So we need to buy chips to get samples right? What about possibility of smaller then 100 chips punches so we can buy them sooner for development?
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The minimum quantity for this offer is 50 chips, and it was chosen based on my experience with other chip distributions where I realized that serving too many small customers kills my ability to ensure the service I would like to provide. A lot of 50 chips was therefore my compromise for offering an interesting entry volume for DIY folks and serious miners, as well as being a well sized offer for manufacturers of single chip devices.
Alas, for designers I understand that it is not ideal, since they do not want to order 50 chips just to see if the chip is doing as proposed. Therefore I am evaluating an additional offer dedicated to support you developers out there, without limiting my ability to handle everything well. The problematic part with low-volume orders is the shipping and handling component, which basically is identical whether someone orders 50 or 2 chips. The 8% surplus I put on top of Bitmine's prices are covering those expenses, but won't do so if applied to very small orders.
One option I am thinking of is to add a low-volume flat fee for smaller orders of say 1 BTC for quantities below the lot size, to compensate the S&H expenses. I understand that this would cause a huge cost overhead if buying a single chip. But assuming the reasonable number of chips required to test a design to be around 4 (if you want to test the binary-tree communication you need 3 or 7) it is maybe quite acceptable. As an example, 4 chips would be charged 4.4 BTC (3.4 for the chips plus 1 BTC low-volume fee).
What do you think, is this fair and acceptable?
when pricing is announced.
