I can tell you guys right now that you're going to end up having to buy one set for Europe (with someone you all trust) and maybe two batches for the US.
I have purchased from ngzhang before and I'm willing to ship from Des Moines, Iowa (just two hours north of BFL Labs in Kansas City, Missouri). But I don't think it's merely going to cost an extra $10 for
insured shipping, it'll probably be more like $15 (esp for Canada), and I'd have to find someone around here willing to repackage them securely for us (fortunately I do think I have that covered).
I guess I'm not opposed to doing this if we get enough interest for two batches. I'll probably be in the market for up to eight more depending on my private investors for my own mining op (mostly family). I'm going to talk to one of my financial backers (cousin) and see what his opinion is on the risk. I have to tell you guys, though, I wouldn't expect everything to be only $10 more when it is all said and done. When I did an international wire last time it ended up costing about $50 in total (this was the most direct way to send fiat money, however). I think I could mitigate that somewhat by using Bitcoin, but when you are talking about buying $30,000 dollars worth of equipment with BTC, there is a LOT of variance in price that could hurt you that you won't have with straight US cash. (This is just off of what experience has taught me, ngzhang can attest to my frantic emails the night Bitcoin dropped form $4.95 to $4.50 as I was preparing to send him the coin)
Anyway, I will subscribe to this thread and will give you an update on exactly how many more I'm interested in shortly. For now you can put me down for 8 and a tentative on being the one to ship them if you guys trust me. I don't really have much in the way of credentials to speak of, but:
1)
I have been around for a year from my pretty dismal OTC rating (
),
2)
was known for being the first guys to look seriously at Dwolla since their offices were downtown about 5 blocks from me,
3)
successfully predicted we'd start to see stable growth in December, and
4)
have recently helped subsidize some miners who were scammed while waiting for reimbursement.
I would be willing to provide additional information about myself for those of you actually participating. If you look through the Icarus thread you'll see a few comments where I asked ngzhang about having authorized retailers in the US and Europe already. I would mostly be doing this service as a way to help increase reputation, but I would want to be compensated for any insured shipping that I would feel obligated to do. I do think the price could be reduced quite a bit this way, I just want to manage expectations when I said I'm not sure $10 would be enough to compensate someone for this appropriately.