Topic: [CLOSED] - Stumptown Miners - Avalon PCB Assembly - West Coast USA - page 13. (Read 30738 times)

Very Interested in throwing my hat in the ring for some combination of k16s and k64s totaling 256 chips from Ragin's 1st chip group buy.

Interested in 2 k16's and 4 k1's (assuming all chips are good).  I'm also in ragingazn's first batch and steamboat's 3rd batch, so that works out perfect.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=Sie4JW1E

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

The escrow address for Ryepdx's Avalon Chip group buy is:

1E4YTtj589bWJPyN5y1NMTdkQ3DDfc6c8f

Please state and agree to the conditions (if item is received damaged, item lost with tracking, customs fee etc) beforehand.

If possible, GPG sign your agreement to prevent any discrepancies later on and please ship with tracking to prevent problems during delivery.
GPG signing is not a requirement, and any verbal exchange in the form of private messages or posts on bitcointalk.org, or email is effective as a statement of condition.

In addition to that, I confirm the receipt of:

1) Photo of Ryepdx's passport
2) Photo of Ryepdx's Driver's license
3) Self-potrait of Ryepdx and his house
4) Self-potrait of Ryepdx and his house number
5) Self-potrait of Ryepdx and his license
6) Photo of shipping label to his address

The fine print:
This Contract is solely generated for the purpose of facilitating the transaction between the seller and the buyer, which refers to the pseudonyms used on bitcointalk.org.
The escrow holder, John, assumes and gives no liability or guarantees on the satisfaction of all parties involved, although he agrees to mediate and facilitate the deal to the fullest extent he is capable of.  On the event that any problems arises, he will release the escrow to whichever party that presents him with the most convincing proof and/or after an open discussion with others or theymos. 
The verbal acceptance by both parties (or the failure to reject) and the sending of Bitcoins to the escrow address above constitutes the acceptance of the terms and conditions stated, and the activation of this Contract.
[
Please understand that I am assuming the risk of holding the escrowed Bitcoins, and I am using my own time to facilitate this transaction.   
I am imposing a fixed and nonrefundable fee of 2% for this transaction, to be deducted when the funds are moved.

Thank you.

John (the escrow holder)
27 May 2013
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True facts. I'm not going to be going with Colin's supplier in all likelihood. I got some preliminary online quotes for fabrication before I started focusing on assembly costs, and it looks like $10 per board is pretty much what it costs at most places for our batch sizes.

Interested. 34 chips from ragn's first group order.

$2 to $20 for fabrication? That was a real quote? Hahahaha. I hope $20 is for 10 units and $2 is for 10,000 or something, because that's completely useless otherwise.

The last quote I got on the K1 from Colin. It was a hand-wavy $10 for assembly and $2 to $20 for fabrication. Still waiting on a quote from SMT NW on both the K1 and the K16. ESP Seattle finally got back to me, but they weren't able to beat Tate's price on the K16, so I won't be pursuing things with them any further. I'll send out for a quote on the K1 from Tate today.

Sounds great, What's the status on the K1 quotes if any?

Sounds good to me.


And a refund address. If your group buy has enough people sending chips to me, you'll be bumped into a lower-priced assembly and fabrication tier, which will result in a refund of the difference between what you paid and what the miner now costs. Plus I'll need to issue refunds for anyone who joins from a late-shipping group buy without enough orders to justify the cost. (Making a batch of, for example, four miners would not be worth it, and I don't want to hold up assembly on a shipment from a larger group buy to wait for a couple more chips to trickle in from a later group buy.)


Sounds good to me. When someone joins from a particular group buy, I'll send my shipping information to the person who organized it and then the person getting miners from me can just tell their group buy organizer to send their chips to ryepdx, or Stumptown Miners. The person organizing the group buy can then just tell me who's forwarding their chips to me and how many they wanted forwarded.


That's what I plan on doing.


Hopefully! :-)


I'll be selling the BTC I receive immediately in order to hedge against such crashes. I'll also be organizing a local meetup for people interested in this endeavor so they can talk with me face-to-face. You can hand off whatever USD you want to hand off at that point. If it ends up that the price of your miner drops due to the amount of involvement from your group buy, I'll send you back the extra cash along with your miner.

So far I like how this thread has been going, I was wondering just in case BTC crashes to 80-90$ levels.
Is it OK if I paid you in USD when it comes time to order?
Heck we can even meet up for a few drinks with the other local miners too 

Here's a thought: each group buy had a public address that was associated with it. Based on the prices and fees for each group buy, it'd be straightforward to make a formula to calculate how many chips each sending address purchased.

In order to use the website, perhaps the payment for board assembly has to come from the same address that was used to purchase chips, so it can be verified that X number of chips (less than or equal to the number of chips on the boards being made) actually belong to that person. That'd constitute proof, in the blockchain, for the group buy operators to release those chips... assuming the chip ownership wasn't transferred after the fact (that'd have to be handled through the forums).

Or perhaps there's a better way to do this. It does seem a little convoluted, but I'm imagining scammers trying to get boards made with other peoples' chips.



Edit: After 5 minutes of thinking about it, this is a terrible idea. Maybe it's good for settling disputes, but it shouldn't be the primary verification method.

The pool operators just need the individuals that want to redirect their chips to you to inform them the same way they initially provided shipping info. Since the pool operators are trusted entities, they can simply provide you a list of everyone who redirected their chips. (All of this assumes the pool operators will be amenable to the idea of redirecting chips in the first place).

What YOU need, then, is some way to connect payment for the boards to the identity of the individuals who provided chips. You COULD use the blockchain method I described, but that has the complication of post-order ownership transfer. Since the pool operators will probably be providing you forum usernames, maybe the website could spit out a confirmation code that we'd PM to you.

Sorry about the brain dump, hope something useful came out of it.

Edit 2: Oh, duh, just put the forum username into the website. I'm a little slow today.

Let me consolidate the rambling into a coherent suggestion:

1) It's recommended we use the same address to send bitcoins for making the boards that we originally used buy the chips. This will help settle any disputes that arise.

2) We pay up front for boards on the website, and leave our forum username and probably an email address.

3) We inform group buy operators about the change in delivery address. Hopefully they'll be OK with this (since it saves them shipping $ and trouble), and they'll provide you a list of forum usernames that are now sending chips to you (and the associated number of chips).

4) You can validate the people rerouting chips against the people who paid on your website using forum usernames, as well ensuring they're not having more boards made than they're having chips sent.

5) Hopefully this means nobody gets scammed.

My thoughts exactly. I'm going to put together a simple website to start taking bitcoin and registering how many chips to expect from each group buy soon. Right now my freelance work is pretty much taking up all my time, but I should get a chance to put it together soon.


Yeah, definitely. I'll probably send him a message once I have some hard numbers to lend more weight to my request.

Thanks!


Yep. I'll be converting it to USD upon receipt, though. I have to pay the plants in USD and I don't particularly want to get screwed by exchange rates.


True facts. As for myself, though, I've decided to assume Tate's is the cheapest (barring that guy on Dorkbot proving to be legit) and start looking at heatsinks and components. I also need to source PCB fabrication, but I'm not too worried about that since there wasn't much variation among the preliminary fabrication quotes I was getting earlier. (They were all about $10 each for quantities over 100.)

That's totally fine with me. I know you from raginazn628's group buy and have every reason to believe you're on the level.

I assume you want BTC?




It is pretty good, and most of the companies I know of mostly deal in high-end networking or military hardware. On the bright side, their volumes are usually low, but $45 is hard to beat.


Ok, all the people involved in this will need to verify the transfer with their respective group buys, then. That should probably get worked out sooner rather than later. It does have the potential to save the group buy operators some trouble, so hopefully they'll be on board.

We should probably give raginazn628 a heads up and see what he thinks.




Ok. Have you seen this?

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/klondike-heatsink-sourcing-208381

It sounds like they're open to the idea of releasing it to specific vendors who are willing to pay them a fee per PIC.

Now, regarding escrow, is it alright with everyone if I gave JohnK my personal identity and then held the funds myself? I'm going to have to pay the assembly and fabrication plants and I don't have enough money on hand to fund a full batch of 100 on my own. If I fail to deliver, JohnK will release my personal information and you all can choose to pursue legal action.

Are there any objections to this arrangement?

Sounds good if BkkCoins releases a image file to load into the PIC.

No, I haven't. I was planning on sourcing and programming the PICs myself.

Have you made any arrangements with BkkCoins about getting programed PIC chips?

No problem! :-)


Yeah, I'd be alright with Californian companies. They're within driving distance for me. Idaho would work too, honestly, if there are any Idahoans reading this. But they'd have to be able to offer *very* competitive rates. ~$45 for assembly seems pretty good...


I'm hoping to get in contact with the people running the group buys for the people involved in this effort and having them send all the chips from each given group-buy as single, long strips. If that fails, I can just get the cut tape spliced together.


That's fair. I admit that I haven't spent much time sourcing heatsinks. It looks like there's at least one viable, BkkCoins-approved design on the Klondike thread now, though, so I'll start looking for sources.