Topic: Alpha Technology Litecoin (Scrypt) ASIC Miner Order Batch 1 Now! - page 18. (Read 529056 times)

If the letter of the law is not working for them, you just have to take to the woods and beat them until the person will not give all the money.

18 months and not a single delivery. big project failure by OP.

No...the circle jerk continues. Basically, they don't have any clue what they're doing and have had to re-do pretty much every single thing along the way, from the chip to the supporting hardware. Every 6 weeks or so, they make a news update letting everyone know that they've reached heretofore undiscovered depths of ineptitude, in their quest to produce the most highly-optimized, completely worthless mining hardware.

without going back through pages and pages what is the situation here? Did they make their machines yet?

My problem with the winding up petition is, I really don't think they have any assets to liquidate. Everything about this project is outsourced. I don't even think there would be office furniture to sell off. They have done so much reworking of their hardware, that I'm betting they haven't even purchased the components in bulk yet. I've grown pretty skeptical that recovery is possible. At this point, I just want them put out of business with such a giant stain on their name that they'll never be able to rip anyone else off, again.

I have been in talks with a law firm that is very good at Debt Recovery.

I am negotiating a flat-fee cost for winding up Alpha. If Alpha is wound up, their assets will be seized and sold to pay off debts. You *DO NOT NEED to have a Judgement* to participate in a winding up order. If you are interested in joining, I need from you:

1. Your full name
2. The Amount that Alpha owes you.
3. Your full address

Send me these items and I will compile them, and get them over to the law firm. I will shoot off another email when we are ready for the next step, which will be soon.

Send it to [email protected]

I'm still looking here time to time.

Can't stop laughing at how retarded people investing in this obvious scam were.

Unfortunately their website has worked for me. Checked it a couple of times the past few days. They should pull it down. The whole thing is a farse. They have no products to sell and can't even operate a telephone. The website is pure propaganda.

Thank you for explaining 120 vs 240V, I always forget the mechanics of it.

their website has been down for a few days now.

That's quite a good guess, here is an overview EU wide: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/File:Electricity_prices_for_household_consumers,_first_half_2013_%281%29_%28EUR_per_kWh%29_YB14.png

28 cents euro versus 0,30 USD at this moment.

Power equals current times voltage, or P=I*E. Mmmm. Pie. What this means is that in Eurpoe the voltage is doubled but the current needed is halved. This leads to some nice things (less power lost in the wires due to heat) and not-so-nice things (getting shocked by 240v hurts more than 120. Don't try this at home).

But the power from the miner's point of view is constant.

Since Europe uses 240V power versus the USA's 120V, wouldn't that mean you guys get twice the power per KWH? My brain hurts when I have to think about 240V. Regardless of where you live it doesn't make much sense to plug your Vipers in, unless your stealing electricity. Not something that is advisable unless you enjoy having the power company shut off power indefinitely at your address, whether your willing to pay for it or not. It's easy to steal if you know how, and apparently easy for the power company to tell as well. There are meters everywhere all communicating in real time. My advice, don't even think about it.

I'm pretty sure most customers don't pay $0,10 a KWh, but likely around $0,30 in Europe...
You will pay 10K to lose $500 (and rising each day) a month over here.
Now that's what I call a great ROI 

Let me get this straight. Their miners will run at 14 Watts per 1Mh/s which means:

If you had your rigs right now, say the 50Mh/s Viper, and you pay $0.10 per KWH as we do in the Florida. A 50Mh/s Viper would currently earn $1.80 per day in LTC, of which $1.68 goes to cover power costs, leaving $0.12 in profit. If you ran it for a year straight, assuming no changes in price or difficulty, it would earn $43.88 annually. With the cost of a 50Mh/s Viper at approx $1950 USD it would only take about half a century to ROI, yes that's 50 years.

I have to say I'm actually surprised that these things even make that much, I fully expected it to run at a loss. Why are they still working on this paper weight? There is no demand for it, why make it at all? Just ship people a metal box with a hair dryer inside of it along with some blinking lights and call it a day?

Yup, and the smallest mistakes can provide all sorts of hilarity. Part of the reason I prefer using R(ds) for overload sensing, DCM is great for sensing power through the choke, but that RC circuit can be affected by noise, component layout, and doesn't tell you if the FETs are cutting through. But who wants to spend the money for an op-amp limiting circuit on both sides of the push/pull? Not to mention the fun that happens when the voltage drop from the left side of the chip to the right side of the chip (500 amps, .6 volts...) causes problems.

The off-shelf stuff is great for testing, but very expensive to use for mass production. And in Alpha's case I wonder how stable it is when half the engines are running light power pulls while farting with the memory and the other half are pulling full current for the math engines. At random across the die of course, this is a tougher problem. So they ran everything at full current and now the chips overloads the power supplies. Yep.


Yeah. There's a lot of weird pressures and unbridled optimism in some of these mining firms. This is complex shit, and happy pony magic doesn't work well when the 600amp IGBT goes foom. Building this kind of stuff right takes months/years, not "wave wand and it works in a week".

Ah well. They fucked up.

You're right. Powering this type of ASIC is a real challenge. However, there are solutions available for CPUs and GPUs - typically, these are complex multi-phase systems with sophisticated feedback systems carefully tuned for the precise application. While you can buy the voltage controller ASIC off-the-shelf, you still need the inductors, switches, and compensation network, as well as a suitable circuit design.

One of the things that struck me when I first saw the PCB layouts for the alpha board was that they appeared to be using off-the-shelf , but very expensive ($50 each in 1k quantities), DC-DC modules for each group of 4 ASICs. This suggested to me that they either didn't want to fund the design of a DC-DC converter based around a CPU/GPU VRM ASIC, or that they did not have the expertise to be able to build such a converter.

The latest spins of the board appear to use Altera monolithic DC-DC converters - an impressive ASIC with integrated switches and integrated inductor! Again, suggestive of the fact that there is no will or capability to build a DC-DC solution in house. The Altera converters are even more expensive - $19 each in 1k quanitites - with 1 converter needed per viper ASIC. The other issue is that they seem desperate to keep the cost down, they've said that the viper ASIC needs 15A @ 1.2 V - so it's rather optimistic to use a monolithic DC-DC converter rated at a maximum current rating of 15 A.

Developing power supplies for Bitcoin miners is in a class of problem called "bitch on wheels". This however is not an unknown issue, it has buried a number of other companies over the years and anyone who has designed high power supplies knows the joy of watching smoke and plasma balls rise from 300 amp IGBT circuits.

I think however that people designing boards tend to be simply willfully ignorant of the issues of providing 500 amps of power at half a volt and thus they screw up the same thing over and over again. At least on a SHA256 chip each engine is pulling constant power through the hashing cycle. I wonder if a scrypt miner pulls varying levels of power depending on where it is in the computations, and that power variance fucks over any attempt to provide a constant level of power to the engine with 500 other engines on the same chip bitching and moaning as they vary their requirements from cycle to cycle.

It could explain the complete graveyard in the Scrypt space. That could also move the level of "hard" from "flaming levels of difficult" to "fuck, we have a chip and can't make it work! And here comes THE NOISE FAIRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

That's an interesting one to monitor. So far I only find "zero information, but it's going to be very cool very soon" on SFARDS

This latest update from Alpha has delivered some wonderful satire - quite how it is possible to project manage as badly as this beggars belief.

They've had nearly a year with virtually no competition, and they've blown it all, with fail after fail after fail.
SFARDS (formerly gridseed) taped out their 2nd gen scrypt ASIC last month with an estimated power efficiency of 2W per MH/s.

I wonder if alpha will ship their 14.4 J/MH miners before SFARDS ship their 2 J/MH miners...

A moron, but also a multi millionaire.