All I can say is that if this is real, I would be sweating bullets if I was running a 36GH/s GPU farm right now. It'll change the game pretty quick.
Yep. Or maybe not. There are people that dont pay for electricity, or have extremely low rates; For them, this isnt much of an improvement. Cost per hash is somewhat comparable to a GPU setup, but its a riskier investment. You can sell GPU's if bitcoin implodes, but its gonna be a lot tougher selling these boxes. So Im not sure how much of a difference it will really make. I think the free and nearly free electricity guys are as much a threat to one's 36GH/s farm as this product. A while ago some Canadian posted who has electricity from hydroelectric. I dont recall the exact rates but it was low enough it might have been nothing and make wonder why one wouldnt rent a studio there and fill it with mining equipment.
Everyone pays for electricity in some form or another. Solar panels cost money and have a limited lifespan, any lease with electrical utilities included will be quickly corrected after the first contract period of getting burned.
It says the firmware is upgradeable, so it could probably be applied to other cryptographic applications with a bit of tweaking. That's what it sounds like they are doing from the website ("Release schedule: We’re currently working on final MCU firmware and software device drivers. It is our expectation this will complete within a two week time frame. Note: Members of our packet verification product program will receive a different firmware package and your deliveries will be staged based on final firmware for your application."
I think any of us could pull off something of similar quality and magnitude if we hadn't any scruples about it.
I disagree. I know I couldnt. Not without hiring a photographer (really, it looks easy when you see the result, but just try to make a picture like that that I would confuse with a professional one), an engineer to make credible PCBs design, a company to make those PCBs, rent the equipment you see in those photoshoots, hire a website designer, rent the office space, outsource the production of those (clearly custom) alu boxes, probably hire a consultant to proof read everything on that site and make sure its all plausable. Thats a pretty penny for a scam. impossible? No. Implausible? I think so. Hence my bet
You are thinking to small. I could do everything you listed above for under $2000. Again, I am merely playing devil's advocate, my favorite spot on the field.
Dual zoning; you can live in your office, negating that expense. It is obvious from the pictures that it is zoned commercial/residential.
Those aluminum boxes could be fabricated by just about
any machine shop that handles aluminum. I have had aluminum equipment hundreds of times the size of these custom built and powdercoated (or anodized depending on the application) for less than they charge for a single unit. Obviously, you can't compare apples to oranges and I was building lighting racks with built-in heatsinks, but materials are always the lion's share of expenses in metal fabrication. I could find a metal shop on Monday that would crank those out -finished- for under ten bucks a pop.
The PCBs are a non-issue, as has been addressed numerous times in the thread. Even the design could be poached from any of the numerous open-source FPGA projects without too much trouble. Three months is plenty of time to learn the software enough to tweak the designs.
Proofreading for plausibility....they screwed the pooch on that one; everyone on here was shouting 'bullshit!' the instant they saw the numbers.