Topic: Black Arrow 28nm 100Ghash Bitcoin ASIC from $0.49/GH/s - page 363. (Read 787286 times)

As interesting as this model is...

Unless difficulty rises on a rate less than 1/3rd of what it does now.. (which.. haha.. wont happen) there's no way for your products to give customers a profit, as you claim. If you're "guaranteeing" this, then why not make it a money back guarantee? Make it simple too.. during those 15 days of burn-in/warranty-testing, if the product hasn't ROI'd then issue a refund, or offer them to buy it for less than the difference.

Thanks for the reference.

Wow, these look really cool and I was about to pre-order, but then I saw they won't be available until February of 2014.  At that point, I'd imagine you'll be able to buy extremely discounted hashfast and cointerra stuff.  I'd be surprised if you got a lot of preorders for this offering. 

I don't get why the bitcoin asic vendor's don't follow the standard business model for the semi-conductor industry...  Why not focus on getting your chip out as soon as possible...  Forget about putting together miners.  Then setup a supply chain as an asic only provider...  Sell your asics to Burnin, the Cointamination people, Stumptown, etc. - all of the groups or companies out there ready, willing and waiting to put together miners for people.  If all of your focus was on getting the asic out there, instead of dealing with individual customers, sourcing cases, power supplies, and all of the components and fans etc. and assembly that go into a miner, would it be possible for you to get the asic off the production line sometime in December (which seems to be the date you need to be out by to stay competitive.  I just don't understand why all of you asic developers are also burdening yourself with actually building hardware too.  I would preorder 2k worth of chips if I had your word they would be in my hand by, say, mid-December.  If you shared your hardware specs with 3-5 specific hardware vendors, I'm sure they could get everything ready and probably have the hardware in our hands for when the chips arrived.  Hell - you could beat some of the biggest names out there for delivery if you just focused on getting the asic produced and shipped.

Theres a reason intel and amd don't build computers....  Think about it.  I'd love to see someone bring some competition to hashfast and cointerra in the form of an innovative business model.

I actually think that this is why BFL had their epic failure.  Pick one thing and do it well.  If BFL had just focused on getting their chips out to 3rd party hardware assemblers, they would be THE bitcoin hardware company.  Instead, they had to worry about assembly, cooling, power supplies, packaging, customer support, supply chain delays, etc.  Thats what killed their output.  And I bet if you look at their bottom line, all of the overhead for all of the extra components they had to source, buying power supplies, etc. along with the damage to their reputation as a company - focusing on selling their chips probably would have netted them a lot more profit in the long run.  As they would have been the only option for probably a year or so to buy high performance chips, they could have sold them for whatever they wanted to...

Just a thought.  Good luck, I respect your company very much.

BlackArrow, can you give us some rough timetable for the project which wouldn't be a business secret, like:
- estimated date of tapeout
- estimated date of chips produced
- estimated date of first prototype
This will greatly lift the confidence of buyers since they can checkout if the project is on track.

Also, is the info of your chip foundry public yet?

Lancelot:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/discontinued-lancelot-heavy-duty-400-mega-hashes-2-x-fpga-mining-board-187549

Can you inform us what products has your company delivered "on-time" before?

Thanks

TMC

You could offer an escrow service.  Pay with BTC and if any of your terms are not met, including the delivery date, all BTC are returned to the customer.

You do have a great reputation, and I'd have no problem ordering products from you.

However in these turbulent times with huge hashrates coming on line, new vendors, ipo mining farms etc it's tricky to work out if anything you get in your hands today will be profitable let alone predict what the mining world will look like in 5 months time.

I wish you well in your venture, for me the days of pre-orders are over and I will re-evalutate future purchases when vendors have items in stock.

I'm not familiar with them but if they have then I stand corrected:

We are among the few companies...

I think Enterpoint has been reliable in the past..  ? 

We are the only company from this forum (as far as I know) that has delivered the products on time. If we said that we'll deliver then, we will. What other kind of guarantees can be offered?

We could have "forced the truth" and say that we'll deliver in Oct-Nov, but we prefer to sell less and keep our reputation unharmed.

I insist with my question

"I am interested,

Any guarantee to be delivered during Feb-14?

TMC"

As we're trying to get this product out as soon as possible and in order not to skip the testing phase (normal with any reliable product), we offer free hosting 15 days while we can test customer's miner and the customer can receive the mined bitcoins. This will save a lot of time and money in case of any warranty claim as we can replace it immediately.

We might offer paid hosting as well by the time when we complete our products. More details later.

Regards!

We have added 2 hours ago Paypal. Please let us know if you encounter any issues.

We're looking into accepting credit cards directly as well, but it might take a while.

Regards!

Thank you, Black Arrow, for prompt and precise explanations. The answers increase confidence.

You have promised credit card payment option soon. Is a matter of days or months?
I know a person who decided to buy elsewhere just because of CC available there and not here.

Everybody does not like pre-order. We all like btc-miner.

Do you have any more details available about hosting option?

Everybody until now sold you hardware that they knew that you're going to loose money because 1 month later they announced something faster at a better price.
We are guaranteeing that this won't happen with us: If we drop the price you'll get even faster hardware, keeping you in front of everybody else.

Orders of over 10000 pcs of Minion ASIC are $127.36/pcs

$127.36 / 64 = $1.99

Customers who pre-order and pay now have 25% discount. Our promise is that we will ensure that customers who preorder now will always get a better deal than customers who order later.

At the same time we promise that our prices will be below market price at the time we ship.

This means that customers that preorder now will have considerable lower market prices by the time that we ship which puts them in advantage towards anybody else.

Unless Bitcoin mining stops because it becomes unprofitable for everybody else in February, our customers WILL make profit.