Some of you may have seen the newsletter that was sent by KNC yesterday, it's also here on their website:
https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-75I'm not quite sure what to make of the third item on the list, the "Plan B" temporary hosting.
Clearly they have not yet taped out their new chips yet, but is this a "BFL" scale fuck up waiting to happen? Did they overreach?
Plan B
As you are all aware we broke many world records in releasing the 28nm chip in such a short amount of time. We are a very ambitious company but even for us, to go “all in” and not be able to deliver on our performance targets, like our competition, would be completely unacceptable to us as a company and everything we stand for. So today we are introducing, Plan B.
To make sure that everyone who has paid for their Neptune gets their we are building a data centre like no other. It is located in the north of Sweden not far from Facebook and other Mega Data Centres and it’s totally powered by renewable energy.
Over the next few months we are bringing online enough hashing power to make sure that any delay in the Neptune timeline will be compensated with a completely free hosted hashing packages to all fully paid customers.
In the addition to this commitment, as part of Plan B, for all Neptune customers, we will be offering a free conversion to a hosted hashing package where we will simply fill your wallets directly and you won’t have to worry about anything else. All the other costs taken care of by us. We are able to do this by using our 28nm chips which is why all products that we have coming out of our factory in the next few months will go into building and supplying the Plan B facility.
If, during the course of development of Neptune, there is any threat to the timelines for delivery, those delays will not result in the loss of any mining time for our Neptune customers. We will release more details of this as we get closer to the delivery date, but for now we have one of the world’s largest data centres to build.
I havent read up on KnC the last months but i think there Neptunes were to be delivered in Q1-Q2 2014 or so. There first release of miners, Jupiter & Saturn was pretty close to projected target dates(end of september) and they started delivering a few days into October so maby they see that they might be a week or two behind there shedule on when to start delivering there new line of Neptune ASIC miners.
The announcement of plan B is then just telling people that they intend to pay people for the mining incomes people would have got during those 1-2 weeks that they may be late. KnC have some mining on there own with previous generation ASICs and they intend to use generated bitcoins from those machines to pay costumers in the days there late if there late on releasing the Neptunes, thats how i interpret there news.
Locating a data center in the north of Sweden is nothing strange, we have lower electricity prices and lower taxes on electricity in the northen part of Sweden and the labourcost in northern part of Sweden is lower than if the had hosted there devices in Stockholm for example.
I don't see it as possible that KnC would screw up as BFL has done, KnC may be a week or a few late but i doubt it's possible for them to be over a year late on delivering ASICs like BFL was on the delivery some of there costumers machines.
