Topic: LargeCoin Pricing Announced; Taking Pre-Orders - page 7. (Read 30323 times)

As VAT tax refunds work, in my country at least, you do pay the 25% VAT to start with, and then get a refund. So you do get a tax refund, but the original price is of course excluding VAT, so it won't cost you less than that (ie. you're just refunded the additional amount you paid).

Do you have a reference for the obligatory three year manufactur's warranty in your country? A reference that specifically mentions that this applies for business-to-business sales?
As I mentioned, it makes no sense to purchase this kind of unit as a private individual and increase ones cost by 25% (because of VAT). So laws governing consumer sales will not apply.

ttul, you have ignored my previous question regarding selling your chips to OEMs who will then include them in smaller products targeted at the private individual. I have a feeling that the number of people willing to invest $500-$1000 in Bitcoin (through such a small device) can bring in a larger sum in total than the number individuals willing to invest $30,000. Can I get you to make a comment on this?

$30,000 is just a ridiculously high price, but reading through the whole thread it seems ttul is testing willingness of people to buy the box for $15k?    


@ DeathAndTaxes:

Yes, $18k seems acceptable, if the LC appliance really can deliver on the promised specs. But if the power requirement really turns out to be closer to 200W (or more) and the performance is say 20% less in the production unit this would be a slightly different picture; in case of the BFL Single it happened...

Likely LargeCoin wouldn't even need to be dollar for dollar the same price.  @ $0.10 per kWh the Single costs ~$1700 more per year.  If using AC that is another 30% so $2200.  If the LC was $3,000 more it be better option after little over a year.   When you start to consider the advantages of density, noise, management, plus host cost (and load) is is still competitive at a slightly higher price.

If it is $15K vs $15K it is a no brainer.
If it is $18K vs $15K it is kinda a weigh your options type decision. 
If it is $20K vs $15K you need a good reason (like has to be in a datacenter, you have $0.20+ per kWh, etc). 
If it is $30K vs $15K there is nothing to weigh.

Still something is missing, the BFL Single (now that it's actually shipping):


With the initial investment at about $15k for the 24 BFLs, a LargCoin appliance @ $15,000 would be quite competitive.

And the rig box is not even out yet, so if the actual performance is the same ratio as  with the BFL single (1GH projected, 832MH delivered), the BFL will get you about 42 GH for $30k @ 2.5kW (or probably more kW).

Shit, this is hot.

As I think I said earlier, your mom probably doesn't have a Bitcoin ASIC in her basement computer. This means botnets can't harvest nearly as much horsepower as will be available when ASIC computation is ubiquitous in the Bitcoin network. Just as FPGAs are rapidly growing in prevalence and replacing GPUs, ASICs will eventually replace FPGAs. LargeCoin's goal is stay on top of the ASIC trend and profit over the long run as Bitcoin comes into widespread use.

Bitcoin has been through more hard knocks than most well funded startups could possibly handle, and is still going strong. I don't see a reason why it won't be around in 10 years time, and by then many orders of magnitude larger and more interesting.

Wow the pricing is a non starter but 200MH/W on a sASIC?  I would have guessed a sASIC would be more like in the 60-80 MH/W range.   That likely means a custom ASIC could be in the 500 MH/W range.  28nm could maybe break the 1 GH/W barrier.  :The entire network using less power than giga farm is using right now.  Yeah the NRE means it won't happen anytime soon but it is pretty nice to consider the future security of Bitcoin.

Higher capital cost and lower energy cost is better security for Bitcoin.  The simple version is the attacker doesn't attack long and defender must defend forever so higher the ratio of capital:operating costs the better for the defender (FPGA, sASIC, ASIC).  The lower the ratio of capital:operating costs the better it is for the attacker (CPU, GPU).

One day someone will build a standard cell based ASIC for Bitcoin mining, and that will cost $5-10M NRE and it will be a monster.

Pipe down over there and let the adults talk in a reasoned manner please. If you don't agree with some claims, please present your arguments and questions in a less offensive format. Thank you.

As I read the ttul post it pretty much says that the current offering is based on sASIC.

Same is true with GPUs. Never seen a botnet of 5870s. Whoever is geeky enough to buy a 5870 knows how to be secure usually.

Quit the marketing and BS talking. You are not using custom ASIC as that requires millions to produce and nobody would take that risk.

Probably using sASIC in the best case ...

Also, this rig box and box that makes 50 ghash/s or 20 ghash/s will only centralize BTC to the few that can afford paying over your threshold amount of 10k+ which I doubt many "casual" miners are willing to pay. Stop trying to sound like you are making BTC more secure because this simply is not it.

ASIC will be devastating to BTC and make it 51% easily in the early true custom ASIC times until everybody gets same HW and drops GPUs.

ArtForz mined about 60k BTC in the days everybody was CPU mining with a single 4870 AFAIK. Someone with secret ASIC could do the same and 51% this easily taking all our coins.

This is quite true. The cost of fabrication is extensive, and much of that cost is for very very experienced engineers to validate the design before it is manufactured. Silicon wafers, and the literal fabrication process are only part of the cost. It's easy to understate the complexity of putting together an integrated circuit. We're talking about tens of millions of transistors, complex timing circuits, and little tiny wires that all have to fit together perfectly to result in a working product.

FPGAs are a great because they provide power efficiency within an order of magnitude of the ASIC, but without having to worry whether your simulation of the metal layout might not work just right with the lithography process. Unfortunately, FPGAs carry with them a couple of serious drawbacks versus ASICs:

1. FPGAs use a lot more logic to implement the same amount of logic. That logic eats up power.

2. FPGAs themselves are very complicated chips with high fabrication costs. That keeps the unit cost high even at high production volumes.

In our exploration last year of various options for increasing the efficiency of Bitcoin mining, we thoroughly evaluated the FPGA options, because of course using FPGAs instead of ASICs would have greatly sped things up and reduced our risk. But, what we discovered was that the power, space, and unit cost efficiencies of ASICs will always win out over FPGAs in the long run.

So, if you believe that Bitcoin is going to be around for many years to come, as we do, then you'll want to make a long term bet on ASICs rather than loading up on FPGAs that will be left in the dust as the difficulty factor is pushed higher by ASICs. Short term calculations based on today's difficulty factor and exchange rate are just not relevant. If your goal is short term profit and you fear the future of Bitcoin, then stick with FPGAs.

I am very pleased that there are others like Butterfly Labs who seem to also be working with ASICs. This is great news for Bitcoin - the more custom logic that gets pushed out there, the lower the risk that Bitcoin will be co-opted by botnets operated by nefarious groups. Because, last time I checked, your mom's PC didn't have a Bitcoin ASIC in it.

They have already once adjusted the specs downward from 54.4 Ghash/s to 50.4 Ghash/s, and from 800 watts to 2500 watts. Although this is still vaporware, I'm pretty sure they learned from the Singles mistake and the current numbers are more accurate.

Something was missing from your table:
Based on $464 per one Icarus unit (for batches of 30x, without separate PSUs. Next revision may be considerably cheaper).

I'm quite sure I've read that info in this thread already.

Any answer to this question?

Also, directed at pretty much everyone, why are we suddenly allowed to compare things to the BFL Rig Box as if it's real? Did we learn nothing from the "guarantees" of the Single? Compare this to products that exist now: BFL Single, the various Spartan-6 FPGA miners (see my sig for the best one!), GPUs.

Comparison to X6500s:

That's based on the bulk price of $515 each for the X6500.

Let's say the X6500s require 900 W more. That difference is less than 8 kWh per year. At $0.20/kWh, that's $1600. Plus, no DRM messiness. I'd still buy X6500s, thank you very much.

Still, in the long run, that power efficiency is amazing. Any proof that it's physically possible? Did you use a 28 nm process?

Wafer sharing is not the only method giving such low-quantity outputs.
It also may be a sASIC with some layers configured by ion-beam etching. Expensive, but literally single chip production is possible.

We will need some very specific details in order to take you seriously.

• What is the ASIC chip set you are using?
  Where are you physically located and will you allow members of the Bitcoin community to visit your place of business?
  Who or what is this escrow service and if it is not someone or some business we are already familiar with - why should we trust them?

We (Bitcoin Miners) are generally in a frantic FPGA mode right now but anyone would be stupid to fork over even a $4k deposit before we have some real specifics

I assume that the company doing the multi client wafer would have a schedule and would be doing another one the next month or whatever period they run on.  Assuming their test worked, they could buy multiple slots on the next month's shared wafer and have 25*n chips, n being any number that suits their fancy.  And in that month while they waited for that production, they could put together all of those rigs, so by the time the chips themselves are ready, they can be dropped right into the rigs and fired up immediately.

"by default" means that if no obvious fault can be found the blame is on the manufacturer during the first 6 months.

If you turn it that laptop the manufacturer will examine it and kindle refuse your warranty claim since you've operated it provable outside the specifications.