CSO Blockstream: mining company Bitmain sells Antminer S15 at a loss to pay off debts

Samscon Mou, Chief Strategic Director of Blockstream, one of the most avid public critics of the mining giant Bitmain, said that several lawsuits have already been filed against the Beijing company. At the same time, Bitmain allegedly has huge debts to suppliers and production contractors.

1 / Bitmain already facing multiple lawsuits and more being filed. Their assembly, component, production, and repair companies are unpaid and losing patience. Seems to keep going. #BitmainIPO pic.twitter.com/fBlSulRaRG

– Samson Mow (@Excellion) March 10, 2019

Mou claims that Bitmain sells Antminer S15 devices at a loss (the price is 30% below cost). According to him, the company has produced only 1,000 such miners.

In this regard, he questioned the success of the new model S17, since the architecture of 7-nanometer chips from Bitmain allegedly does not provide the necessary performance (in practice, he noted, no more than 60% of all chips are viable).

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? 7nm chips is very bad, maybe 60% are viable. Only about ~ 1000 S15's were made.

– Samson Mow (@Excellion) March 10, 2019

Blockstream's strategic director believes that the company demonstrates to investors the work of individual chips, which do demonstrate the declared performance, but mass production is likely to be economically unjustified.

3 / From what I’ve heard, bitmain cherry pic king chips chips chips chips chips show show It’s not worth it. But that's not their only problem …

– Samson Mow (@Excellion) March 10, 2019

It is noteworthy that the Taiwanese giant TSMC allegedly sold all 7-nanometer chips to companies such as Apple, Qualcomm, Huawei, Nvidia and AMD. For manufacturers of ASIC miners, there is no production left in this way, even if the architecture of their chips was viable.

5 / AMD had to switch from GlobalFoundries, when they closed their 7nm plants. 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) March 10, 2019

So, Mou summed up, the company is desperately trying to attract investment to cover debts to suppliers. At the same time, Bitmain sells the S15 at a loss, and the S17 model can be completely untenable.

Recall that in the third quarter of 2018, Bitmain suffered losses of $ 500 million.

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