Topic: Where are the new Custom Hardware vendors? - page 2. (Read 3415 times)

from my research it appears the main issue is that to develop a board based on someone else's chips is usually an expensive venture unless you source it to china or north europe, and even then the asic manufactureres charge too much for thier chips on a reel.

for example lets take a bitfury 16-chip board:

PCB prototype cost (3-10 boards): ~$60-200 per board with varying timeframes
parts (not including bitfury chips): ~$15-30 per board depending if you want to upgrade components for better overclocking
assembly (in north america): ~$80-$200 per board depending how many and where you go. generally there is a first-time fee of >$200

total cost per board for small-run batch : $200-$350 approx
total cost per board for batch of 200 boards : $50-$100 approx
CHIP COST: currently the lowest ive seen is around $15 if ordering a reel. for 16-chip board : $240

this means that even with large production batches, we would be limited by what the chip designer wants for a reel. In the above example, a medium-sized run of boards and assembly would not be much less than direct purchase from MBP/BFSB (especially if they drop pricing to $350-$400 soon like i think they should)

Even with the promise of $5 chips in janruary, you would see costs of around $150 per board and it would be minimally cheaper then what they would likely charge at the time. The only way to step ahead of the curve is to design your own chips or have an open-source design.

*open-source cant be difficult, since most designs are based on FPGA code, right? I would imagine it cant be difficult to make chips for $1 a peice that are a basic design (exactly what avalon and asicminer did IMO)*

One quick question, is the $123/share price tied to the exchange rate or fixed? I guess I probably should post this in an appropriate thread but oh well O:)

Im more than happy to answer any questions or concerns, as is zombie. We try not to have too much of a life outside the forums

Yeah and I was asking a genuine question . I'm looking for the catch and can't find one which of course most people would find alarming. I'm not saying "true believers" don't exist but they are very rare and the number #1 choice of clothing for wolves .

This just raises my alarm but I think I will look into this more and maybe throw a few BTC in to see how it pans out since you guys have been pretty tenacious in defending any accusations or concerns...

I was just replying to the question.

He was looking for a new Custom Hardware vendor, and we have one in our midst: a miner just like us that put his money where his mouth is and paid to get 15TH/s made to be delivered sooner, rather than later.

These are always at-cost or even below-cost deals I structure for GBs. I don't make a single satoshi from immediate GB share sales as the extra funds go into UPS protection and co-op facility improvements. I'm trying to pool buying power so us little guys can get Institutional Pricing and exclusive deals like this.

I was once scammed by ASX Project (see the #4 sidebar FAQ at: http://www.reddit.com/r/bitcoinmining ) and I fell for BFL's BS when I was a noob. I'm here to help others have better experiences than I did when I started.

For me: personally, I eventually receive 0.25-0.37% of the 2.75% hosting/management fees once the miners arrive and are running, for coordinating all this and running the co-op. I would definitely say that is a very modest fee for the value of my work. I actually have no skin in these particular Rounds myself as far as shares but that's just because I have so many pre-orders in already, all over the place.

Because I have more than enough for myself to make a tidy profit, and I still make money on having all the boards hosted with me. Just because I am not as greedy as others does not mean I am doing this at a loss

I keep seeing this spammed everywhere and have one question that keeps me from participating. Why would you sell these if they are profitable?

For those looking to buy hardware off the shelf, Black Arrow was contracted to do a Bullet Run by bobsag3 and a custom hardware mfg. that sells his miners on the GB forum. bobsag3 is the exclusive official US Reseller for Black Arrow and has put a lot of money down to get hardware in miners hands sooner rather than later.

I was offered exclusive pricing on this by bobsag3, a DZ MC co-op member/leader/admin/vetted miner host and GB Coordinator.

BA is guaranteeing shipping by November 1 or we get our money back.Thomas S. and I are holding onto the GB funds to make sure that refund funds are available, if necessary. In fact, we have an update from the factory that they expect to be shipping tomorrow night and bobsag3 expects delivery in Missouri by Wednesday/Thursday. If they fail to meet this Nov. 1 deadline we all get refunds but get to keep the hashrate.    

These boards will be considered to be on the shelf and available for immediate sale/shipping by Wednesday/Thursday. I should have some more recent pictures to share on this shortly.

===

I'm offering fractional ownership of these boards to be hosted at a pro colo facility by bobsag3. There is also a sales outlet if you just wanted to buy boards outright, but I'm not involved with that deal.

I'm just the GB Coordinator for this deal and I'm truly hardware neutral as a longtime IT vet (except for BFL/Avalon; they're permabanned from our co-op). I'm not officially affiliated with BA, but they have stopped by to confirm that they're working with bobsag3.

To summarize: 15TH/s Black Arrow Bullet Run with Bitfury chips now instead of BA Minion chips in February.

$123 = 8.34 - 10GH/s + 1 month free hosting in Missouri + World's Lowest Hosting/Management fees at 2.75% every 2 weeks + UPS / Gas Generator backup protection + 3 remote admins + 1 local admin (all IT pros, including 2 Network Engineers and an EE) + custom built cabinet with extra Air Conditioner just for our co-op. This facility was designed by bosag3 and myself, a pro network engineer who's designed 4 different Research Lab server rooms.

Miners guaranteed to be shipping by November 1 or your money/BTC back.

Please see the 11th GB link in my sig for more details.

I would expect no less and assume he will find a few minor errors in my statements that he will use to post more FUD to confuse the basic facts which show without a doubt that BFL has purposely misled their customers almost from day 1 and continue to do so.

Well schooled, Tehfiend. Excellent point by point refutation and good real world examples.

Expect to be labelled a troll by the boy in a bubble.

It's definitely a lot easier than you have made it look as KNC brought a 28nm ASIC miner to market in a little over 4 months.

Yes you are right, you are living proof of the risks people face when making pre-orders as the VAST majority of your customers experienced insane delays and extremely negative ROI if they managed to receive their product. We can now say "be careful you don't get BFL'ed when pre-ordering" and pretty much everybody will know exactly what that means.

Yes actually it is the vendors vault when they sell more pre-orders than they could possibly ever ship in their advertised time-frame such as BFL has done. Both Bitsyncom and KNC (and most others really) sold limited numbers in their batches unlike BFL who pretty much took money from anybody willing to get in their line with no idea that your advertised shipping times were complete lies which would slip time and time and time and time and time again.

Check again. A few weeks ago I purchased 3 Avalon mini's that shipped in less than 72 hours after I ordered them. They are due to ship their gen2 hardware OFF THE SHELF any time now...

Josh everybody knows you're smart enough to understand that in "this industry", volume means nothing and hashrate means everything. It's like comparing the number of 300MH block eruptors with the number of 500GH Jupiters that have shipped. By repeating this over and over it is only revealing the deception you are constantly hiding behind.

The fact is BFL has been a disaster. Sure not a COMPLETE disaster like bASIC but still a disaster. While waiting for my 60GH Feb BFL pre-order to arrive:
- I've pre-ordered Avalon batch #2 units in Feb which arrived in JUNE for a total of 190GH
- I've pre-ordered raw Avalon chips from Zephir in April which arrived in July, had them sent to Germany where Burnin used a custom board to ship me functioning BitBurner miners in August all from scratch!
- I pre-ordered from a BRAND NEW company KNC back in June which shipped a 525GH miner to me THREE WEEKS AGO!
- I've ordered 3 Avalon Mini's on Oct 15th which shipped within 72 hours which had three times the hashrate for less than my BFL pre-order cost which has still not shipped

What has BFL been doing during these 8+ months since others have produced miners FROM SCRATCH in much less time? It's 100% obvious that BFL sold MANY MANY MANY more orders than they could possible ever ship and all of the lies that have been spewed by you during this past year amount to fraud in my opinion.

/school

Actually the chip design is not a very difficult task and soon there will even be open sourced chip design. So you can anticipate many cheap Chinese made miners showing up in the coming months

The manufacturing node currently is not a big concern, since the mining rig's cost and delivery time is the main factor. 4 Avalons delivered today are much more useful than a knc saturn delivered one month later, and the earning difference is more than enough to pay for months of electricity cost

YiFuck's ego chi, maybe?

Anyway, I'm having the same thoughts that the next few months will decide which ASIC companies will be left standing. The race to the bottom has already started and soon we'll see how low $/GH will go.

Maybe we won't see so much "next gen" ASICs but just more energy-efficient respins of older designs. There seems to be a sweet spot between the 130-110 nm and 20-28 nm designs that is efficient enough, and cheap enough to make... just stick more of the chips on the same PCB, and they might still be cheaper to churn out en masse than the ones made with 20-28 nm process.

The next half year should prove to be interesting.

Difficulty just jumped 46% up, few hardware vendor can chart the market with such fast diminishing return, unless they have already ROIed. I think Avalon is working on something big

Some even drag it out unnecessarily long and refuse to give refunds. Amazing right? (Need to get my dig in the guy deserves it)


When you ask where are the new Custom Hardware vendors... do you mean chips and rigs or would those producing units with others chips count?

I think there a plenty of people keen on developing "new" systems but given that the cost of developing a chip is pretty substantial and time consuming has probably put a huge damper on newer vendors because of difficulty rising sharply and the actual demand for miners will taper off if it hasn't already. What doesn't help are companies like BFL and Avalon that have pretty much soured the market and thrown up huge hurdles even for the most well intentioned company but I would say the economics are not there. Look at Black Arrow and their chip rig combo "pre-selling" at the lowest rate $/gh but given their time to market it will likely not be oversold like an Avalon or BFL offering because their really is no guarantees now to earn back your investment.

To be honest there are quite a few people at the margins as well looking to revive the DIY push that BKKCoins, Alten, Burnin all started with their DIY Avalons unfortunately Avalon failed to deliver and that I think has left many questioning the trust of chip fabricators. I suspect that DIY will push through and continue developing units even with exponential difficulty some people are keen on this as a hobby, even though it is an expensive hobby. There are plenty of people willing to keep even pushing the Avalon Gen I Klondikes just get those boards going. If you are looking for newer vendors I don't see where simply designing ASICs is going to be profitable for anyone for the foreseeable future. I suspect several companies will collapse and fail to produce a second or third generation of miner at this stage. Some of these companies really should disappear as they are literally dragging the marketplace down with their ineffectual shipping and refusal to follow fair and reasonable trade practices. With them gone it might put some needed trust back in the community and free up space for better companies in the future.

I would ask you what is wrong with KnC, HashFast, Cointerra, and Black Arrow? Are they not new enough? Different in their offerings? Better at customer services and shipping on time in the case of KnC, are they not?

Sorry for the derailment.

Without either a rise in the exchange rate or the sudden mass adoption of reasonable transaction fees or an increase in the volume of transactions (with fees), mining isn't a good investment. The spring/summer rush of preorders was based on a lack of awareness of how much hashrate had been bought by everyone else and hearing good news stories from the lucky early Avalon miners. Now the reality has hit home, I doubt KNC, Hashfast, Cointerra, Bitfury and the dreaded BFL are getting many new orders today. I guess the delay between the preorder date and the delivery date of most of these devices means the feedback loop informing people with spare cash that this a sensible investment was too long and thus, people have made irrational and unsound decisions.

Why aren't there more vendors? Perhaps the people with the correct skills and experience are getting paid more working for Intel, AMD, ARM, Samsung or Apple and don't feel that attracted to working in this kind of insane environment.

Philosophically, I don't really see any real advantage to the mining difficulty getting any higher. Back in the CPU days, more people mined and therefore the market was more accessible and the network more distributed and therefore safer. GPU and now ASIC mining reduces the pool size with no real advantage unless you have a larger share of the pie. I think this is where Litecoin has the better balance, but unfortunately it was derivative and second to the race.

I'm really sorry I resurrected this thread.  I thought the OP had a very good question but it went ignored.  Now I really regret my decision, lol.

Um... yeah.  So this turned into a bit of a hate-fest.  Serious replies still appreciated, curious why the vendor pool, if mining is such a good investment, has basically dried up after early next year?

What can I say, a monumental asshole visited this thread (and I don't mean me  ).

I don't regard myself as a troll; just a burnt out customer who visited a stupid forum (not this one) for a year hoping for some good news. It never happened. Now, I don't want any newcomer to this forum to get the distorted picture that MA tries to paint with his plays on words, refutations, denials and delusions of grandeur. What goes around comes around, when chickens come home to roost ....

This thread starting good....and BAM !

Trolls come back again with BFL rage 

Come on...