Bitcoin Forum

NOTE: This offer is now closed. We have decided a better business model for us is to offer the design for lease/license. So if you are interested in this, please contact us at info@bitcentury.io.
For our customers who ordered our LittleFury USB miner while orders were open, we fully intend to deliver them to you, and are in fact targeting an accelerated delivery schedule.
Thanks,
Luis
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Hello everyone,

My name is Luis, and I am one of the co-founders of BitCentury.io, a new Bitcoin mining vendor. Today we're announcing our first innovative product, the LittleFury!
Before we get started on the details, we'd like to officially thank and congratulate BitFury for achieving what many thought was impossible - A very low powered and high speed ASIC done right, all by himself, with no prior ASIC experience, on the very first try, and in a very short engineering time frame. *Pure genius* by anyone's standards! Thanks BitFury, without your ASIC, our product offering would not be possible!

What are the specifications of the BitCentury USB PCB/Board?

The board will operate at 4.5W to provide a hash rate between 3-4Gh/s, which makes this the world's fastest USB powered bitcoin miner!
The hash rate is heavily determined by the operating conditions of the device (USB quality, Thermal characteristics, etc). The device is powered and provides communication via USB3 and will contain 2 (TWO) Bitfury 55nm ASIC chips.
Note: Our PCB will be CE certified.

https://i.imgur.com/cizJD0X.jpg

What is your price?

We are charging 325$ USD to cover manufacturing, testing as well as shipping & handling. The 325$ USD includes shipping charges to your location (aside from any customs fees which may be applied by your country). All units will be sent out via DHL, and a multi-lingual manual will be provided.

Only send funds from a full wallet that you can prove you are the owner of. If you ever wish to modify your order a signed message will be requested verifying your ownership over the address which sent the coins.

How do I order?

You can order on our website via our store at https://store.bitcentury.io


When will units be shipped?

Devices will begin shipping in November 2013.


What if I want a refund?

We are currently not offering any refunds relating to pre-orders from these devices unless we fail to deliver your order by Jan 1st 2014. On this date, we will open up refunds for users who request it. You will be refunded your full bitcoin payment to us. To be clear, we will not be mining any customer sold products for more than a few hours before shipping. The mining will be done for quality assurance testing purposes so as to minimize any chance of us shipping DOA (dead on arrival) products to our customers. The reason for the Jan 1st, 2014 refund date is that in the event there are any delays outside of our control for the November 2013 estimated shipping time frame, we will still have some head room to make good on delivering your orders.


Thread Moderation Policy:
1. Keep it civil: We welcome all respectable comments and opinions; however, any rude/insulting posts will be deleted. Let's keep it friendly and civil please :-)
2. "Reserved" Posts: People making "reserved posts" usually intend to make a detailed comment at some point. To be clear, we don't accept reservations for products without payment in our store. So, if you don't edit your "reserved" post after a few days with some content, I will delete it just to keep the thread more legible. Thanks for your understanding.

I confirm that BitCentury.io has purchased the chips required to fulfill these retail orders.

Reserved.

Reserved

reserved  ;)

Nice, how about adding a third chip to make it beat what Jalapeno was supposed to be?  ;D
That would still fit into the USB3 900mA power limit.

Delivery in November 2013 ... That's too late, even at 3-4Gh/s.

We really wanted to, but the thermals come heavily into play at that point. It would need an active cooling system (fan). We have some additional designs on the table which we're looking into and hope to offer moving forward.

Reserved.

Nice usb 4 Ghs. November is delay. But thanks for your work

nice i want one... :D

I'm glad to see product diversification of Bitfury products. Good luck with your product BitCentury!

Nice, guys. We're working on a 2 chip USB stick too. We're still developing it so we're still not sure where it's going to go, but congrats to you guys. That's a nice price for you guys too  :P

very nice work guys! like it!

 :D  reserved

I bought 3 based on Dave's recommendation.  That said, I'm guessing you are doing this with October chips, but November shipping is pretty late for this to be a viable player.  October 25 Gh/s H boards are going for $500... 

would it work on usb 2.0 ? If so then what would happen if...

1. The USB 2.0 port can only provide 500 mA -- Would it work in reduced capacity?
2. The USB 2.0 port can provide > 900 mA -- Would this work as expected?

The design incorporates programmable voltage level and current monitoring.  The device will work in a reduced capacity when connected to a standard 500mA USB2 port (I am expecting approx 3GH/s in this case).  However a high power USB2 port will give full performance.

Reserved

Hi -Redacted-,

First, thanks for your order! Our shipping time is dependent on us receiving October chips from Bitfury's business partners. With this, November shipping should be realistic for us. As for the Oct 25GH/s boards, I believe those are just boards without any chips, hence why the description is "For Hackers". Also, those boards are currently only being sold to European customers. You'll note David (USA) also sells them for October but with a much higher price point. I believe this is because those specific ones titled "Starter Kits" come pre-assembled and with ASIC chips in them. Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken though.
Cheers,
Luis

PS. Also for everyone else, just to be clear, we are not taking any "reservations" without payment. If you want to purchase some units you must order them from our store. People posting "reserved" in these threads typically means they intend to come back later and make a comment, which of course you can make at any time. People posting "reserved" who don't make a comment after a few days will see their posts deleted just to keep the thread more legible. Thanks for your understanding.

I don't believe this misrepresentation is deliberate but the H-Board is populated with ASICs and uses an M-board as the SPI hub. So the $500 price point represents 25GH/s with chips in October.

Ok, I'll check with David and/or the EU Bitfury guys. Clearly David sells a nearly identical product for almost 3 times that price, and their goal is to keep prices aligned to each other as they are all business partners, so we'll get an answer shortly I'm sure.
Cheers,
Luis

Great idea but your pricing makes zero sense.
$100-90 per Gh/s is expensive now in July. In November it will be felony theft.
Spend a extra $175 and get a 25 Gh H board.

Price goes with the inverse of production capacity, so the sold out boards for August are from a smaller batch I presume.

EDIT: Inverse, though you know what I meant  :)

Yeah. To be competitive you need to get under $20/GH...or even lower if the Hboards overclock well. I've been trying to figure out if it's worth it to mass produce these USB sticks. It probably will work but margins will be low and delays will be very costly.

Watching! I hope you can lower a bit the price.

I agree... I think if these priced these at $100, they would probably have enough pre-orders to order a second $60K reel of asics.  You would get people sending them as winter holiday presents and what not.

This opens you very dangerous case,  you can assembly those chips, mine with them until 1st january 2014 and then pay refunds form what you have mined.
Seems not so safe to me.

Hi pajak666,

We will not be mining any customer sold devices for more than a few hours, necessary only for testing purposes and to make sure we are not shipping any DOA's (dead on arrival) product. Thanks for pointing out this potential loophole, I will update the opening post. The Jan 1st, 2014 refund date is just to give us some head room in case there are any delays outside of our control by 3rd parties we will be depending on.
Cheers,
Luis

No bank transfer payment option :(  What should ppl with no BTC do ? It will take too long to buy them, even longer to mine on GPU.

I use coinbase.com. Easy to transfer from Bank into BTC.

Good luck with this project ! Really looking forward to seeing it become a reality and purchasing them in November once they become available.

-Mr. Burnt-Out-On-Pre-Orders

Unfortunately, Chips alone are 1/2 that pricing.

I don't think you would have to go to $100.  My suggestion would to work with a break-even after 3-4 months.  Like 120,000,000 difficulty at ship time would put around $150-185.  Something like that.  You can definitely charge more per Gh/s than the other BitFury products.  But having to wait 3-4 months is an eternity in the mining world right now and everyone knows that date can move.
You would definitely sell some to the newcomers in November but experienced people have had enough of pre-orders unless it's a relatively safe bet they will get their money back in 6 months.  Right now you at over a year break-even in my estimation.  For what it's worth. :-\

Keep in mind that when we build these things, they have essentially the same number of "doodads" (i think is the correct technical term) as the larger boards. Micro controller, power distribution, transformers, capacitors, etc, most of which can handle many more chips than what we have on board already. I would expect that the H-Board cost is nearly identical to our cost (Specially since their chips are dirt cheap for these boards, less than 1$ each is my guess.). Even if we were to build H-Board equivalent ourselves, you're still looking at 320$ cost in chips alone for a product that is being sold at 550$. There's no way we can compete. What a few posters say they would be willing to pay for this in Nov is already well under our cost for production. All of this doesn't even include the percentage of chips which will be DOA, or the percentage of boards which will be DOA out of the assembly, boards withheld (not sold) for warranty replacement if anything goes awry, etc. Then if there's a major hick up anywhere in the chain we're at that point taking huge personal losses to get these things to you. Unfortunately, 325$ is really our minimum pricing at this time. What it all comes down to is, If you want cheaper boards, we need cheaper chips.

A reasonably priced LittleFury may not be tenable.  And I'm not saying competitive.  Just reasonable from the standpoint of newbie willing to pay for one for the experience.
Agreed on the H-board.  BitFury would have been crazy to create their own competitors by selling chips cheaply.
But perhaps with some sort of assurance they may be willing to cut the chip price to you for a product like this that they don't want to build anyway.  Selling 40,000 more chips than expected because of a popular product that gets their name out there more might be attractive.  Even if it is at half the profit of the other chip sales.  It's not like it's more overhead for them to order more chips.  And in 6 months they will be outdated.  
I may be all wet, but perhaps there is still an opportunity here if you can get your costs down.

I'd gladly pay that price now and order a ton of them. The problem is your eta is November which is too much money for the performance. Like mentioned, these would have to be around $150 each if your shipping them in November. The difficulty is going to skyrocket by then and ROI would take to long at current BTC value.

or up the hashing power. Since you're using usb3, you should be able to squeeze more than 4 GH out of 2 chips...even try moving to a 3 chip solution.

Open an account on MtGox, use BWT to finance your account in USD, buy BTC for USD, withdraw BTC to your wallet.

Cheers,
kev

Hi kaerf,
It's possible to up the hashing rate of the chip, but there are critical power usage and thermal concerns above certain levels. We wanted to start off with conservative numbers and design, rather than over promise. Further, we have not finished testing the chip at these higher hash rates (beyond 2.4GH/s). For more details on the tests we have performed so far and the efficiency ratings, you can read this blog post here: https://bitcentury.io/blog/initial-testing-of-bitfury-asic   (scroll to the very bottom of the post)

You can see that at 2.4GH/s the bare chip (no heat sink in these tests) is already at 76 degrees celcius and consuming 1.7W of power, which also translates to a W/GH efficiency  that is ~45% worse than the 2.082 GH/s per chip we're currently achieving.  So, while we can cool the chips down by various methods, we can't really do a whole lot about the significant power consumption increases. With USB3 having a wall of 4.5W's, even just at 2.4GH/s (nevermind 3 or 3.5 or the max theoretical 5), the power consumption of 3x chips would already exceed the 4.5W limit (3chips x 1.78W=5.34W).

As per our latest video, you can see that at 2GH/s, Nigel was able to touch the chip for many seconds in a row. In fact we had some earlier takes of similar video with him touching the chip even longer, without burning his fingers - but this was with a heat sink as shown in the video. Once we go above 2GH/s temperature rises quickly and we were also contemplating in the background safety issues around much higher hash rates considering that this USB product is pretty much targeted at people new to bitcoin, or those who are not wanting to do hardware assembly etc; as such, safety is an important consideration. Cooling fins and other methods probably will help that, we are currently looking into that, but wanted to get a product announcement out the door ASAP.

Cheers,
Luis

Too expensive for such a pre-order. I think you can do it either with a relative high price in November when you have the miners in hand or pre sell it now with a lower price.

I would think about it at 150 to 200$... And you can make it work at that price easy... If not you someone else will...

brambi1 has the point. Just see how many steps there are if you want to buy BTC on MtGox. How many steps, and how much time all that takes.

Do Bitfury chips exist yet?

Yes, you can see them in action on our website at www.bitcentury.io

Let me clarify - Have any devices powered by these chips been sold and are currently in use by anyone that is a consumer? I'm not talking about sample chips used for development, etc.

The first devices are scheduled to be delivered in August 2012.

That will be cool. If these guys were priced out at parity with BFL stuff (I know I know... my Jally has mined out 6 BTC already though) I would jump on with a preorder or two. Anything more than the $50/ Gh/s that the BFL is approximately at is too rich for my blood. I'll just keep buying more BFL miners. I hope this product is a great success though. More success in the market will bring down prices across the board. And more TH/s will squeeze out the smaller players!

Will this device be 'string powered'? It's a feature that is on the
bitfury ASIC and makes it possible to power them in series. Could
potentially cut the current requirements in half.

I myself have still no idea how this works however:)

intron

I'm very curious about that too. It's a big advantage. My guess is that inside is simple OPAMP. Connect output with some power transistor (outside chip) and you can have regulated high amp zener diode. This diode will hold voltage at settled point while delivering current to chips that will need more "juice". There will be some power loses but if chips will draw very same current then this losses should be minimal. But DC/DC converted will be simpler, smaller and more efficient. You can do this with every chip, mounting opamp and power transistor outside package.
But it's all guesses and I may be wrong ;)
Documentation from Bitfury is needed ASAP ;)

It has something to do with a current mirror, I only got
a sketchy schematic from bitfury that was used for doing
SPICE runs I guess. Not of much help though:)

intron

Or coinbase or localbitcoins.

got my eyes on this thread, hopefully the price can be a bit lowered

Due to lack of interest; we have decided to discontinue this offering. The handful of users who have placed orders will be happy to know that instead of refunding; we will be hand assembling and fulfilling your orders out of prototype chips. You can expect to receive your devices in August, a full 3 months ahead of schedule.

We are open to leasing our design if anyone is interested in printing usb3 miners from their own chips/reels. Please contact us via PM or E-mail ( info [at] bitcentury dot io ) to discuss arrangements.

It should have been obvious there would be little interest in this product. Just compare it to a 5 Gh/s BFL. Your LittleFury has:

• a lower hash rate
• a higher price
• a longer delivery time

You might want to change the title of the thread to reflect the new status (or lock it ... or whatever).