Yes, it’s possible that competitor statements about their tech had an impact on your presales.
However, since your presale specifications changed multiple times, including the delivery dates, isn’t it just as possible (if not more likely) that the way you executed the presale program could, itself, be the main reason for whatever impact on presales Obelisk experienced?
At the time, Obelisk had the most efficient machine on the market (notwithstanding the whatsminer machine, which hadn’t yet been announced), even despite missing spec. Sales dropped off tightly corresponding with the rumor that the Innosilicon machine was actually 4.4 TH/s.
No we never shipped any Ethereum miner. The first chip came back functional but there is some performance/stability issue that required a fix to address. We now have the fixed chip back and it is looking promising.
What complicates the situation is that there are multiple players each producing miners. So it is very difficult to model the right amount of miners that will maximize profit. What often happens is that you will be forced to drop prices and sell your stock before the competitions do. It is often very dynamic and chaotic.
Miner companies like Innosilicon typically don’t want to do self-mining because it stretches out the capital cycle and put stresses on cash flow. It is usually forced into self-mining if the market price for miner is depressed thus self-mining might be more desirable. Another reason is that there will be sub par machines that is not good for sale but can be used on a self-mining basis to recover a portion of the investment.
It’s good to do a post mortem on this, and I’ll help provide a perspective on how this works as a consumer but also behavioral economics.
Let’s concede that you had the best performing unit on the market, but even if they the units were technically the best performing they did not meet the performance expectations that you set with consumers. And yet, your customer approach has still been “it’s the best soup on the street and it’s late you’re going to like it.” You used a handcuff approach to customers and customers do not like that – or their shacklers.
So yes, in that context, a competitor comes into the market and says “we have another product and it’s going to do X or Y,” then consumers make choices based on credibility. On that front there are no saints in this business. But customers have real data at that point about how you handle them as customers and they’re reconciling your prior promises with your treatment then.
For example, you’re still sending Batch 5 orders of DCR-1s to customers today, even with dozens and dozens of people on your Discord posting that these devices are losing money and aren’t being used. (The environmental damage of this alone will be a topic I’ll turn to next: you come from a generation that should be protecting our environment and producing thousands of computers that go immediately unto the trash is a tragedy).
This is how consumers behave: you set the expectations with customers on what you’re selling and how you’ll do business. You are selling your credibility. You’re losing that credibility quickly by your practice, and even if competitors’ practices aren’t ideal, consumers are making a comparative choice. Here are your stats:
You see, you’re looking for externalities but you did not do what you said you would do on any of these things and you’ve only delivered an effective product (the SC-1) in a context where you cut out the competition from the field of play.
With the GRN-1, you still have an opportunity to do the right thing now. Don’t make the mistake that you made before by digging in and producing rigs late that customers don’t want because they’re not what you promised and then moving on. You won’t make your delivery times, and you should start now to offer GRN-1 refunds.
It’s never too late to do the right thing.
Thank you for your honesty. That finally solves the question about the availability of the mysterious A10.
I’m very surprised at how long it took Innosilicon to fix the problems with the A10. You are delayed by at least 7 months as initial shipments were scheduled for September 2018. Why the long delay? How do you guarantee people who pre-order your Grin rigs that Innosilicon won’t be have the same delays? Otherwise, they are better off buying both the Obelisk CC31 and CC32 miners.
On a different note, how will A10 be competitive with Linzhi’s upcoming ETH miner? It’s 3x your performance and uses HBM. Chen Min is shipping in June.
Interesting dilemma! How does your CEO, Gordon Ao, delineate the difference between mining with defective mining rigs or commercially viable rigs? I mean if you already have the infrastructure for mining, how does Gordon resist the urge to make more profits by secret mining.
You raise some good points here (I’ve been picking on Obelisk but you are right to point out the issues here with Innosilicon).
One suggestion that a community like Grin might consider is to have a Code of Conduct that vendors must sign up to in order to have tech-coordination discussions with community founders. Vendors gain entry to privileged discussion with coders in exchange for agreeing to abide by certain expectations.
The Code of Conduct could be as simple as this.
These would be binding on any vendor that chooses to collaborate in the same way that NDAs and other instruments are. It would hold the vendors directly accountable to the community by virtue of some simple rules. Vendors could still develop products independently without signing on but the benefit of agreeing to the Code of Conduct should be apparent for access.
Obelisk is not having difficulty making the Cuckatoo31 design work. Everything is on-schedule, and on-target for performance metrics.
Your open letter included a demand for a full refund. The terms of service that you agreed to upon buying the miner indicated that refunds would not be possible. We offered a buyback program whereby you could receive partial compensation in return for releasing us from the obligation to finish manufacturing and shipping your units (several hundred dollars per machine). As you skipped over this buyback option, Obelisk still had a legal obligation to deliver the units that you ordered.
We have not delivered hazardous waste, we have delivered fully functional DCR1 mining machines, per your order.
We have substantially upgraded and refined our processes at Obelisk to ensure that we are capable of meeting delivery targets. We’ve posted about this at length already, but we’ve made changes all the way from our firmware strategy to our chip specification simulation to our manufacturing pipeline.
This is a non-answer. Innosilicon at some point decides how many wafers to order. That number should be disclosed to customers, as that number directly impacts the returns that the customers will see. Especially if machine margins are not known, and the manufacturer both has the capability to self-mine and a history of self-mining, there is a big risk to the customer that the manufacturer will produce more machines than make sense at the customer price.
If Innosilicon refuses to disclose total production volumes, its customers are fully trusting that a reasonable and profitable number of machines have been made. Every machine that gets made reduces the profitability of all of the other machines. Without the critical variable for total machines produced, customers cannot make accurate models to determine whether the purchase makes sense for them.
The graph size upgrades were introduced … as a means to resist single chip ASICs, which were deemed “not meaningfully different from pure computational ones like Bitcoin’s sha256".
…
All this was heavily put into doubt when Obelisk posted details of their GRN1 miner in … revealing simulation data of a single chip C31 ASIC as well as planned single chip ASICs for C32, C33, and C34.
Based upon the long discussion here, I didn’t see the obvious confirmation/s from other ASIC firms. So may I ask explicitly?
If we maintain our commitment to the C32 phaseout, and have ASIC manufacturers make significant investments into C33 miners, then we lose the option of freezing the primary PoW at 32 edge bits. Which is a very natural size that’s easier to design circuits for. Also, there’s something nice about the memory requirement being a round 1GB.
If I understand well, we’re going to reverse direction: to make it easier for ASIC miner. Then, my question is why we don’t directly change the C31 phaseout plan? since the C31 make the ASIC even more easier.
And to protect the existing investment on C32 ASIC, we can keep both C31 and C32 but change the C31 phaseout plan to make it more fair between C31 and C32 ASIC miners.
According to current phaseout plan, the C31 miner has obviously shorter life time than C32 and it’s not fair for C31 miners. (mainly because the C31 miner come out a little bit late than expected!)
The Grin developers currently have no intention of changing these rules in the foreseeable future, unless Cuckatoo is shown to be broken (e.g. by exhibiting a sublinear time-memory tradeoff), or unless the phasing out of smaller sizes should be delayed in order to ensure public availability of >= 1 GPS miners.
^ According to our commitment on Cuckatoo31+ (im)mutability, even the Scheduled PoW upgrades proposal was added later than that commitment, I’m afraid we’re opening a back door to start breaking our commitments. I’m not against the necessary change/improvement, but just want to emphasize that we MUST be very careful and make the community well informed about this discussion, and please DON’T hurry to make decision unless we’re 100% sure.
No, not everybody is convinced that C32 chips have sufficient yield to be economically feasible. But we should find out within a year, as Obelisk is planning to put them into production, following their C31 chips.
The original phaseouts do make single chip ASICs harder. But as Moore’s law marches on, with 5nm and 3nm processes in the pipeline TSMC's 3nm Plant Will Start Production in 2020: Finally Approved,
it’s not clear if it will ever be too hard.
Keeping our commitments is precisely the reason we shouldn’t change the C31 phaseout plan, which is less than a year away, and upon which current investments have been made.
That’s why my proposal only affects C32 and later phaseouts, which are much further into the future, beyond the 18 month deadline that I’m proposing the term “foreseeable future” should refer to.
@asic_king Update for the prospective buyer? Is 100GPS @ 500W achievable as the final spec?
Time sure flies. The other reference point that is confusing for many of us is the announcement back in January. The expectation was that final specs would be available BEFORE the pre-orders start. That factoid was from the company themselves. But no specs that can be validated so far??? And they are also onto batch2 of the pre-orders. This does not pass the red-face test.
No new details on C31 specs, but this tweet from a few hours ago is suggesting they are pointing everyone to the C32 version and telling everyone to wait one more day.
We have released the spec. Please refer to our website for official announcement.
https://www.innosilicon.com/html/grin-miner/index.html
Some observations:
fewer graphs per second than Obelisk machines
worse energy efficiency than Obelisk machines
higher cost per computation than Obelisk machines (even with the presale discount)
2.5x TMTO to hit CC32. Slean mining maybe? Certainly indicates that CC32 is a second-class algorithm on this machine, if it was first class the TMTO would be 2x at worst. That’s also going to impact it’s competitiveness in May, when there’s been plenty of time for manufacturers to come forward with a new CC32 miner.
No disclosure around production volumes. Which in my opinion matters more than any of the other points. Innosilicon has had multiple points in history where their miner was absolutely dominant, many times better than the next best competitor, and yet because of overproduction everyone who purchased from them still lost money.
No mention of what type of mining it does. If it does mean mining or slean mining, it should be capable of targeting Cucakroo29, which means the planned hardforks will be important.
Awesome. We will be sharing our observations with the customers that have hired us for a technical assessment. Hopefully, with their permission, some of that insight can be released to this community, so informed decisions can be made. And thank-you for taking down the first copy of the Grin PCIe card from your Site. It was obvious that it was a Nvidia Tesla card. That could have mis-led the community that Inno was now re-branding a GPU card from them. The 2nd version may be confusing too with the graphics DVI-like connector on the back-side. But this time there is a disclaimer that it is just for illustration purposes. So we can accept that it is a marketing mock-up.
As a follow up from Tuesday’s governance meeting, it’s been proposed that we continue the conversation regarding @tromp’s proposal to put phaseouts on hold:
tomorrow Saturday @ 15:00 UTC
in https://gitter.im/grin_community/Lobby
The aim is to reach a decision regarding the proposal and stakeholders and interested participants in the community are most welcomed to participate.
@tromp has confirmed he’s available.
It’s unfortunately quite short notice. If there’s reason for why tomorrow is not a good time to do this, please advise.
