Topic: [2015-10-04] Bitcoin Mini – Another Overpriced Raspberry Pi 2-based Bitcoin Node (Read 589 times)

With Bitseed, https://bitseed.org/, we specifically chose a board with SATA port for this reason. This has given us the option to offer 120 Gb, 320 Gb, 1 Tb SSD hard drives in the $129-$199 price range and have also shipped SSD on special orders. We have seen the 160 Gb drives on our initial units we started shipping a year ago fill up while upgrading to the newest version of Bitcoin since we keep a backup of the blockchain and indexing and the default update process on Bitcoin causes it to temporarily exceed the disk size unless the backup blockchain is deleted first. We have avoided shipping units with only SD storage since SD cards have been reported to fail within a year, often a few months when used for blockchain storage.

We are also pursuing extended capabilities for running other apps on top of Bitcoin, such as Blockstack, and have run other coins as well - Crypti, a node.js platform which runs Dapps written in js on sidechains, https://crypti.me/, NXT, Peercoin, Blockstore, Litecoin, and Dash. The biggest hurdle is RAM, and going from 1 to 2 Gb adds at least $50 to the parts cost if we want to keep the SATA port. We see fairly low CPU activity after initial indexing, so having more CPU cores (we currently have 2) doesn't not give much speed advantage after indexing is complete. We are anticipating that 2 Gb RAM boards will come in at the same price point sometime in the next 6 months to a year.

yes, these things will get cheaper as time goes by, like anything of this nature. startup costs are big, but competition will force the market to compete.

for now, its attractive to the ardent enthusiast... basically the target market.

Hi all,

I'm one of the guys behind the Mini. Thanks for your feedback. We are still officially in the "pre-order" phase, but have shipped 3 units already. We are very excited to get feedback from those first few customers, too.


For what the Mini currently is, the price is about as low as we can go, because we include shipping, all the cables and things needed (and we are streamlining the shipping), and a full current blockchain on the flash drive. As technology in the open source boards quickly improves and we start seeing increases in sales, we'll be able to upgrade our base hardware.


We've not run into that particular issue, but we'll keep our eye out, and ask for that specific feedback from customers. Thanks.

We've been working on this project for several months, and have gone back and forth about who our target customer is, which affects our value add that we immediately offer. As bitcoin has been increasingly mentioned in MSM, international markets falter, and regulation has been somewhat clarified, we expect the user base of bitcoin to at least double over the next 12 months to 24 million+. The specific demographic we are targeting is 18-35 yr olds, smart, financially aware, but not command line savvy. That specific demographic gives us room for margin, because what we offer is a tight build of the products together, with a plug-and-play, all-in-one solution. But we also offer the expert something.

That something is what I personally am most excited about, the future of the Mini is as an open source platform (I envision Maidsafe and OpenBazaar running on a Mini). We will be working on an API for the Mini that people can build on top of. I envision a kind of app store/npm in the future. But that is a ways down the road.

We are very sensitive to open source. We will release our code as we go.

Once again, thanks for the feedback,

Ansel

Hello, I'm one of the guys from Bitcoin Mini. I've corrected those tabs. Thanks for pointing it out.

With an Rpi2, you need either a USB device (which disconnects regularly, it's common with USB media) or an SD card to continually process the blockchain. Neither are a decent solution imo.

Even with an SSD over USB, it's still a bit of a clusterfuck

agree, there is no incentive to spend my money to get that Raspberry Pi 2 just for run a node, even if those 90$ sounds cheap,  Raspberry Pi 2 is not a "good" hw to run it at least from my point of view, im not saying that it cant run a node, but i think that it still need some improvements.

in the other side, i think that with some improvements it could be the good alternative soon ( if they improve it a little bit )

Is it just me, or do the "Requirements" and "Interface" tabs not do anything on the bitcoinmini.com site?  Tried it on two different browsers.  Might be a bit pricey at the moment, but I guess it's still preferable to tying up your desktop hardware.  The cost might come down over time, too.  I'll consider it if I ever get off my restricted bandwidth internet package. 

Anything above US$90 is way overpriced for these kind of things tbh.

Bitcoin Mini – Another Overpriced Raspberry Pi 2-based Bitcoin Node Solution

When people hear the name “Bitcoin Mini” for the first time, they might expect to see a Bitcoin-branded Mini Cooper zipping through traffic.  Unfortunately, that is not what this Bitcoin Mini is about, even though that doesn’t make it less exciting.

http://digitalmoneytimes.com/bitcoin-mini-another-overpriced-raspberry-pi-2-based-bitcoin-node-solution/