Topic: Just got an email that Alpha is opening up preorders for Q3 scrypt ASICs (Read 2718 times)

I've just done it, and I'm doing it again. I can build a complete rig in an hour, up and running. A few thousand dollars either way doesn't matter when you talk about a 6-9 month wait. It's also not an "Amazing deal" An amazing deal was 700gh/s for the Jupiters from KNC for only $5k. If these things were half the price they are asking and shipping in a month, it would be an amazing deal. Right now, it's about equal to what a good sale price on GPUs would bring.

The main problem with this is that we have no idea what the environment is going to be like in 9 months time... What if there are so many people hashing due to it becoming more accessible to the public that your new shiny expensive miner will take forever to pay itself off.... New laws could trash the price of bitcoin leaving many of the alts not worth mining. The bitcoin and altcoin scene is very fickle and to make a investment that wont pay anything for another 9 months seems kinda silly. Especially if everything goes to crap at 8 months in and you only get 50% of your deposit back :/

People already learned the hard lesson with BFL, not many are willing to give any money to those stupid companies.
And this stupid refund policies? These guys are crazy if they think they can do it.
I guess it's against any consumer protection law in any western country.

Just think of how many coins you can mine with 25Mh over the course of 6-9months+delays. Just think of the value of those coins if you held them for that long.

Interesting, maybe time to grab some litecoins before the Q3 difficulty jump.

WTF LOL.


That's $8000 to $10000 in just cards alone.

Add on (PSU, MOBO, RAM, etc) x 8-10.

Then add on the cost of power at the wall and the cost of your time building and then maintaining all these rigs.

25MH for ~$9000 is an amazing deal.

The problem is the wait time and uncertainty of delivery. You don't know if something better/less expensive will come out before your product arrives.

I'm with you (and others) on this one.  I was wondering whether to buy an R9 290x or wait for one of these asics (two companies apparently wanting to offer these).   I'm not 100% convinced about the asics offers, and as someone recently said, the longer you stick around the Crypto world, the more careful you become.... too many things can/do go wrong in this "wild west" world!

Its time for me to see how well an R9 290x mines!

As someone was saying in a scrypt asic thread, "I thought scrypt was supposed to lock the asic guys out???".   If both SHA256 & Scrypt goes the asics way, that will be a sad day for the gpu guys!!   Not looking forward to that day.  I will probably buy into a small asic if they ever surface.

another BFL company  I'm gonna stick to my gpus

not going to fall for this scam again...

Why do I need to redo my math? You can read, right? The price is listed in british pounds. In USD it is about 8900. I can build pretty close to that 25MH for that today. Maybe spend a little more, but I'm not talking 32 $500 cards, I'm talking 40-50 ~ $200 cards. A difference of a few K here and there isn't much, especially betting on completely new, untested hardware from a new, untested company. If they start shipping and reviews are good, I may buy some, of course by then all the rigs I'm building now will have spawned many more like them from coin profit, and I likely won't need them. I suppose I'd consider selling off all the old hardware and replacing it with new for the power savings, but that can wait until products ship.

Or put themselves on an exchange like havelock or something.

building coins with supposed resistance is not the most efficient way to create long term hashing for the network

Blakecoin has the idea to try and use a fast and efficient algorithm for the hashing that uses a parallel structure and works well on CPU, GPU, FPGA this is a more balanced approach to the design  

Why Blakecoin beats other coins in the long run:

The modified blake-256 algorithm hash rate is just under 3x faster on the GPU and just over 2x on the FPGA compared with Bitcoin
The reward for mining Blakecoin does Not decrease over time it only increases with block height and difficulty
No restriction on any platform as Blakecoin does not include artificial *Security* that slows down possible mining hash rate and reduces power efficiency
Already has planned use for Blakecoin as a currency storage between MMO systems with prototypes in development

Blakecoin is the fastest !

5.1GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 7990
2.2GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 7970
1.4GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 6970
1.3GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 5870
1.6GH/s on a ZTEX USB-FPGA 1.15y Quad Spartan-6 LX150 Development Board (using < 40w of power)

Tweaks:
Removed some of the double hashing from the wallet for increased efficiency and reduced collisions

compared with scrypt performance on FPGA for the modified Blake-256 is very good  

I would have also thought that if the investment in very expensive Asic development was done for the modified Blake-256 algo you could be talking 2-3x faster than even the current best SHA-256D Asic it would most certainly use less silicon space thus the chips would be cheaper each and use less power, I think an investment in scrypt based Asic devices is very risky with new algorithms like Blake-256 on the scene  

it is also possible to merge mine other Blake-256 based coins with Blakecoin thus supporting other coins with different features without having to pick and choose, it would be up to the pool operators to pick which coins they merged mined with Blakecoin  

  

Those things are going to put my miners out of business

WTF

 

Why not to buy (invest in) LTC right now instead waiting such a long time for shipment ? How big will be the difficulty when you will get this device ?

If they need help to pay for the development perhaps they should do a kickstarter campaign to help pay for costs...

I agree, Oldminer, their terms are quite stringent.  I think your concern about products may be valid but I also think they'll provide more proof of an actual physical product soon.  They've said they would post a video soon.  They also seem to have thought out how they would go forward with releasing the product.  It's hard to tell at this time with great certainty and that's indicative of poor management.  Then again, the terms do give the sense that they are trying to cover themselves financially by ensuring a certain number of buyers and maybe even raising some capital to cover costs.  

I try to look at many angles.  On this topic, I can't fully agree or disagree with anything at this time.

Seems like they are building the plane as they fly it.  Quite risky.

It's an interesting story.    

much proffesional 

Well, looking at their terms its obvious they are concerned about losing money on cancelled orders. Such concern shouldnt be warranted if they are selling something that actually physically exists as demand should be high surely? As a result, buyers would be queuing to pick up cancelled orders. The whole thing stinks, and under Australian law their terms are illegal which makes it very suspect.


The thing thats appealing about crypto-currency to the mainstream is its free from regulation and can be 'produced' and traded quite freely. Does anyone truly see the day when the majority of people who cant afford ASICS pack up their bat and ball and go home because the crypto-currency production domain has been taken over by the rich and big business? I dont think so. If I was a coin dev, I would already be working on a new crypto that is ASIC resistant & will only ever be able to be mined by the masses. In effect, such a coin would be 'future-proof' and now is a perfect time to release it.

Their refund policy is illegal pretty much anywhere with basic consumer friendly laws, period.

Not following the logic of, "... if these things are legit..."  and "What a con."  Why wouldn't they sell the unit to the next buyer if the previous buyer opted out of the proposed contract?

Now, your next point has my interest.  You make a very good point and it deserves more consideration.  What we're looking at is development of business and technology growth at an ideal time.  World economies are recovering.  Unemployment is going down.  What better time to develop?  Look at what is happening.  Just as you said, coin makers are dictating new hardware.  This is an incredible phenomenon if it can be sustained.   And as I've said earlier in some other threads, the coin is as valuable as it's use and so far the usability is growing.

Very interesting times

Wow..if these things are legit they wouldn't care less if someone cancelled, they could just sell the unit off to the next buyer. What a con.

Aside from all this, there will always be a market for new coins to mine for those with GPU's. Coin dev's will just modify their current coins to circumvent these devices and new coins will be design with resistance in mind. Interest in coins that don't comply will die.