Topic: [ANN] Sfards:SF100, the first 28nm Dual-Mode Miner is accepting pre-order now - page 13. (Read 129863 times)

Can we know who will be doing the tear down?   Excited to hear we will be seeing the insides.

And yes we don't really know what release was they are just too quiet.   We know someone got units.... just not sure if internal or one big buyer.

I recently shipped my SFARDS to a fellow forum member who will be doing a full tear down and write up on it for the community. When he is done he will ship the miner back to me so stand by for more info on the ins and outs of the hardware and the software interface

I agree I think most units produced went for internal use or a private buyer they probably shipped a hand full to resellers just to prove the miner is real but at its efficiency they didn't do a public release since they are the highest in efficiency for both SHA256 and almost in scrpyt right now I think Titans still are higher

I thought about it and sadly I came up with that as a possible choice.  It was odd to say the least resellers got 5.   Normally it's based on their sales..... but here they were like send them five.   It was odd from beginning.

I highly wonder if they did a cost/benefit of selling vs mining then selling.   I don't think anyone has publicly announced a scrypt chip in the works, especially dual.  So this offers them a unique time with no one to compete with.   They mentioned dev gear and showed it LONG ago.   So for all we know they mined with most of first batch paid for a cheap data center and now after halving can sell the machines and sit on some LTC as a company.

I think you nailed it on the head and it was my thought also.

They went into mass production over 5 months ago and yet as you say only a few have been seen in the wild.  Their lack of interest in this thread also shows that retail sales were never their priority so it was either a means to attract big purchasers or investment in their own mine, which also explains the silly prices they were sold at.

Machines could start appearing in the next few days, but the way things look at the moment on the market, incoming halving of LTC and with previous prices they are going to have to drop the price a huge amount to make them worth buying, that will probably mean they will carry on mining themselves.

New manufacturers tend to cater to the community and talk a good game until they have a fully operational magic money machine in their hand.  Then their priorities suddenly change. 
Bitmain is the only company that has stuck around for the little guy.  Even that relationship is tenuous though.

It is sad they missed the halving.  It is crazy thinking about this to me.  I would have been pumping out these machines as much as I could long before that halfing.

Now the question comes did they mine them their self, and selling 5 to a few resellers.  I will be very curious to say the least if they have lot's of stock after the halving.   If they suddenly come with new batch in a day or two we will know they were mining their self.

Yea with 200 BTC and $3 LTC (equivalent of $1.5 after that halving tomorrow, which is the same it was pre pump) things are not looking too good for any sort of mining in general. 

I agree today is a great time to buy

Screw buying these units. At ~$215 USD right now, you are WAY better off just buying BTC on an exchange instead if you are profit-minded.

I don't think they have any intention of dropping the price, or even selling them to customers. They'll just mine with them themselves & rent out hash to victims customers on their cloud mining site.

Even if they did drop the price enough to make them almost worth while buying, I still wouldn't buy one, due to their complete lack of communication in general. Sfards last post here was on July 27th - almost a month ago. Not only does that not sound like a company that's keen to promote a product to potential customers at all, but it makes me very worried about the standard of customer support I'd get if I had a problem. I already know from experience that they ignore emails, but add to that their lack of information/communication here or anywhere else & the signs are not good at all. Terrible in fact.

Yep...you have to remember gridseed blades (SFARDS is rebranded Gridseed) sold them for like 3k initially, prices then plummeted to under 1k each  few months later.

The less people pay for these overpriced miners the faster the price will drop.

Will wait for the price to adjust to market. One way or the other prices will be coming down

 Nope.

 That's a subclass of "people that don't care about RoI'.

 9-)

you forgot to mention hardware junkies who always want the latest gear to test and do write ups on for the benefit of other forum members 

 Only if they drop the price enough that they can manage to sell a significant number of them.
 As of right now, the only folks that would buy them are people that don't care about RoI or don't know to figure difficulty increase into an ROI calculation.

You are in the wrong spot go over to hardware sales.  This is considered hijacking thread for sales.

A2 has nothing to do with SF100.   If it was a SF100 you were selling then it would be kinda ok to post here.

New batch A2 Farm Boy LTC 60mhs scrypt 590watt, $500 plus shipping or discount price for over 100pc  pm me for more info.

Well some of the last scrypt gear dropped and dropped crazy amounts in price.   I don't think we will see that level this time.

But it would not surprise me if we see a drop in price with announcement.  They are unique as 1/2 is scrypt so the can justify a partial premium.

I hope that BitMain's chip announcement and the possible short term release of the S7 will put some price pressure on SFards.

Pretty soon they will have to share the stage with S7. And of course the LTC reward is going to be cut in half. After those events I don't think that the SF100 is going to be nearly as interesting as it was.

That web interface and the way it works is similar to the one that was available and used mostly by people in China when the original gridseeds came out. It functioned with a specific controller that was available as an option with the 5-chip gridseeds when they first came out. I still have two of them around here somewhere. I only used it for just a bit to check out before rolling my own version of cgminer with gridseed support.

It wasn't until the 5-chip gridseeds started to become available outside of China that people started building alternate mining software. Until then everyone used it. It used to drop miners all the time so custom methods were developed to power cycle automatically. The old controller is a device similar to a Pi...forget exactly what it was but the generic version (without their custom firmware) is available that does something I forget. (might have been a WiFi extender.....but again, I forget)

You're lucky...the original web interface was (originally) only in Chinese. At least this newer updated version is in English.  

Either way...I imagine most people here will soon ditch it in favor of something more common such as cgminer once support is built. It seems this time around they built this controller into the device? Hope it is something generic like a Pi that we can provide our own firmware for....otherwise an alternative controller will need to be devised.  

Although the concept of a central cloud managed web interface to your miners is kinda neat...it even allowed updating of the device firmware from their site... I imagine it would make it easier to manage 100's or 1000's of miners... I personally was just more comfortable with cgminer at the time as it was familiar to me. I haven't checked out this new version so they may have made a lot of improvements....such as it being in English now

...also in theory I would think someone with back-end access to this cloud managed web interface could direct hash anywhere they desired...even siphon off tiny amounts from everyone so no one notices....we're such an untrusting lot aren't we