I for one believe it's part of the hazards that we miners must accept, and write off the loss,
I generally agree, but it's also one of the reasons why we shouldn't be willing to pay prices which are too close to the border of profitability... there are a whole bunch of risks associated with operating mining equipment, including shipping snafus.
If a core dev like you is following this thread, then we mustn't be that much off target with our purchase
I would agree, but if you buying more than one miner and waiting time for it is more than it should be all profitability disappear.
For us who buying more gear there is always risk but price in this case is something which can put off even big players.
Dont know how long BITMAIN was running miners before selling them to us but within short period price dropped from 3btc to 1.9btc.
This means that this gear is still overpriced.
Probably beggining of february we will see gear for 1.5 maybe less.
Or they will introduce new gear which will be sky high for normal people to buy.
I think you have a point. Evidence seems to show with little doubt that they have mined at least weeks with the gear they sell now. Even if they say days ("burnin' yeah"), it's up to everyone to figure out what the truth is. But I think the profitability outcome (i.e. break even or not) will mainly depend on how fast CoinTerra, Bitmine and KnCMiner will be shipping. 28nm and lower processes seem to be the real threat to 2W+ per gigahash technology.
EDIT: something I was also thinking about is CEX.io. They say 55% of their hashrate is Bitfury (and 45% are "external" miners on ghash.io), and if I recall well it means they are also hashing with about 2W/ghash. What will happen when difficulty makes 2W/ghash unprofitable? I know it probably won't happen anytime soon, but it will certainly happen at some point.
Will CEX.io eventually shutdown, or will they renew their hardware before it happens? If so, how will they raise the reinvestment funds? etc.
