What's the thought or plans for the future given you've clearly put a good amount of effort into making the boards stackable with various backplanes?
Is it only 'we did this to enable people to purchase multiple boards on this order', or perhaps 'we plan to offer opportunities to purchase more compatible boards throughout the year that have BitFury chips', or 'we see opportunities to keep providing compatible boards even if we have to switch chip sources', or (ominous music) 'we did this to get someone else to fund our own super-massive scalable mining rig, MWahaha!' :-)
Seriously, I can only put in for one board now (and have done so). But all the people commenting that they've placed multiple orders made me think: Should I be totally discounting the stackable nature because it will be useless for anything in the future? And, should I sell body parts to go for a second or more board now because I won't be able to get one later?
Hey Dav
Good questions. Hopefully this little spiel will answer you.
We are intending to continue this project into the future beyond this specific group buy. Initially the plan was to continue producing Bitfury based boards for as long as it is viable and then seek out a new chip source to implement a new version of the Drillbit System to accommodate next Gen chips. This is still the plan, but it is looking at this point like one reel of Bitfuries is as far as we will go with Bitfury. The main reason for this being that prices has risen dramatically on the Bitfury chips. If we did move into a second reel, we would have to put the prices up a lot. When we get to that point i will put it out there to people and see if there is a response, and hell, maybe we will do a second reel at raised prices. If we can gather the funds before October we can get both reels at the same time. This would be a plus for sure. It really depends on whether people are willing to pay the new prices. If that ends up not eventuating, from there we will focus our efforts on gear based on new chips. I am making investigations, buts its still too early to tell what might be available and when. I know thats all a bit off the topic, but also not really.
All the hardware is designed to be upgradeable. The intention is that next gen boards will be able to plug into your existing system. Now, there is a massive disclaimer on this, and that is basically that we can't guarantee comparability until we know what the next chip is all about. Best case scenario it just slots in and happily coexists with your existing boards, worst case is that the old and the new boards won't be able to go on the same miniplane. But either way, the miniplane will work with new boards. New chip based boards will be designed with the same basic technology as the existing boards, just modified for the new chips. So yes, your Drillbit System will continue to be relevant and expandable beyond this group buy. Exactly how it will work is yet to be determined. It all depends on whats next, but whatever it is, we're going to do our best to get our hands on them and get them out there for you.
Barntech