Topic: LargeCoin Pricing Announced; Taking Pre-Orders - page 8. (Read 30323 times)

It would have to be absurdly high. See here. It would take $.47 per kilowatt for five years before the C200 overtakes the Rig Box.

MAYBE if someone really wanted to mine somewhere with very high elec costs they could have an advantage with this product , but that person would real have to want to mine there badly...

Except BFL's initial price per performance target was outstanding and even with it's revised specs, it's still very good. LargeCoin's price per performance target is already not competitive. Who's to say they can even produce hardware up to these specs that their simulation showed.

I'm assuming the prices quoted are ex VAT, thus there would be no refund. (25% VAT where I live)

However, the warranty needs to be sorted out if this is to be sold in Europe. In my country the manufacturer warranty period is three years, where the first 6 months all faults are considered to be from the manufacturing by default (after that the consumer has to show they're not due to wear or negligence).

Also, as far as I can see, the "DRM" issue is moot. Those still believing it to be a problem need to read ttul's posts in more detail (or if we could just get all that info merged into the top post)

My answer to the thread poll would unfortunately be "no". Not because of the price (it's likely not worse compared to keeping my money in the bank) but because of the warranty. Us europeans just shake our heads at the US "90 day warranty" madness.

I just read the whole 7 pages of this thread and sounds like a complete echo of the BFL thread at the start ( except we have BFL to compare to.)

If I had that kind of money to throw into bitcoin, I would buy the 6000 coins as stated a few messages above,  invest them in bitcoin ventures and have low risk ( accept maybe bitcoin price crashing....)

Well if the initial production run were done on a MOSIS process (partial wafer with other users), they would need to tape out again for a full wafer, unless they wanted to spin the same wafer over again. The tape out is what costs the most, but having a proven-working design certainly helps things along when you want to graduate up to full wafers.

Right.... if they have 25, the hard part is done.  Now, it's just set up the machine and press go.

I completely disregarded the 25 as I don't see it as any meaningful limit, and my argument would apply to anyone doing ASIC mining, not just these guys in particular.  I assume that the only reason that they'd do 25 is for prototyping to keep the risk manageable in case there were any bugs to be worked out, and if everything works as planned, nothing's stopping them from making however many they want.

ttul, has your company considered delivering chips to OEMs in order to maximize your profits? Since the initial costs to develop ASICs is rather high, to me it makes sense if you were to sell the chips you produced to other companies that would then design a small board (like the FPGA boards that exist already (including Butterfly Labs' "Single")) into which they would integrate your chip. These companies would then either directly sell these devices to consumers, or let a retailer do this (to avoid the aforementioned obligatory 2 year warranty that's present in at least the EU).

Does this make any sense for a company like yours to do? This assumes at least that:

1. The initial cost is your primary expense (ie. spitting out more chips would only marginally raise your costs).
2. You are able to release specifications to the OEM that doesn't reveal anything about your chip that might be taken advantage of by a competitor.

With an initial shared-wafer run it seems unlikely one would get enough units to be able to aim immediately at replacing everyone's household furnaces with ASIC bitcoin-miners or including a miner unit into every rack everywhere to help offset the high operating costs of secure, controlled-environment rack-hosting or just selling one units each to every bitcoin miner who can swing a lease or loan.

You lot maybe shouldn't be trying to discourage select clientele from snapping up premium-priced units but, rather, be urging them on while looking forward to the full wafer or multiple wafer runs the wonderful early adopter angels will be enabling by their magnanimous gesture of taking the initial run's produce so the world can move on to some real production scales that might maybe show us before too long just how cheap ASIC based appliances can be once they start pouring out at full production into a ready market able to absorb almost any number of them.

Of course if these are not the full blown type of ASIC but the structured ones or something hopefully there will also be R&D overhead for a full blown implementation also to take into account once the R&D that went into this one is accounted for.

So yes, buy these quick, be the first on your block to have the latest and greatest thing in bitcoin mining! Snap up this six month or less window during which you'll be among the few in operation and the block reward is still unhalved! Have months of amortisation already under your belt when everyone and their dog has one and GPU mining becomes just a toy for the litecoin folk to play with!

-MarkM-

On the contrary, rack space is expensive and it is imperative that it be used efficiently. Consider that the expected power consumption is 100 watts - whereas a BFL single is close to 85-90. Sure you could pack several singles into a rack space and cool them with forced air, but there goes your 40 amp power budget, poof like that.

Now whether the LC device is actually 100 watts, that I doubt. I hope you LC guys have significantly oversized the power regulation chips on these things, because it would suck to have to redesign them when you found out that mining actually uses a lot of power by activating many gates simultaneously.

Truly devious and very true.

...I like it. jk

A wildly unbalanced power of any kind goes against the p2p currency philosophy, doesn't it.  I would hope hard-liner p2p people would amass to shut this sort of imbalance down.

This is based on some kind of sASIC chips, right?

May I ask, just out of curiosity, how many chips are built into one of those rigs, or the other way round, how many MH/s you managed to cram into a single chip?

Maybe that is exactly what they are doing. I would assume an ASIC manufacturer would want to proliferate their chips to as wide an audience as possible, any other goal seems counterproductive to maximizing their profit. If they were looking to mine themselves, they would want the opposite. Just enough sales to pay the NRE costs, while still keeping the competition low to maximize mining profits.

Official explanation...


How much would it cost to produce 25 more units? Or 100?

Too costly, rack-space is not an argument, it is already very small with future BFL rigs.
People with 1.2m to invest for a full rack don't have any problems finding a place to store them. Hint : They can be stored anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

If I was to start a mining operation this size, (5 rack, 6m$) actively choosing the best location based on electricity cost , security and rent cost would be a rather trivial task.

I hope you can significantly lower your prices on the future batches or offer a compelling bulk discount.

/Following/

If the deposit is held in escrow, they will not be able to touch the money until the product is shipped and delivered.

I am surprised that as a legitimate offering, this would even be offered for sale.

If I were in a position where I thought I'd be able to have a head start on manufacturing ASICs that blew all other miners out of the water, I'd be highly motivated to just keep it all to myself as I pretty much dominated mining.  I'd score 7200 BTC a day (with it halving soon, of course).

Or perhaps I could have my cake and eat it too.  I could sell rigs for a healthy $30k, knowing that I alone had the upper hand in deciding how productive those rigs were going to be.  If for every 10 rigs I made I ran nine and sold one, I'd effectively guarantee that all my customers were competing for 720 (360) BTC and nothing more.  The customers I sold it to would have 10x the expectations - in the end, 9x of their expected yield I'd be keeping to myself with my supply of "unsold" rigs that I was running for, um, "extensive burn-in testing" before being sold.  (What, you think I'd let them sit idle on a shelf in a warehouse?)

If this product results in centralization of mining, I bet there will be cries for Bitcoin to switch to a CPU-based algorithm!

It may be a production run on a multi-chip wafer, i.e. they literally have only 250 ASICs.
All they could finance is a multi-chip wafer run.
The "deposit" will finance the PCBs, passives, power supplies and assembly.

Yeah I don't get it either although I doubt they have a 20 GH/s chip.  More like 10? to 20? chips per "rig".  So 25 units might be 500 chips.  Still it doesn't seem to make any sense.    25 units @ $30K ea = $750K.   100 units @ $12K ea = $1.2 mil?  Since incremental cost is small why would they want to limit themselves to 25 units and thus have to price them so high as to be inferior to other offerings?

That's what I don't understand. The vast majority of ASIC cost is in the design. Whether you produce 25 or 250 chips, the cost is nearly the same.