Topic: [BitCentury] Metabank 120Gh 65nm Pre-Order Proxy [CLOSED] - page 10. (Read 79010 times)

Hello everyone,
I just wanted to let you know that I finished replying to everyone who had requested to be put on the waitlist so far. If you somehow didn't get an email from me yet, then please email me (not pm) your original email requesting to be waitlisted, and I will make sure you are in the right spot on the list, but I am pretty sure I got everyone.

Tomorrow, I hope to start emailing customers their sales contracts, although everyone hopefully already has had a chance to read them from my previous forum post.

On the Bitfury ASIC update front, we haven't much new to report. I don't believe that as of right now, there's been any confirmation either way of the preliminary test results, although it does look like Bitfury may have missed his bet deadline for June 15th.

Hope you're all having a great weekend...ideally not glued to the screen like I have been all day :-)
Kind regards,
Luis

Note: We are migrating Mail Servers right now (3:00PM PST)... please wait until we give go-ahead for any additional waitlist requests.

Edit: As of aprox 3:45PM PST mail should work for most people. If you get a failure to deliver message to: [email protected], please just try a bit later until DNS propagates around the internet.
Thanks
Luis

For those not wishing to read the entire (very amusing) saga. The TL;DR version is this:

1. The Chips have been acquired from the factory in Taiwan
2. Punin is already trying to test them on a PCB (presumably to address Bitfury's online bet which expires in just a few hours!)
3. Bitfury has privately acknowledged that BitCentury will be getting Alpha chips for testing and punin already has Nigel's shipping address in Australia! We will be posting pictures/videos etc as soon as we get them, but it's realistic a few days away, likely next week some time before we actually receive our alpha chips.

In the mean time, here's some pictures from punin's blog that might be of interest:

Speaking of getting Bitcoin related work done fast and across the globe, some of you might interested in the status of Bitfury's ASIC. On this Finish blog (use google chrome to translate to English), you can follow punin's adventure as he flies from Europe to Asia to acquire BitFury's chips from the factory, to then distribute them to all sorts of countries around the world for hard core engineer alpha testing.

https://bittiraha.fi/content/matka-alkaa

Enjoy!
Luis

Hi Foofighter,
We initially looked at incorporating in Canada, but once we sat down with our lawyers, we realized it made no sense given our staff thus far is already in 4 different countries, and will likely expand in the future to others as well.  We are not a typical operation primarily based in 1 or 2 countries. While today we are looking at shipping from Russia, tomorrow it could be designing PCB boards out of Australia, designing power components out of Taiwan, PCB printing and assembly from China and running a website out of Finland. Then 1 year later it could all change. So maximum flexibility will be key to being competitive.

Further, what is considered local for me as a Canadian, is considered offshore for the other business partners and potential future investors.
Likewise incorporating in the USA in certain states is considered 'offshore' from the perspective of many other countries. Even more so when incorporating in Russia. As such, since we would be considered offshore no matter where we incorporated, we then considered various countries to incorporate in that would be more or less neutral to any of our current and future business partners, investors and ventures. With this, we considered a location that was historically stable and then obviously, it made sense to consider corporate tax neutrality which we see as benefiting everyone involved including our customers due to retail price impact, granted individual import/duty taxes may still apply.

Bahamas was only one of many options, but we settled with this one as it could be done reasonably fast, inexpensively and our lawyers already have years of experience in incorporating other companies there without any issues.  To be clear, we are not trying to weave a complex web of offshore companies and tax structures to obscure what we are doing as has been popularized recently in the media with big conglomerates like apple, google, starbucks, etc. Sorry, we have no time or any interest in this,  we're just a bunch of engineers trying to get work done as fast as possible as anything Bitcoin related seems extremely time sensitive, as such being able to get things done FAST without a lot of bureaucracy was our #1 consideration.

Hope that helps,
Luis

Dear Luis,

just double checked the contract but Iam wondering now why your company is legally placed at Bahamas, I thought you would have an offince in Moscow and you are currently located in Canada.

As I understand the situation, this would be just a private office in Moscow and you dont pay any taxes in Russia? Means your company is not predominatly located in Moscow? So is the adress in Bahamas just a letterbox company to save taxes?

Please explain.

Best regards
Foofighter

+1

Thank you Luis!
Email sent...looking forward for updates.

Hi guys,
On the subject of waitlists for Metabank Bitfury Orders:
Thanks for your continued interest. We are not aware that Metabank has officially come out and stated that they may have additional units for sale should some of their potential customers from batch 1 not pay within a week. We believe this information is being propagated by at least 1 individual on bitcointalk.org with possibly questionable motives, but in short, we cannot confirm the validity of what is being claimed either way.  That said, it is not outside the realm of possibility. Do let us know if you find a reliable source of this information.

This situation is one possibility, but there are others which may eventually result in Metabank selling more units - or not! Odds are, *IF* the BitFury ASIC passes tests successfully first time, and *IF* Metabank is just holding off on those test results before selling more devices (likely at a higher price than before), then we might as well be ready, but really, do consider they many never sell units again, or at least not in the short term.

What Bitcentury will do then, is organize a product tracking waitlist of sorts,  wherein people that are interested in eventually buying units can email us (See email below, please don't PM me on here), and I will add you to the list.  There is no money/bitcoins involved in this, and so this is not a pre-order, but rather a waitlist for a possible pre-order. As such, we offer ZERO guarantees of any kind.

We will simply try our best to be ready to buy more units *IF* and when they sell them again.  If they do sell them, we will announce our selling price at the time and then you can judge whether or not you still want to commit to the purchase.  You will be given 24 hours notice once we have confirmation and emailed you that we can purchase more units, and nothing would be official until you actually send us the bitcoins to secure your queue order (later to be followed by a signed service agreement).  Failure to send us the bitcoins within 24 hours of notification will result in you losing your place in the queue to the next order/customers.
  
Please be sensible with your requests. Anyone asking for more than 10 units, we may require some proof you actually have the bitcoins/funds to pay for such an eventual order.
Those that have already contacted us and we have replied to you in one form or another (if unsure, please email us as per below), you will be automatically added to this list, and we will contact you over the weekend with your place in the queue & how many units.  

So, if you are interested in being on a waitlist please email: EDIT: The waitlist is now closed, so email was removed

With the following info:

EMAIL Subject: Waitlist request: Name, # units, June XX, 2013

1. Your BTC Source Wallet Address:  
2. First/Last Name:
3. Address:
4. City:
5. State/Province:
6. ZIP:
7. Country:
8. Phone:
9. # of Units:  
10. Your Email Address:

Thanks,
Luis

If there is a chance to get one of these units, PM me pls.

thanks !

• Defining Bitcoin is pretty hard, and linking to a wiki is useless for this XD
• I'd suggest defining Product more specificially, to indemnify yourselves against the risk of Bitcoin hash algorithm changing; eg, SHA256d searches where the final 32 bits are zero
• "BTC signing" and "BTC wallet" are wrong terms - signatures/wallets are unrelated to the BTC unit of currency, and as Bitcoin wallets are not public information, it is unreasonable to expect proof one owns it (nor is there any standard/specification for doing this)
  Looks like, from the context, you want "ECDSA signed message" and "…from the Customer's pre-specified ECDSA key"
• Quote
  or software alterations that go beyond changing configuration parameters of the original provided software, may render the Product warranty of Metabank void
  Not sure about Bahamas or Russia, but this clause is invalid under US law.
• I'd suggest removing the vendor requirements from 5.1. I don't think anyone cares if the chips are from Bitfury or not, if they perform better…
• The contract names Canada as jurisdiction, but it started off as a company in Bahamas... Doesn't the jurisdiction need to be the location of one of the parties?
• Clause 5.4 must allow opt-out to do business in the USA, I believe (and I intend to opt-out of it).
• Finally, IANAL and the above is not legal advice.

Hi oaxaca,
Even the brightest make mistakes. Feel free to offer a better value service. Competition is a good thing.
Cheers,
-Luis

I would imagine that with that kind of profit margin, you'd hire only the best and the brightest.



Well, so much for that theory.

Hi Foofighter,
Good question. What you might notice in the contract is that some clauses got removed and others simplified. We were advised not to over commit, and especially not to be too specific where possible to allow for maximum operational flexibility.  In regards to the mining, our intentions are the same as before, but we were advised not to include the details in the contract. Imagine a situation where one of our staff was making copy/paste or typos in the destination BTC address and all the mining proceeds from your machine went to somebody else? Imagine we didn't discover this until later after many customers were affected. Our lawyers thus advised to remove these clauses to limit our liability as well. On a similar note, I think is important we also state publicly that from the 57 machines we've purchased from Metabank thus far, 10 of those were purchased for Bitcentury from our own funds, and yes, with those we intend to mine to get more familiar with the machines, but also for profit generation, to cover company costs or raise funding for future ventures, etc. At the end of the day, we aim to grow our business and expand into other areas, time/opportunity permitting. Building trust and being transparent with our customers I feel is critical to achieving that goal, especially in this line of business given the current environment.
Cheers,
Luis

Hey,

just checked the new contract.

So what happens now with the mining earnings produced during the testing phase of the devices?

regards

Hello everyone,
Service Agreement (Contract) Update#4: Well, it's finally ready! We appreciate everyone's patience with this, it was important we did sufficient due diligence. I'd also like to thank the individuals that provided constructive feedback and contributed to its improvement. Feel free to comment further on it if you wish or ask any questions. Over the next few days, our customers should be getting  an email from us, with a copy of your Service Agreement(s) and some basic instructions. Also, I will leave up the early draft I posted a few days back so people can easily compare the changes, but FYI after a week or so I will delete it.

Service Agreement URL: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bz7CvNpsvWycTmlDcHBzVUs0Qk0/edit?usp=sharing

Cheers,
Luis

Hi Foofighter,
We have not finalized exactly what we will do yet, and likely won't until we give it a try and find what works best. Our goal is to optimize the logistics such that your device is out the door to you as soon as possible but still undergoes some decent amount of power on testing. We discussed something along the lines of picking up the systems from Metabank, dealing with paperwork during the day,  testing the systems overnight, and packing them back up and ship them out the next morning. Then rinse and repeat. There are many more things to consider in this logistics operation (how fast can we get systems from Metabank? Will it be all at once or small batches? How reliable are the first units after testing? (This may impact how much testing subsequent undergo). How are the units  packed from metabank?  Are they delivering plain circuit boards in an anti-static bag, or do the systems come with full CNC milled aluminum boxes (Avalon style)? What is the quality of the boxes/packing material from metabank? Is it good enough for international shipping or will we need to source additional/better packing material? How many units can we reasonably process in 1 day?  etc), so I am hesitant to commit to anything specific, but as soon as we figure out exactly what works best we can certainly communicate it.

Luis

Hi,

just wondering,
have you planed how long you will test each device at your office? Will this be a matter of hours or more like a full day or so?

regards

If there is a free spot pls PN me 

my funds are ready i got my deposit yesterday and if someone do not pay i will take their spot

Let me know guys