Bitcoin Forum

(translation in progress, will be fixed in next few hours)

Pre-orders

You can make a pre-order by buying a special "DB.RCLMR" security in the Exchange section of https://icbit.se trading platform.
After mass-production announcement you'll be able to exchange 4 bonds for one basic device (Reclaimer One). Number of bonds per device is fixed and won't change.
You'll need more bonds to buy bigger models.

Estimated product performance

Reclaimer	One:	4 GH/s	$320
Reclaimer	4A:	8 GH/s	$520
Reclaimer	RM:	80 GH/s	$2800

(this price is valid for pre-orders via DB.RCLMR bonds, average price in USD is based on USD/BTC rate at ~10)
Given numbers are not based on working prototype tests yet, but are guaranteed to be not worse than that.

Product description

Reclaimer RM is a 3U 19"-compatible 'rackmount' device which can be controlled via Ethernet connection and work directly at selected pool/bitcoind without any PC. You'll be able to mine on any pool or your own mining server.

How to buy Reclaimer bonds

You can make a pre-order by buying a special DB.RCLMR security in the Exchange section of https://icbit.se trading platform.
Current price is 8 BTC per one DB.RCLMR bond.
Only bitcoins are accepted, but you can try to exchange USD to BTC at the same platform.
USD can be deposited via aurumXchange's VouchX codes.

Wow, competition is coming fast now.

Actually we were thinking about this and making preparations since ~new year, but it was announced only when we decided it to be become real.

No word on date availability, can we expect this to ship before 2015 ?

We expect this to ship somewhere around first half of 03.2013
I'll post additional notice on shipping dates after prototype tests.

Im curious how you expect to sell any of these then. Your price/GH is significantly above BFL, and you will probably be ~6 months later. Are you just betting on BFL not delivering?

Rackmount FTW!

Seems interesting.. 3 competitors now.. wonder whos numbers are most realistic.

My price per GH/s is sometimes lower than some of our competitors.
Also, why would I make our prices much lower if there are no available alternatives at this moment ?

We can make our devices faster for same pre-order price if other products will totally dominate at the release time. It depends on what we'll see then.

Do You have estimations on power dissipation ?
Are You willing to disclose more technical details than the competition ?

Since you wont have hardware until next year either, the alternatives are plentyful. They dont exist now, just like your product doesnt exist now, but  alternatives promise much faster delivery and better GH/$. I honestly  dont understand why anyone would preorder your asics instead.

+1

Looks like the 80 gh unit is going to be bigger than BFL's two SC + a working laptop?

Will the ASIC support password cracking ? this would be a major benefit over other ASICs

What kind of passwords ?
No, this is a specialized device and it can be only used for mining, proof-of-work generation and PoW signatures.

Not sure, just asking regarding other uses, BFL once stated that their ASICs can do certain type of password cracking which is similar to  SHA256 processing, but they purposely disabled it so they don't run into export limitations.

Presence of competitors is NOT a reason for me to not do anything.
If some of them will start shipping I'll consider changing specifications of our devices, but now it's too early for that.

Making different ASIC products is a good thing for protecting the network, not to mention the competition itself.

I can't imagine how this can be done with a custom ASIC product. Either it's suboptimal design consisting of generic packet hasher and separate nonce incrementation module (would only work on SHA256-hashes anyway) or it's not completely truth.
May be their representative was talking about something else.

I remember their announcement of BitForce product that mentions "medical image processing", "Monte-Carlo method" and so on, but that was FPGA and it's technically possible with appropriate bitstream provided. Just as with any other FPGA board, but without GPIO pins.

Yes, I have simulation results, but I wouldn't like to publish them because this estimation may be incorrect.
AFAIK our competitors aren't disclosing this kind of information too.
Of course it's much more effective than FPGA products, at least.

As for more technical details: yes, more information will be added.

If You don't start with the 3rd round and have the option to send the output of the first complete sha-2 pipe you can use the chip for general sha-2 calculations. this is suboptimal but only a small overhead with the advantage of a new market. But You already have the design and probably MPW based results so it is too late to change anything.

Even with suboptimal designs only bruteforce tasks are possible.
You can't use it for general SHA calculations because that would require completely different IO for high bandwidth: you'll have to channel gigabytes per second in both directions.

Let's imagine that we want to mine bitcoins on a general purpose SHA256 device. Without using midstates we should load 80 bytes of block header first (two chunks of 64 bytes each), then get first hash result - 32 bytes. Then we load it again as a 64 byte chunk and get our result as 32 bytes. This equals to 256 bytes of total I/O per one dual hash, and just for 1 GH/s that would be... ~2.048 terabit per second.
May be there is a little mistake somewhere, but anyway making general purpose hasher and bruteforce hasher is not the same.

I think the issue the others are trying to make is that at present:

1.  Your device is estimated to deliver at least 3 months after BFL.

2.  Your device is considerably more expensive then BFL.

3.  Your claim of performance is lower than BFL.

4.  You wont provide any more details than BFL.

I accept that BFL has made claims which they currently wont prove, but at this stage, if you want to compete, you need to either claim a better/ cheaper product, or wait until BFL fail to deliver.  Given the two options I think most people would currently pre order from BFL.

$1299 / 40 GH/s = $32.475 per GH/s
$2800 / 80 GH/s = $35 per GH/s
I wouldn't say that this is "considerably more expensive" or "claim of performance lower".

But I still prefer giving minimal numbers yet to be on the safe side.

I'll give you #1, but 2 and 3 arn't really that true.

Compare to 2 SC Singles:
80GH/s for $2600 - requires a PC to connect to.
Or the Reclaimer   RM:
80GH/s for $2800 - does NOT require a PC to connect to.

Those 2 smaller ones tho? The 4 and 8 GH/s units? Those might be hard to sell at those prices.

Are you really going to need 3U of electronics/fans/etc for 80 Gh/s? BFL supposedly will be able to do 80 Gh/s with 2 tiny Single SC (which will be the same size as 2 current Singles), which suggest BFL will be massively more efficient in terms of Mh/Joule...

I think you're missing one small (but important factor):

I saw this detail. But isn't it irrelevant? All you should need to drive 2 x Single SC is a wallet-sized ~3W Raspberry Pi.
My question is why would Tycho need a full-blown 3U enclosure for similar hashing capacity?

I am genuinely curious and trying to learn more about the product to evaluate my investment choices.

Reclaimer RM will contain same boards as smaller devices, plugged into a backplane. Technically it's possible to shrink it down to 2U, but 3U would also allow usage of common ATX PSUs with top fans when more powerful devices will be available.

Note that this 3U device is expected to provide much more hashpower with additional modules installed - not all the space inside is occupied at 80 GH/s.
All Reclaimer devices are designed with expansion in mind so if someone releases faster products we can just switch to soldering more chips on same modules or plug more modules in RM.

RM enclosure design is not done yet, so changes are possible. I can agree that 2U may be more suitable for collocation or filling 19" racks entirely. We will check if mining module, connector and backplane fit safely in 2U height and post updates in case of any changes.

1U and 2U rackmount case hardware is *EXPENSIVE*, with 3U you can still use standard heatsinks etc. Maybe with some luck some models on 2U.
A proper low height heatsink is going to easily cost 60$ alone.
Then add a properly sized PSU there, and your 750W Corsair is starting to look cheap.
Then for lower height you need to use smaller diameter fans which are by ORDER OF MAGNITUDE less efficient, infact, in modern 1U server the biggest electrical expense can be at times the fans!
Because adding depth to fan is not efficient, but a must do in small diameter, and to drive sufficient airflow you need to spin it at really high rpm these fans can  use considerable amount of electricy to even reach half of what an 230mm fan @ 2.5W can do. Some say these might use even upto 10-15W *EACH* and you need like 4 of them (that's why they are also RPM controlled)

Since depth of a rackmount chassis is not set you can make half depth chassis, and you can load any rack in standard setup DC from both sides, mount them from both sides and drive the hot air to the center of rack for gravitational dispension of heat by rack top ventilation hole, creating a natural rack zone hot and cold aisles :)
How well it works depends on the DC, some DCs don't have hot and cold aisles, others does. I would use one without hot + cold aisles for this setup other than which sucks hot air directly from top of the rack and keeps everything else cool :)

Ofc, to get it to work efficiently you need fill up the whole rack, which means that even on 42U rack you need 27 (1 slot for the switch) of these, or atleast near so putting separator plates makes sense :)
That's 75600$ investment per rack for a total of 2.16TH, at a operating cost of roughly 500€ a month depending upon location, electrical rates etc. plus network capacity. many DCs include 10-100mbps with the rack, not really free but "cheap", and backup connection probably will cost about 30-40€/mo for crossconnect + 50-150€ a month depending on provider, how low they are willing to go.

If someone wants a low cost location for several Us we should have spare capacity in near months

I concur, I allready have a PC, so I actually don't wan't the miner to be able to mine standalone, what/who is the intended audience, multibillion rack farms!?

there ARE going to be big mining rack farms, so someone might as well cater to them. when you're looking at mining operations as a business i could see these being useful after a certain point.

Mining via PC is possible too. But in most cases direct mining is MUCH more convenient.

As for the audience... Why, yes. That's what rackmount devices are for.
Plug it in somewhere, control via IP from home. There are no restrictions on what pools/servers can be used.

May be other types of Reclaimer-based devices will be created too. And we are planning to offer chips for sale if someone wants to produce their own miner.

Will p2pool be supported at reasonable stale rates? Ie. can your product be used to find shares in the p2pool share chain, as opposed to Bitcoin blocks?

Yes, shares are reported immediately, no need to wait for entire nonce range scan.

Will you be able to cancel a nonce range and start with new work at anytime? I believe that was one of the issues with Singles on P2P, was it not?

That problem with p2pool was caused by Single's inability to report shares until the entire nonce range is processed, AFAIK.

^ It seems this only solves half the problem. When a new p2pool block is announced the miner needs to start working on a new share immediately, or else work is spent finding a share that has already been found.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3286/why-does-the-bfl-single-produce-50-stales-with-p2pool

Yes, of course that's how it should work.
That's the reason why we invented long polling, after all :)

Competition is always a good thing. And depending on how many people order BFL products and how long it takes to deliver X units, it could be quite awhile before all orders that are placed in say sept/oct of this year are filled.

Also, depending on how this is setup, it could be substantially more convenient from a placement/cabling perspective compared to trying to deal with 20 individual units vs a rack.

Maybe some would believe this is more realistic and less pipe dreamy

When do you expect to be testing the prototype?

On the larger device how expandable is it?

What kind of computer will the larger device have embed? X86, ARM?

Excited to see more vendor choices for ASICS.

Another claim of ASIC with no proof of anything shown that is taking pre-PURCHASE (not pre-order, there is a difference) far in advance of any  deliverable hardware. Great. I'm so excited, please take all my money.

The Custom Hardware section is starting to remind me of another section of these forums where some guy found a way to get tons of people to throw coins at him. Then other people saw what he was doing, and decided to do the same thing, so they could get coins thrown at them. Look how that worked out.

I'm not saying anyone is intentionally misleading customers (although it is completely possible), but if you are handing someone money for a device that may exist sometime in the future then you are letting them take advantage of you. You're taking the risk for their business, and they will be making the profit off of you (twice). You're an investor that is getting a negative return on your investment for months (years?) until this hardware gets delivered. You are being blinded by your greed. Look how that worked out for all the people in the long-term investments subforum.

You should take a close look at kickstarter http://www.kickstarter.com/. Its much the same "business model" as you are commenting on. Customers fit the bill for development and manufacturing @ 0% and then get promised product at a offered rate.

FUD. All 3 instances have been well known and highly established members of the Bitcoin community. BFL has a very consistent track record for delivery excellent products, tho not without their fair share of faults. Tom and his MMQ have been very successful in selling FPGAs, and that is expected to translate well into the bASIC. And finally Deepbit is one of the largest pools, and got that way for a reason. I dare you to pick a better set of 3 companies to pre-sell ASICs.

Interesting they don't have any bitcoin things but indiegogo does:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_text=bitcoin&search_submit=Search

I have, and I'm not fond of it. Although what it does a lot better (in most circumstances, as the rewards are dictated by the company) is reward people for early adoption. For example the price you pay will often be less than the retail price for the product you're kickstarting, and you will often get other bonuses that retail customers will not get. It doesn't make up for the negatives, and I think kickstarter should be limited to startups and individuals. I really don't like it when I see established companies looking for funding for their next product on kickstarter, I feel those are the worst examples of what I described.

I have no objections to the claim that what I said is FUD.

I am absolutely afraid to give someone who isn't publicly identified and does not have a working product or prototype they're willing to share thousands of dollars.

I am absolutely uncertain that all these companies will not only have the technical expertise to design and implement such a complex device, but will do so in a timely manner.

I completely doubt that these companies have my best interests at heart while they're holding onto thousands of dollars of my money with no strings attached.

As far as companies I'd trust more - any company that would be willing to take pre-orders, and not require me to give them thousands of dollars to sit in an imaginary line waiting for imaginary hardware. Enterpoint comes to mind, the way they handled the Cairnsmore1 development and release was magnificent compared to most other developers of similar hardware. I don't want anyone to stop offering this hardware, I would love to have an ASIC device for mining. What I want to stop are these poor and greedy business practices of taking money up front to (hopefully - with no transparency how can we know?) fund development costs.

Is that the one that just recently got a working bitstream > 800MH/s?

If by "just recently" you mean over a month ago, then yes. Also they're the ones that had the hardware at my door two days after I made my payment. They handle their business.

Their shipping times are very good then! But answer me this: how many days after you got your product before you could mine at > 800Mh/s?

I was mining at around 750Mh/s within 3 days, and I've been mining > 800Mh/s for a month or more I believe. I didn't mark my calendar. It's not perfect, but I don't expect perfection from every company I deal with. I just would like the companies to not want my money for months so they can make a product I may or may not see at some point in the future.

Ah then you were lucky then. Some of the earlier units waited months for a working bitstream, IIRC.

Not true. I was watching Enterpoint's thread quite closely and I think the bitstreams Enterpoint made available on their website at the time provided around 200-400mh/s, so the cairnsmore board was still earning BTC for early owners during development.

How very interesting, he announced this in ~December of 2011 on IRC, and then a bit later swore that no such thing existed. Does it take that long to design?

I don't remember saying that this this never existed. Can you provide a quote ?

Yes, the project was started almost a year ago, but it was far from actual IC design stage.

Your icbit.se site is a total fail. Unusable, try again.

Looks like someone posted wrong info in the bitcoin wiki, so I should make things clear.
1 bond doesn't represents 1 GH/s, rather 80 USD of listed price.

So Reclaimer One costs 4 bonds for 4 GH/s and Reclaimer RM costs 35 bonds for 80 GH/s.

What ever happened to these?

the prices suck balls compared to other manufacturers, that's what happened

Estimated product performance

Yepp, I would be interested a current status too.

Send the staff member a PM, and the next time he logs on, he'll promptly provide a status update.

Hmm, I always thought [Tycho] and DeepBit were the same user, so that DeepBit should have been able to answer:


Anyway, as suggested I send a PM to [Tycho] a few minutes ago...

Any news on theses and whats the difference in theses due to cost compared to other ASICs

They are exactly the same in every regard ;)

still maybe closer than some others  ;)

any new info about this project?

More then two weeks now and still no response... I'd guess this ASIC is dead.

Dead, resting, or quietly working behind the scenes?

seems alot of fly by nights these days

  Josh, said that there was going to be testing units taken out of the wafers that he received in this batch. He said, "It will take 1000 of the 5000 that he has now. I still mine on GPU's. I get free electric. Made a little money so far. The CGminer developer had an all expense paid trip to BFL to give support to CGminer. There has been pictures taken of their lab. I have also seen them unloading the same pieces of contraption out of what looks like a semi trailer. They have a lab. They have machines that looked like they were going to be making something. I myself think that Josh is just young to business and he is having a hard time getting what he wants out of the companies that he is dealing with. Look for more posts from kolivas. He knows what is going on more than anyone. He may have worked with a proto-type or something.

Josh is not "young to business".  He's a retarded mouth piece with a superiority complex who has been led around like a puppy dog by his superiors.  It's only by dumb luck and the sheer greed of the people on this (and other) forums that his antics didn't drive BFL into the ground.

and this thread has nothing whatever to do with BFL

..
I cached my shares in for a small loss a while back .....

Hello.

Reclaimer project was cancelled due to complete lack of public interest. All bond buyers were refunded at icbit.se
Total number of bond buyers was 7 (seven). Of course some of them bought more than one bond, but this is obviously FAR from making any sense in mass-production.

80 GH/s for $2800 is still pretty damn good. Shame the project fell through the cracks.

I wonder how much it would've taken to complete the project.

haha...literally JUST found this today. oopsie... :(

IMO, you ran into 2 issues: Your prices weren't competitive, and your payment methods were confusing and convoluted as hell. The first one doesn't seem so bad now, so if you get a simpler payment method, and reopened this project, you'd prolly get some sales with no problems.

agreed... we really need more then avalon and asicminer... and i don't know that we can really count on BFL to deliver.

Actually I think that this was also caused by lack of any ads.

And I can't imagine what can be easier than paying in BTC. It's even much simpler than some of our competitors :)

The average person found icbit.se too complex for their understanding, they just want a bitpay form to deal with I think

Exactly. I have no problems paying in BTC. In fact, I actually prefer it. However, signing up to an exchange and having to buy bonds (how many? 1 per order? Enough bonds to get to $2800?) makes no sense to purchase a physical product. It might work for ASICMiner, but there's a reason why BFL and Avalon use a 3rd party payment processing company.

So anyways, back to my question. Is there a chance this could come back? I've said it before, the rackmount option is very attractive to some of us.

What they said  :D  I'd be interested in a couple of rigs  ;)

Not gonna do a "preorder" ever again though...............but,maybe a BTC escrow type thing,hmmmmm  

I was gonna drop for another BFL unit,still might,but would like to see some competition.

FTFY  ;)

Seriously, I was interested in this project when I would have seen any progress/updates on this. But the lack of activity in this thread and the failure to answer PMs for months made me believe that this project is either a non-starter or a scam.

BTW, I agree with the others - the payment option was a disastrous choice too.

pffth
I was interested and registered and bought ...
but what followed was less info than bfl on a bad day ,
in the end I sold back at a small loss...

it wasn't complicated to get the shares...

+1

Sorry, but what can be easier than accepting bitcoins ?

Well, one had to open an account at some unknown/tiny exchange (if necessary fund it via VouchX and exchange to BTC) and then buy some bonds. To me this is a different thing then just "accepting bitcoins".

is it safe to assume the project is not developing?

BTW Been mining on deepbit since April 2011  ;D my fav pool by far

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=108375.msg1767578#msg1767578

+1

Well, you have to open an account or register in ANY case. How else can we know who is making pre-order and find out one's contact details ?
"accepting bitcoins" means at least creating a new bitcoin address and identifying the buyer, practically the same as it was done.

It's just easier to use our existing trading platform than creating some new site.