Topic: Alpha Technology Litecoin (Scrypt) ASIC Miner Order Batch 1 Now! - page 208. (Read 529093 times)

Why dont you check out Fibonacci, they are selling by the unit at 8.65 MH/s, purchase as many or as few as you want ... better act fast though, last time I checked they were 80% sold

It's a monster thread to read through however:
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=2702.0

I've got a few solicitor friends I will run this by but I think they will agree with my initial conclusions.

As an early pre-order customer you bought under the terms of Alpha's initial offering, i.e 5mh/s@£1500 or 25mh/s@£5000
The "Matching the Competition" announcement, in essence was a free upgrade.and was not specific enough to be legally binding.

As you never purchased a product based on that announcement you have no legal foundation to enforce it. Anyone buying the product after the 28th will be buying under the terms of the "Managing Directors Statement".

If you are not happy with the situation I'm afraid your only course of action is to cancel your order.

Regarding a full refund. If you are not a business customer you are legally entitled to 100%. If you are a business customer, you are bound by the terms set out by Alpha T.

As I say I'll run it by some lawyer friends and see what they think but I wouldn't get your hopes up.

I estimate the total network hashrate as 1.000.000MH/s in Q3 - or better 1000GH/s or 1TH/s. The KnC Titans alone will add about 625GH/s if KnC sells the whole batch (2500 Titans at 250MH/s). At this point the difficulty would go up at least 3x.

Regarding minor altcoins: they don't matter. They don't add much hashrate and much mining profit (in absolute $). The litecoin network is between 150-200GH/s right now, so makes up 50-70% of the total you calculated.

Regarding your last point: afaik bitcoin doesn't have KGW as well and doesn't suffer from it. I'd expect litecoin difficulty to go up massively and GPU miners leaking so smaller coins as well as Vertcoin etc. But Titan's cannot switch en masse to smaller coins, as these do not have the marketcap to absorb and pay for a few Titans.

Hi retro72, I bought before they reopened the batch.

The letter from the Managing Director, as (or if?) it changes the original terms of matching the competition, should come with a statement of "100% refund if not happy with the revised terms".
Without this the MD is changing the terms from their side without the Client accepting the revised terms.

Please have a look again and kindly confirm your thoughts on this for batch 1 early customers

regarding vaporware, you are 100% right, look at Bitmain now with their antminers, no pre-orders and their units are very much relevant to present day, not paperweights.

Seriously my last pre-order, but I don;t want to give away something that we have rightfully paid for.

Many thanks!

I just want to add.

Those of you buying the 16mh/s machines are not in the same race as those buying the 100mh/s + devices.

IMHO your strategy should be to mine low diff altcoins and stay away from the higher market cap coins such as LTC, DGC, DOGE etc. You will be pulverized.

With that in mind you should be in no rush to take high risks on unproven, potential vaporware. A couple of months here or there will not dramatically affect your ROI.

Therefore, if I were in your position I would wait, see who delivers then buy a batch 2 device. You could then mine low diff coin, on a low power consuming machine, with little to no risk.

Reserve for doxing.

There's a couple of things I'd like to point out in It's about Sharing's post.

Firstly KNC are not late regarding the Neptune. They stated it would be shipped Q1/Q2. We have just entered Q2 so I would not call that late.

This notion that Alpha will definitely be the first to ship is misguided at best. Hundreds of things can go wrong from here to final production. They have no experience with this or any other large scale product manufacturing.
Cointerra were made up of some of the best guys in the business. They had a prototype, tape out went well, then it all fell apart in the last couple of months. They delivered late, under powered devices that did not meet their power consumption targets.

Fiaz was pretty quick to back out of the July delivery guarantee, which shows just how much confidence they have in that promise.

This industry is littered with high profile failures. So to equate Alpha T to some of the great Businessmen who started companies without qualifications is just nonsense. There are many more business failures than there are successes. And very few Sir Richard Bransons or Sir Alan Sugars in this world.

If I were to back a horse in this race. Based on past form it would have to be KNC. Yes the favourite doesn't always win and a rank outsider does occasionally cause an upset but you will lose more money than you win if you keep backing outsiders.

Alpha-T's 30% down policy may seem nice on the face of it but when you look deeper, they have surreptitiously tried to claim you are all business customers, therefore are not covered by even the most basic consumer protections and are not entitled to a full refund of your deposit. Not only is this illegal but I would suggest immoral. It also opens up the possibility of Alpha walking away with half your money, even if they fail.

A couple of other things to consider. The reason a lot of Asic manufactors do not ship PSU's is that they tend to have major problems getting through customs. Your device could be held up for days, if not weeks while customs check the PSU meets the certification of your particular country.

It is simpler all round to buy a psu locally.
Personally I wouldn't  trust a PSU I know nothing about, running 24/7 under high stress loads. They can and do ignite, potentially taking your house with it.

Also Alpha T has stated their devices will be Wi-Fi enabled. Please do not connect your miner via Wi-Fi. You stand a much higher chance of having your device hacked and all your mined coins routed to another wallet. Run a wired connection through a firewall as a basic starting point. Anyone who connects via wi-fi is asking for trouble.

That's an interesting question. I would say its not enforceable. It essentially amounts to a free upgrade for those who bought before the 28th and was superseded by the Managing directors statement for those buying after.

If KNC had announced their upgrade after the 28th pre-order round. It could have been argued that purchases had been made based on the "Matching the Competition" announcement and a legal case could have been made to enforce it. 

As that did not happen, I would say Alpha are legally in the clear on this issue.

Hey retro72 can you please check if that matching the competition is a condition of contract, if it is then it should be enforced

As predicted? They are (should be) first to market with a powerful Scrypt ASIC machine. KNC Miner is late right now with their BTC Miners, so I wouldn't count on them to deliver the ASIC's before Alpha Tech.

You do realize the engineering is being done by a notable engineering firm in India right?

And all of the bright minds in history who didn't have so called qualifications, yet their companies turned into billion dollar companies. Come to think of it, many of the young Bitcoin companies fit that bill.

If you want to hate, try to do a better job of it...  

Give credit where credit is due:
Alpha Technologies is giving timely announcements.
They are the first larger ASIC in this space.
They just upped the Hashing Power by over 200%.
They were the first company (I know of) to take partial down payments of app. 30%.
They offer something that a lot more people can afford. 10k for a KNC Miner rig, whenever that is shipped, is waaaay beyond the budget of most people.

Props to Alpha Tech - Keep it up Fiaz. Nothing is perfect but you have our support.

And the experiment continues.

I love these forums, they are full of (usually) useful information. For example when alpha-t first announce I had some cash lying around and I thought about pre-ordering a unit. After looking through some forums I found someone who suggested using your money to buy GPU's and mine with those until alpha-t get close to shipping, then use the BTC to order the scrypt miner, instead of sinking your money into a pre-order with nothing to show for months. Well that's exactly what I did and I used the BTC  i've mined (via middlecoin) in the last few months to reserve a 16M/h this morning.  Thank you to whoever posted that and good luck to alpha-t. I hope you guys deliver and on time!

Also a question, does anyone know if these units will work on coin switching sites?

My beef with KNC is there is no "smaller miner" / "Hobby miner" option like BFL and Alpha-T has.  $10k / €8k / £6k is a lot of dosh to most peeps to suddenly find and dump on one piece of hardware. If they had a $1250 / 25mh version I would order a few, as not Alpha-T got my £3k for 2 x 16MH units.

Even these prices are no where near the hobby price the BFL jally's where and if you where close to the front of the queue for those you made a nice ROI. 

M

I just added up the total network hashrate of all GPU's running on all scrypt coins as reported by coinwarz and got to a total of 281g/h. So with a few missing say 300g/h.  300g/h is 300,000mh.  I wonder what the total m/h is being put into the market buy Alpha and KNC come the summer?

The main difference I see between BTC ASICS and Scrypt ASIC's is the sheer volume of altcoins this new hashrate will be spilt around vs all the BTC ASICS pretty much only chasing BTC when they arrived. And as most of the big boys have KGW / other quick difficulty adjusters its those that don't that may get mullered.

Am I correct that Litecoin is still vanilla scrypt only and has no KGW / Other difficulty adjustment yet?  Surely the difficulty on Litecoin will be pushed to the roof and then left high and dry when it's turn to be the most profitable Altcoin comes round for a day.

M 

FIAT in my case, the refund was put on hold until the 28th, possibly to coincide with the reopening of batch 1 orders.... Either way it's been over a week now and I'm losing patience.

Are refunds being processed in BTC or via fiat-transfer?

Thanks, but I'm still waiting for my refund which has been stuck pending for a week !

As predicted, alpha is delivering inferior tech.

What did u expect when accountants are starting an asic company? Leave engineering work to engineers

Indeed ! Exciting times.

I'm not getting out of the game but i'm not increasing my stake any longer.

1. if the date for 70% payment comes and the market place has changed a lot, then 70% would be the cost of a brand new miner many times more powerful than Alpha-t, so forget about the 30% loss, you can get a brand new one for the remaining 70%. TBC

2. there is one and only one thing that needs to be understood very clearly. all the value of these alt-coins is junk. the true value of the bitcoin is in the fact that there is limited quantities of it, and one day it will saturate and there will no more New BTCs.

So:
if you are going to do a service or provide goods, it will be against a coin that is available in limited quantity.
the only coin "getting there" is BTC and LTC.
the amount of energy spent on the creation of the existing BTCs and the future ones is tremendous.
there will be very little interest in any other cryptocurrency once one is saturated.
the GPU guys were trying their best and successfully pushed LTC into good grounds, hence the interest in LTC.
BTC and LTC are both junk for many reasons:
1. Only POW no POS.
2. Inflation is really required. The problem with fiat is uncontrolled inflation.
3. The sovereignty fund is also required, also how is it managed is another story.
4. The need to recover coints that have vanished from existence is also required. How is this implemented is also another story.
5. Has anyone tried running a business using the mediocre clients? it is not a client is is really a wallet. there is a need for an accounting software that sits on top.

So essentially
1. Unless there is a fundamental flaw in the existing coins, or
2. Until the Experiment phase has finished

I personally would not be jumping on the next Scrypt-Jane, Prime or whatever new ASIC algo is created...

Sure that might hurt Alpha Tech customers (me!) but really it comes down to when they can deliver.
The bigger question is, how will this impact GPU miners? I mean how much is going to be added to the network and then how much in GPU's subtracted?
Does the difficulty go down? Do the owners of the network, so to speak change hands or just technology or

Even though Alpha (in their newsletter from last night) said "At this point we would like to guarantee a minimum of 650 Mh/s for our second batch, this figure is just a preliminary minimum and it is more likely than not to be higher." it will come down to when KNC delivers. If they deliver around when Alpha delivers and Alpha doesn't once again up their customers a bit, they will all be out.

Further, as we get closer to that roughly 2 month before delivery "pay the balance date" for Alpha Tech customers, if KNC says they are going to deliver in the beginning or mid July ALSO, do any of the Alpha customers go through with their order??? Alpha may want to up things again but not match, say the 16Mh/s miners to 25Mhs (and not 2.5X more as KNC has done). Hardware wise, it would just be upping the lower end Vipers to the higher end Vipers (original specs). So instead of KNC running things, Alpha Tech takes over this role. 

Man, this is more interesting than the bitcoin mining ASIC "competition".