Switzerland is often used by Chinese businesses to sneak goods into the EU without paying import duty.
$6,489 is too risky an investment for me though, I'll stick with $299 graphics cards.
I really hope someone starts building and shipping small cheap ASICs soon or we're gonna lose the network to LiteCoin.
Yes you're right, $6489 is quite a lot of money for most people out there, however we don't believe in the need to develop cheaper mining units because in the end when difficulty will rise, these units (like Jalapenos) will become very unproductive, but this of course is just our own opinion
Litecoin miners is something we are starting to look at, but it's really not a priority right now, might be interesting in the future!
The production is in Italy near Milan in order to keep labour costs low. The exact address can't be told because we have a non disclosure agreement with them.
I really fail to understand why you would first find a production unit when you don't even have a working prototype ?
Guess you messed up with priorities, like about every other ASIC manufacturer, apart maybe from freidcat.
Getting money from us to
try and make a working unit won't work anymore.
It's because of the way it works when doing a mass production of a product, you first agree on models and production terms, then you set-up the production chain and produce a couple of samples that are used to "tune" the real production, and finally when everything is in place you start mass production in "batches".
In our case, samples will be produced during the next 2-3 weeks as we've already set-up all the commercial stuff, don't worry you'll see the pictures posted here as soon as the samples will leave the factory.
You dont have any avalon unit?? That means you cant copy it!
Why dont you buy a avalon NOW? It would be much easier for you to clone everything. After that you can ripp off the chips of your avalon and bring them on the new avalon boards.
That means you could have a working copy in about 1 month!
I didn't quite understand where you've been reading that we don't have an Avalon unit, we do have one that was disassembled for reverse engineering. Doesn't really matter anyway, because Avalon released to the public domain all the specifications, schematics, sources and drawings on github about two weeks ago.