Chief strategic officer of the company Blockstream Samson MOU, which is one of the most avid public critics Bitmain mining giant, reported, against the Beijing company has already filed several lawsuits. Simultaneously with this Bitmain alleged huge debts to suppliers and manufacturing contractors.
1/ Bitmain already facing multiple lawsuits being filed and more. Their assembly, component production and repair companies are unpaid and losing patience. Seems Bitmain is deep in debt and trying to raise new capital from an unwitting investors to keep going. #BitmainIPO pic.twitter.com/fBlSulRaRG
— Samson Mow (@Excellion) 10 Mar 2019
MOU argues that Bitmain sells the device Antminer S15 at a loss (price is 30% below cost). According to him, the company produced only 1000 of these miners.
In this regard, he questioned the success of the new model S17, as the architecture of the 7-nanometer chips from Bitmain supposedly provides the necessary performance (in practice, he said, is not viable for over 60% of all chips).
2/ Selling the S15”s at a loss (~30% below cost) was a bad idea. The cost basis for 7nm chips is 3x that of 16nm chips. What about the new S17 50TH miner though? I’m hearing that the yield for Bitmain 7nm chips is very bad, maybe 60% are viable. Only about ~1000 S15’s were made.
— Samson Mow (@Excellion) 10 Mar 2019
Strategic Director Blockstream believes that the company demonstrates to investors the performance of individual chips that still show the claimed performance, however, mass production is likely to be economically unjustified.
3/ From what I hear, Bitmain is cherry picking good chips from the tape-out to create miners demo to show to potential investors. It’s all a fancy magic show because their current yields are so bad that mass production would never be economical. But that’s not their only problem…
— Samson Mow (@Excellion) 10 Mar 2019
It is noteworthy that the Taiwanese giant TSMC allegedly sold all 7-nanometer chips to companies like Apple, Qualcomm, Huawei, Nvidia and AMD. For manufacturers of ASIC miners thus production does not remain, even if the architecture of their chips was viable.
5/ AMD had to switch from GlobalFoundries, when they closed their plants 7nm. Qualcomm switched from Samsung to TSMC. So there’s no capacity left for Bitmain even if they had a viable chip design.
— Samson Mow (@Excellion) 10 Mar 2019
So, summed up the MOU, the company is desperately trying to attract investment, to cover debts to suppliers. While Bitmain sells S15 at a loss, and the model S17 may be altogether untenable.
Recall that in the third quarter of 2018 Bitmain has suffered losses in the amount of $500 million.
Subscribe to the news Forklog in Facebook!
Source
