Topic: HashFast launches sales of the Baby Jet - page 56. (Read 119626 times)

I share your concerns about group buy risks. The GB I have in mind will have pre-escrow protection to handle funds, miner payouts, ordering details, and if necessary, refunds. HF's MPP helps to hedge against delays if they're legit. Just about finishing up the last details.

anyone notice anything new on the site?

No More Group Buy. Stay Away

Hi Simon,

Thank you for your efforts to help develop the BTC economy. After a lot of thought, I'm leaning towards your company for my final 2013 pre-order.

John K. has agreed, in principle, to hold in escrow my BTC for ~20% of a Group Buy - and the group funds I'm organizing - to purchase 1 unit from either HashFast, CoinTerra, or some darkhorse that magically has powerful ASIC hardware on the shelf at similar or better prices (ex. KnC/BF at even lower prices). If HashFast continues to show good progress I intend to offer the best pre-order + hosting offer anywhere pre-escrowed by JK & backed by your MPP. The proposed GB setup will offer owners the best value and the best dual protection plan to be found anywhere.

At an additional fee, his escrow service will order and have the miner shipped to a trusted 3rd party hosting location and will oversee that miners get paid out fairly & on-time. I've offered him or an intermediary co-admin rights on the miner for auditing purposes. I'm also offering admin rights to AM1/100 shares which will be held as collateral for 2-3 months of miner payouts.

John K.'s exact words upon reading my pre-escrowed plan: "I've read a lot of proposals for group buys at this point, and I must say that yours came across as one of the best written and thought out. "

This type of group buying is exactly what ASIC mfgs. are driving us towards. This is the lengths that I have to go thru in order to get access to the best values and best hardware. Us little guys who are the ones that help keep the network running will have no other way to compete except for group buys and mining shares. Not sure if you foresaw that when you wrote your paper.  

I'm trying to get hosting pricing as electricity is too exp. in my home state of Hawaii (yeah, poor lil me). You mentioned power specs but hosting services charge by the RU size.

Nitpick from a fellow prototype IT HW designer colleague: Judging by concept pics offered on your site, it appears to be not rackmountable, at the moment, which I think is a design mistake, if so. If you can build it with integrated rails, that would be ideal. I prefer the tower form factor for best cooling when designing my gaming rigs but for people trying to mount multiple units on a rack or in a server room somewhere, having a bunch of Towers to service is not ideal (at least from this server ninja's exp.).

Can you give us some rough size estimate? People need this info for calculating hosting costs vs. self-hosting.

Is this considered a Mid Tower or a Full Tower?

Thanks & GL with your product launch!

TL;DR: It's too hard to keep up with net. difficulty without Group Buys or mining shares. Also, the tower needs to be mountable on racks.

Not exactly, most of the coins mined go back for more hardware...

Yes. Also, a smaller company being able to pull even a 100W chip with decent yields is a long shot.

isn't that what icedrill is doing?

i don't know.  i'd have to think about it.

Hopefully someone with asic design skills could contribute... I can barely spell GPU.

Still the issue of heat density and clock potential, usually these 2 factors alone means that smaller chips outperform bigger chips in terms of performance/mm2. Then again most of my knowledge from this area comes from the GPU/CPU industry so it might be as you say that size is not an issue in this case.

I think the biggest thing going for them regarding chip size is that I imagine it isn't as complex as a CPU.  They don't need to support a full instruction set.  They just need to duplicate the hashing core a couple of 1000 times and if 10% of them don't work... not a big deal.  If the MOV or DIV on a CPU doesn't work... it is a big deal.

And some/most/all gains by going big will be lost due to lower yields/lower clock potential is my completely uneducated guess. If everything works out from the start and yields are where they are supposed to be on the first run of chips I can see it paying off, my impression of the tech industry however from the last few generations is that the amount of problems and delays seems to increase exponentially with your chip size :p

Because when I first heard of this program that's the first question that popped into my head as a miner like yourself.

They've personally told me this is the case.

@cypherdoc, what makes you think the hardware 'specs' will be open sourced?

Can you explain how you calculate and what "payback of your investment" means?  Is payback meant to mean "break even" point?  Is the break even point (if that's what you mean) calculated in BTC or USD?

Your terms appear to be hastily put together with a lot of ambiguity, leaving you guys many options to "word speak" your way out of it.

Sounds like an excellent deal. Let me see if i understand it correctly:

1.  You guarantee that the chips will be within the announced specs (<1W/Gh, >400Gh/s), or money back in on Jan 1, 2014?
    1a.  Will it still make sense for me to build support circuitry & mine with it four months into next year?
           (using your refund date of Jan.1, 2014 as the start date, +90 days to determine no-break-even, +30 days shipping,
           shipping to board assembler, assembly, more shipping, etc. bringing us to April 1, 2014)?

2.  What percentage of the $5,600 price is the *price* of the chip?  
     2a.   Will i be able to buy blank boards from you?  
     2b.   If not, will your gerber files etc. be royalty-free & available?  At what date? (i'd like to have the boards on hand when the daffodils bloom)

3.  If, after mining for another 90 days, i still don't get ROI, will i be able to get *2* more chips, rinse & repeat?

4.  Are you giggling now, since these are the very wrong questions to ask?  (the right one being "should i have been less curt with the Nigerian prince?")

These guys certainly try to be the leader. Shipping is prohibitive for buying one (I live in EU). There is always IceDrill as a lower cost alternative...

Maybe someone provides hosting with these?

Cypherdoc if I order one can you provide hosting? Fee negotiable..

Let's see what users will do with only the chips...

What we really need to know then is will HF be releasing an open source motherboard design and are there any suppliers lined up to produce PCBs with these chips. PCB builders will only be interested if HF are selling reels of chips. Assuming the baby miner has 1 GF chip, and we are supplied with 1 chip after 90 days, it will not be useful. Also of note this GN chip requires liquid cooling so basically home made / rasberry boards are not going to happen.

Addendum >> on further review, this is actually quite a generous offer.  In context, a reel of 3000 bitfury chips for October delivery is US$57,750 or EU$45,000.  You would need 256 chips for 400GH = US$4,928.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xkLUp-B7TgoJ:https://megabigpower.com/shop/index.php%3Froute%3Dproduct/product%26product_id%3D52+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au&client=safari
http://www.bitfurystrikesback.com/product/bitfury-55nm-asic-by-reel/

Hence 1-3 x 400GH hashfast "GN" chips for free is generous (HF will generate many more GH/wafer than bitfury)
The only question is how much will HF charge us to attach them to a chassis !

+1 will you offer hosting ?

How much is this assembly fee you speak of?