at some point the ASIC performance curve will level out, ideally you’d be the first buyer of a near-top machine. but even then your expected payback is gonna decay every time a new machine comes online

the real place to be is an ASIC maker, skimming the first un-allocated weeks of usage and then selling it for a premium of the next X months estimated production

so why do people buy ASICs and get into mining at all?? eh eventually the miner will go a little bit profitable, maybe and free cashflow for no work or maintenance costs is verrrrry sexy

is bitcoin mining fucked? i mean yeah if you dont have the resources to either extremely cheap power or early access to top of the line machines .... i get that making those payback spreadsheets is fun

the real move would be to figure put the ASIC performance limit and then buy a bunch of 2nd hand machines at discount during a sell off

or become a shovel maker yourself

s/o to the person at my local meetup trying to offload some GPUs tho. respect.