Topic: Alpha Technology Litecoin (Scrypt) ASIC Miner Order Batch 1 Now! - page 199. (Read 529054 times)

i'm not paying at the moment too, but i don't wanna lose my pre order

I'm not paying anything at the moment.

Any one paid the remaining funds?

its crying shame no1 cares about scrypt anymore, X11 ftw lol

This was a clusterfuck waiting to happen, right from the start.

Im glad i didnt pre order this

This thread gonna end in tears.

I have decided to wait with my payment till I have seen a working prototype.
If that means that my payment window will expire and I will get some petty cash back, so be it.

refund in january - priceless

so hashing power has just tripled at no additional cost, is that right?

and to date, alpha has not sent out 1 physical unit to anyone?

and people are happy to send money for this?

hmm

Before i pay tell me one thing cz i'm dumb and i need plain english to understand:

Will I need to leave my fucking PC on or not?

If yes: give me my money back, all 100% of it, I won't charge you interest.

If no: ok I will pay after you confirm that this unit will run quietly, standalone, i don;t care wireless or not i can wire it, and wired is better actually less radiation in the house, enough of this junk. The standalone design was in your original specs. I don't wish to leave my PC on.

Quoted from the Managing Director letter two months ago

"We believe our biggest competitor at the moment is very much using a smoke and mirrors strategy, it seems after their orders were not filled they were forced to redesign and increase hash rates, if they are at a point where they can still be choosing hash rates then we don’t doubt we are vastly ahead"

And

"It seems to us our imminent release is hampering competitor’s sales forcing them to change architecture and inevitably pushing them back a safe distance from our release"

Is it me or is there a strong whiff of irony in those statements and a stench of desperation around Alpha in general.

Alpha would not be doing this if all was going well. They have increased their hashrate 1000% in the last 3 months. Any profit they had hoped to make must be out of the window. I cannot see how they will survive if they carry on like this.

More back pedaling. This is getting sad. One update after another correcting the previous update. First tty hey will not pander to competition then they start chasing hash rates then they aren't then there is cloud mining then there isn't then there is updated hash rates but no Web gui now there is a Web gui.

Still skeptical about the July ship date until the foundry gets paid. No chips, no vipers.

QFMT.

Alpha management are flying by the seat of their pants. I will be truly amazed if this works out well. 

^^^^this. Some foundries that do not require cash up front will require payment at milestones. That is why AT could ask for 30% for preorder and wait for the remaining 70%.

Now that the foundry hit a milestone they require the remaining funds before AT will receive chips. But because AT management was too greedy and didn't want to give up their huge profit margin they would not compete with KNC and Flower Technology by increasing their hashrates on vipers.

That was ATs undoing because people were not fulfilling payments. So AT was not going to get their chips. They still may not if people do not fulfill enough payments.

So this is the conundrum. I never trusted AT management. They seemed incompetent from the start. They actively slandered competition accusing them of scams and have made some very poor decisions that they back pedal from. Now their entire business hinges on getting the 70% in to get enough to pay the foundry so they can get the chips. While the new specs are a bonus I'm very skeptical of AT being able to deliver in July and be around 6 to 12 months from now.

Might be helpful to others here - Do you know how many watts a netbook uses on average? Any suggestions and average cost?
I thought of running windows just to keep things simple but I can run Linux.

I understand Pi's - I ran two for some miners I had. They are solid for the most part, though the cards occasionally crap out, and I strongly suggest you both have an extra already formatted on hand AND use the HIGH SPEED variety. Trust me on this  I've had them running for months on end with no problems and every so often a card would go bad.

I wonder about those BlackBeagles or whatever they are called as a better Pi (I hear they are more solid).

I have a feeling I won't be able to run the unit in my house though, due to noise.     I will replace the fans and do all I can to get them quiet.

Thanks in advance,
Its about sharing

I imagine it's possible they intended to not mine for profit, but are maybe turning some of their profits into mining equipment for themselves. So instead of the business 'owning' the gear, they own it 'personally'. Either way, their profit is theirs to do with as they please. My only concern for the community would be if their angle the entire time was to simply crowd-fund their own mining operation--which I don't believe was their intent.


Definitely, and that's part of what I meant by 'extra chips'.


I've been around since day 1 monitoring the situation, and so far the only true red flag in my mind is their delivery date / late tapeout situation. So far, no company has come out ahead when going in late like this, and if they find out most of their chips are sorely underperforming, all of their specs will be out the window, along with promises and guarantees. It's usually not good to promote the effeciency increases until you've run the chip against a sample group, as KNC did. They knew their design would be better, but it wasn't until they started testing in groups that they announced the final specs.


I like PIs for many things, I've never used one for mining but I bet it would be a great choice. It may be easier to just use a standard computer, which will let you use standard libraries to compile the mining software. I use cheap netbooks for my gear which needs hardware hosting. I usually setup 2 for redundancy, per group of hardware. Ubuntu works well, so does Xubuntu.

I am not sure about that, as they clearly said they are not going to mine for profit. I'm sure they ordered as many chips as they could afford with the hopes of selling more units. If anything was left over, I can't deny they wouldn't mine on them, but that is fair enough. They also would have some units for RMA swap outs, and/or to give hashing power to those waiting for repair.

I have to trust these guys a bit more than normal as their family business and such is a bit involved, transparent, etc.

I however understand the concern, BFL bit me, Gox to a lesser extent and the whole mining thing has been tough. You may even be right but judging by the evidence, I can't say the company is out to scam anyone. It is a very tough business to get involved in with lots of scammers.

Any ideas on control centers for the miners? I used a Raspberry Pi but would almost rather get a netbook as it is just easier imo.

IAS

Which would dictate they ordered more than they needed for chips, and had planned to cloud mine for themselves all along using the crowd-sourced funding to get their business up and running. Their response (up above mine) indicates this, as they're dedicating the hardware they had planned to use for their cloud, and putting it into the batch 1 equipment.

Could be a win-win for folks, if they do in fact ship in July. I'm still skeptical on that, but we'll see. They're still claiming good specs despite not having tested their chips yet..

A while back, shortly after KNC made their announcement I believe, AT said their units woul be expanable via more cards (not more chips per say). So, they are sending their units full of cards now, I am pretty sure.