Sounds promissing, some questions:
1) Entry price and scale of your product
2) your website mentions already sold high end mining ricks, is there proof for that?
Hi, thanks for your interest. I'm unsure of what site you're looking at, ours is still in development. We haven't made an asic yet never mind selling high end rigs!
Entry level pricing for a 250 GH/sec system will be around $349 on average. Higher spec ones, up to 4TH will come in well under $1/GH/sec.
And they won't be available until nearer the end of July 2014, earliest.
It definitely sounds interesting. One recommendation I would have is to make sure you have things in stock and ready to go before you start accepting orders. Too many companies are accepting pre orders and failing to deliver, or delaying over and over...
Launch it right and you will have many many satisfied customers and word will spread.
Yes, that would be nice but we don't have a spare $3m lying around and the banks won't touch anything related to Bitcoin. We do things a bit differently to the other companies, for a start we have 120+ years collective of experience in actually building complex electronic systems all the way from consumer through to Mil/Aero. In short - we know how to plan projects so that they're delivered on tome and on budget. We do need some portion of the payment up front - there's no use trying to pretend other wise, but it will be somewhere in the region of 33 - 40% (and of a much smaller payment for equivalent performance)
We're also not going to screw people on price. The margins rig suppliers make are outrageous. To put this in some kind of context, we'll be offering a 4TH rig for well under US$4,000, still be making a fair profit AND paying the development costs out of it.
If we can do it, so can any other company. That is, if they don't pay themselves huge salaries.
Thanks for your post though. Hope we might interest you in our wares at some stage.
I did also a forecast, but only based on history:
Development of difficulty since 15.09.13
Dates days to solve 2016 difficulty increased in %
15.09.13- 26.09.13 11 112628549 --
26.09.13-7.10.13 11 148819200 32,13
7.10.13-17.10.13 10 189281249 27,19
17.10.13-26.10.13 9 267731249 41,48
26.10.13-06.11.13 11 390928788 46,02
6.11.13-18.11.13 12 510929738 30,07
18.11.13-30.11.13 12 609482680 19,29
30.11.13-11.12.13 11 707408283 16,07
11.12.13-22.12.13 11 908350862 28,41
22.13.13-03.01.14 12 1180923195 30,01
03.01.14-14.01.14 11 1418481395 20,12
14.01.14- ?? 1789546951 26,15
= average time to solve 2016 Blocks: 121/11 = 11
= average difficulty increase: 316,94 / 11 = 28,81 %
Forecast
dates days for solving 2016 difficulty increased in %
14.01.14-25.01.14 11 1789546951 26,15
25.01.14-05.02.14 11 2305115427 28,81
11 2969219182 28,81
11 3824651228 28,81
11 4926533247 28,81
11 6345867476 28,81
11 8174111896 28,81
11 10529073533 28,81
11 13562499618 28,81
11 17469855758 28,81
11 22502921202 28,81
11 28986012801 28,81
11 37336883088 28,81
17.06.14-28.06.14 11 48093639106 28,81
I was to lazy to put in all the dates :-D
We've spent a lot of time on a Behavioral Model to try to make some sense of what's going on. It pretty soon became clear that there is tipping point where miners will stop buying new kit, because they simply will never make a profit. The difficulty can't keep going up exponentially as a result (unless the Bitcoin value follows the same trend).Our prediction shows difficulty in mid-June at around 18,000,000,000, 25,000,000,000 by end 2014. At that time a TH will earn about $400 a month and eat a good portion of that in electricity costs. As a result, it's worth less than $1.3 per Gigahash/sec.
I've calculated the 50% loss basing on a 5 board delivery per BJ and an hashrate per board of 550GH/s (and an avg of 90%/month of difficulty increases, the default now at mining.tgb)
However since that HF should start shipping sometime like today for that to happen, we are talking about dreams.
Hi, I'm not from the US and so I don't know how close their company law is to it's UK equivalent. but I think that your chances of getting any 'consequential' damages out of them, ie losses you think you have incurred as a result of their non delivery of your rig, are next to zero. Most courts wouldn't consider such a claim unless there were very specific clauses in the purchase agreement (like the ones for Boeing's Dreamliner from the airlines).
For anyone that paid in Bitcoins, there's another complication as bitcoin isn't recognised as a currency (yet) so a court might not actually recognise that a 'legal' payment had taken place, unless you got a confirmation that your order had been received and that the full amount due in US dollars, not bitcoin, had been paid.
Has anyone actually received a rig yet?
Let's roughly look at the arithmetic:
At the current Bitcoin difficulty today, now, 200GH/s yields about 0.055 BTC, about $46.
So today that is about $46. Obviously $200 for $46/day is a good deal.
It's hard to take 1Gh/s for $1 as being creditable because if it's wildly profitable, there will be "shipping delays" and everything will be sold on top of that.
Very roughly if the BTC difficulty is increased by a factor of 10 by the time you sell your magic miner, then you are looking at a few dollars per day.
In summary, I really find it hard to believe that the average schlub will be able to make any money, because by the time this device is widely available, the ROI will suck, pretty much like every miner on Ebay.
The most interesting thing about your mining is what it will do the the ROI of the current monster installations. If your 1GH/s per $1 is not scam, I wouldn't be surprised if your competition doesn't try to hire away an engineer or 2.
This is a conundrum that I can never understand, If you miner can be this wildly profitable, you should be able to get investors to build this equipment and form a wildly profitable private mining syndicate.
Cynically, a profitable alt coin biz model these days appears to be to build an advanced miner and then market it when its reached about 70% - 80% of it's useful life to an audience that can't do math.
Thanks for taking the time to post this. I understand your concerns, particularly with the possible increase in difficulty a $1/Gh miner might bring, but there's an underlying point here - dedicated mining companies already have very cost effective hardware and can deploy said for around $1.5/GH (or less).
That's what you're up against, so like it or not the difficulty is going to keep going up whether or not we make rigs, although not anywhere near as much as some of the more extreme posts would suggest. By August, our behavioral model reckons it to be about 20-22000 MM, about 10x where it is today (or 140,000 TH). At that level a 250GH setup would earn about $150 a month, or $5 per day, and pay for itself in about 8 weeks. If you can get a better return for that on your investment then go for it.
The average schlub who can't even get a seat at the mining table right now might see it as being a rather good deal for his $250.
There's nothing magic about our miner, just good design and a good dose of research. The engineers behind this are all in their 50's and want to do this as a professional challenge, money is not their primary goal and so the notion of a competitor luring one away is unlikely. They already have been offered a stellar deal by a VC group, but turned it down because the VC wanted to keep it 'in -house' and do exactly what you said and use it to mine for their own enrichment. The engineers didn't intend this design to make more money for those who already have it, they genuinely want to democratise the mining process and open it up to everyone.Ultimately, like every other potential buyer, you pay your money and make your choice. I do hope you might consider us when you get to that point.
In this rather peculiar and specialised marketplace, normal rules don't apply. If you do away with all companies that start up with pre-order money, then you'll be left with a few that have past revenues to sustain their future development.
That would dilute any notions of competition - if there were, say, three left then there would be no real incentive to compete against each other, not when there would be such rich pickings, and like it or not, miners would end up paying a lot more for their hardware.
Just remember that buying is a choice, no one is forced to do it but they do because, as gmaxwell has pointed out, they have grand visions of making millions through mining. For most, that's simply never going to happen - you need too much money to start with to buy enough equipment, etc. That's not to say you can't make a reasonable return from a reasonable investment, especially if the chip/rig vendors stop being so greedy.
It will be very interesting to see what happens with the little ASICMiner chip - it's a nice, elegant idea but I'm sure it'll end up being hijacked by the middlemen and that end customers will never get anything anywhere near 1$/Gh let alone the headline $0.5/GH.
In this rather peculiar and specialised marketplace, normal rules don't apply. If you do away with all companies that start up with pre-order money, then you'll be left with a few that have past revenues to sustain their future development.
Thats not so. You can use clear terms and investment rather than pre-order nonsense. With transparency and equity in the business things would be much better off.
Just remember that buying is a choice, no one is forced to do it ... That's not to say you can't make a reasonable return from a reasonable investment, especially if the chip/rig vendors stop being so greedy.
Right and I hope with this thread to advance people's understanding and thereby improve the whole market place. If miner hardware charlatans cannot exist without miner buyer rubes. I've never bought mining hardware with grand plans of making a lot of money, I've bought hardware with the intention of supporting the network— and hopefully not losing (a bunch) on the process, maybe make enough to pay for the effort. I'm a little irritated that it's become hard to do that and to sort out all the fraud because too many people are willing victims.
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I'm sure that forum members appreciate what you're trying to do, and your philanthropic nature - I certainly do - but greed is always going to make people take more risks. Any experienced asic engineer looking at the Hashfast or Cointerra initial offerings would be alarmed at their underlying arrogance and lack of hard technical detail in their pitch. But many other simply see $ signs and the chance to get one up on their competitors, so take the risk. You'll never stop them, but I agree that it's worth the effort.
I really don't like the way in which new companies are attacked by members of the forum, but in your case they are more than justified. Your facts and figures don't make any sense:
You say you have already got prototypes coming this week. Now even in a MPW wafer run, given the power dissipation of your chip -extrapolated from the power supply size you quoted - it must be about 20mm on a side. For that size of prototype in MPW/28nm you would be paying close on 500k$, to get maybe 25 chips, not to mention the cost of design and since you're not an existing large customer, you would have to go through a foundry's agent design centre, another 400k$ or so. As you don't have your own mask set, you need to buy other MPW wafers to get your chips at a current cost of about $16k each to get additional lots 25 untested chips which might yield 20, or $800k each, $1600 for 2 chips for your miner. To get your full mask set you'll have to spend another $1.5 million dollars, and that gets you on wafers worth of chips, maybe yielding 90 best case.
So the money you are asking for is nowhere near enough.
To add insult to already injuring my intelligence, you publish a picture of what looks like a VGA chipset cooler and expect any engineer to accept that this tiny device could cool a chip dissipating 170+ watts?
Do I need to go on here and embarass you further - I have about another page worth of technical stuff - or are you going to stop this nonsense?
You trolling fools did get the part that the FPGA's are just the controller board not the actual hashing chips correct? Of course not, your just a bunch of backyard tinkerers who think they have engineering degrees.
No, the problem is that some of us
do have Degrees, Masters and PhD's, design chips for a living
and can spot an amateur fraudster like you a mile away, did you really imagine you were going to get away with this rubbish? You didn't even try to get the technology description right let alone your device specifications.
It gave many of us a good laugh though. Have to thank you for that, try a lot harder next time.
(if you know what I'm implying) 