No CommentsAlydian, the startup that is being supported by the business incubator CoinLab, might have serious news in just a few days: the company will be hosting ASIC mining equipment for its customers, via yearly contracts.
The new service is directed to all the big miners out there, as the launch day pricing was $65,000 per Terahash with mining hosting contracts only available in 5 and 10 Th/sec blocks. Alydian’s goal is to conquer institutional-level investors that need to turn large amounts of money into Bitcoins.
The California-based company and its incubator are betting on the fact that they are pioneers in this field, but their suggestion raises a few doubts. Alydian’s rate of $65,000 per TH/sec only applies to its 10 TH/sec tier. At $350,000 for a year’s worth of 5TH/sec mining, its prices are equivalent to $70,000 per TH/sec, or $70 per GH/sec. On the other side, pricing from KnCMiner equates to around $19 per GH/sec. Butterfly Labs has been distributing ASICs developed with the same 65nm process node sizes as Alydian’s, but BFL’s units offer $45-55 per Gh/sec. That’s still cheaper than Alydian’s suggestion.
But Peter Vessenes, CoinLab’s founder, has a justification: “not only is there a time value of money, (mining now is worth more than waiting to mine), but also there is a calculation you must do about your terahashes. What percent of Bitcoins mined will they on average earn? Both of these, and the USD-BTC price play into the mining calculations, which is one reason it’s hard to price and understand”. To be fair, factors like electricity costs for home-operated miners must also be considered.
Vessenes suggests that these prices can be molded, especially because he is cutting deals for hash rates: “we want to provide a turnkey solution for institutional investors who don’t want to worry about it, and don’t want to go manage 72 Bitfury boxes”.
Assuming Alydian manages to fulfill its August 29th deadline, we can expect a big push to the network difficulty.
