Bitcoin Forum

The prices just don't add up though. I suppose the power savings would be nice for some people, but if 25MH of scrypt asic will cost at least $9000 USD, I can get that now for a little bit more.

They also have a deposit refund policy which would be illegal here, and probably in the UK.

"Cancellation & Refund Policy

Within 0-1 month after receipt of payment: Full deposit will be refunded.

Within 1-3 months after receipt of payment: 75% of the deposit will be refunded.

Within 3-5 months after receipt of payment: 50% of the deposit will be refunded.

Please note a cancellation fee of £70 towards handling charges will be applicable along with any cancellation."

So if they make you wait 9 months without shipping, they want to keep half your money? hahaha. Just another dirtbag company.

I can make 25 MH right now with ~50 R9-270x cards. In fact, I am on the way there. Power is under 200w per card, but I'd rather pay a power bill than let someone else hold onto my money for 6-9 months.

That's disappointing news!!!

Source?

https://alpha-t.net/news/development-update-23122013/

Announcements

Today is the release of our full pricing, shipping, terms and all the helpful information you would need to secure a pre-order, this can all be found in the 'Terms of Order' page. We will be taking a 30% deposit payment, and remainder 70% to be paid 8-10 weeks before shipment. Minimum chip specifications have been confirmed from our ASIC manufacturer using Global Foundries as our foundry. In regards to our devices, we have confirmed a lower power consumption than quoted previously and also a guarantee of minimum hash rate. this can all be found in the individual Product pages. Please read the Terms of Order page, and individual Products pages carefully.

To summarise some other things:

Viper-5mh/s which can hash at minimum 5 MH/s: £1350 (inc VAT) Deposit- £405 (inc VAT)

Viper-25mh/s which can hash at minimum 25 MH/s: £5450 (inc VAT) Deposit- £1635 (inc VAT)

ASIC Chip Specs

Process: 28nm/40nm HPP, 3.3v/1.8v

Internal Memory: >=128Mb SRAM

Gates: ~28M Gates

Clock Speed: > 600 Mhz Core Clock

Hashing Cores: >= 128

Chip Hash rate: > 350 Kh/s

Power Consumption: < 5w

Registration and Wishlist

Registration will be open on the 25th or 26th of December. We urge all customers to be prepared by providing shipping and billing information in the My Account section. Also showing interest by adding their desired products to the Wishlist, with stated quantity.

You can register here on the specified day: https://alpha-t.net/login-register/

New Office

We have moved to a bigger office in Manchester. Some more interior work is still to be done, but here is an image from the outside.  Details of our office can be found in the About Us page.

office

Launch and Next Updates

We expect to officially launch in a weeks time.  We will be first rolling out some images of our devices and various other product updates.

 

Alpha Technology team

Why give them money now?  Just setup 5 motherboards with 6 R9 290x in each.  NOW!!!
Each board can mine at 900 kh/s.  So 5 rigs can do 27 MH/s.  When they start shipping ASICs, sell your GPUs to gamers.

LOL Because running gpus to mine is expensive, 5 watts for 350kh is a hell of a saving
How many kh is 5mh?

5000 KH/s = 5 MH/s

Yes the power savings would be nice, but this is 6-9 months out on a preorder. Who really wants to try that one again, let alone with a brand new company!

The 30 GPU option would cost $15K just for the GPUs and then sprinkle in all the power supplies, MOBO, cabling, yada, yada and yada. The single device option from Alpha would be about $6K and consume 600 watts.  If I'm wrong, please provide me with links to where I can get in to 5 MH/s or more capability at a similar price point to what Alpha is presenting.

If I'm not wrong, then this marks a stepping off point of the technology like when flat panle tv's replaced CRTs.  We should all be thrilled.

I'm more concerned with other options.  SAI says they'll have a 25 MH/s system for about $1200 USD but they look so far behind what Alphat-t has presented.  If SAI can deliver then it will be truly an amazing product.

Anyone know of other leading contenders in the development of scrypt ASIC?  tia

**edit: and I agree... the wait time is a big detractor but still very interesting in the scope of technology development.

OP needs to redo his math.

The long, uncertain wait is the problem. BFL anyone?

6-9 months is key. Your GPU rig would have paid for itself many times over by then.

Wow..if these things are legit they wouldn't care less if someone cancelled, they could just sell the unit off to the next buyer. What a con.

Aside from all this, there will always be a market for new coins to mine for those with GPU's. Coin dev's will just modify their current coins to circumvent these devices and new coins will be design with resistance in mind. Interest in coins that don't comply will die.

Not following the logic of, "... if these things are legit..."  and "What a con."  Why wouldn't they sell the unit to the next buyer if the previous buyer opted out of the proposed contract?

Now, your next point has my interest.  You make a very good point and it deserves more consideration.  What we're looking at is development of business and technology growth at an ideal time.  World economies are recovering.  Unemployment is going down.  What better time to develop?  Look at what is happening.  Just as you said, coin makers are dictating new hardware.  This is an incredible phenomenon if it can be sustained.   And as I've said earlier in some other threads, the coin is as valuable as it's use and so far the usability is growing.

Very interesting times

Their refund policy is illegal pretty much anywhere with basic consumer friendly laws, period.

Well, looking at their terms its obvious they are concerned about losing money on cancelled orders. Such concern shouldnt be warranted if they are selling something that actually physically exists as demand should be high surely? As a result, buyers would be queuing to pick up cancelled orders. The whole thing stinks, and under Australian law their terms are illegal which makes it very suspect.


The thing thats appealing about crypto-currency to the mainstream is its free from regulation and can be 'produced' and traded quite freely. Does anyone truly see the day when the majority of people who cant afford ASICS pack up their bat and ball and go home because the crypto-currency production domain has been taken over by the rich and big business? I dont think so. If I was a coin dev, I would already be working on a new crypto that is ASIC resistant & will only ever be able to be mined by the masses. In effect, such a coin would be 'future-proof' and now is a perfect time to release it.

much proffesional  ::)

I agree, Oldminer, their terms are quite stringent.  I think your concern about products may be valid but I also think they'll provide more proof of an actual physical product soon.  They've said they would post a video soon.  They also seem to have thought out how they would go forward with releasing the product.  It's hard to tell at this time with great certainty and that's indicative of poor management.  Then again, the terms do give the sense that they are trying to cover themselves financially by ensuring a certain number of buyers and maybe even raising some capital to cover costs.  

I try to look at many angles.  On this topic, I can't fully agree or disagree with anything at this time.

Seems like they are building the plane as they fly it.  Quite risky.

It's an interesting story.    

If they need help to pay for the development perhaps they should do a kickstarter campaign to help pay for costs...

Why not to buy (invest in) LTC right now instead waiting such a long time for shipment ? How big will be the difficulty when you will get this device ?

Those things are going to put my miners out of business

WTF

 >:( >:( >:( >:( >:( >:(

building coins with supposed resistance is not the most efficient way to create long term hashing for the network

Blakecoin has the idea to try and use a fast and efficient algorithm for the hashing that uses a parallel structure and works well on CPU, GPU, FPGA this is a more balanced approach to the design  8)

Why Blakecoin beats other coins in the long run:

The modified blake-256 algorithm hash rate is just under 3x faster on the GPU and just over 2x on the FPGA compared with Bitcoin
The reward for mining Blakecoin does Not decrease over time it only increases with block height and difficulty
No restriction on any platform as Blakecoin does not include artificial *Security* that slows down possible mining hash rate and reduces power efficiency
Already has planned use for Blakecoin as a currency storage between MMO systems with prototypes in development

Blakecoin is the fastest !

5.1GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 7990
2.2GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 7970
1.4GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 6970
1.3GH/s on a AMD ATI Radeon 5870
1.6GH/s on a ZTEX USB-FPGA 1.15y Quad Spartan-6 LX150 Development Board (using < 40w of power)

Tweaks:
Removed some of the double hashing from the wallet for increased efficiency and reduced collisions

compared with scrypt performance on FPGA for the modified Blake-256 is very good  ;D

I would have also thought that if the investment in very expensive Asic development was done for the modified Blake-256 algo you could be talking 2-3x faster than even the current best SHA-256D Asic it would most certainly use less silicon space thus the chips would be cheaper each and use less power, I think an investment in scrypt based Asic devices is very risky with new algorithms like Blake-256 on the scene  ::)

it is also possible to merge mine other Blake-256 based coins with Blakecoin thus supporting other coins with different features without having to pick and choose, it would be up to the pool operators to pick which coins they merged mined with Blakecoin  8)

  

Or put themselves on an exchange like havelock or something.

Why do I need to redo my math? You can read, right? The price is listed in british pounds. In USD it is about 8900. I can build pretty close to that 25MH for that today. Maybe spend a little more, but I'm not talking 32 $500 cards, I'm talking 40-50 ~ $200 cards. A difference of a few K here and there isn't much, especially betting on completely new, untested hardware from a new, untested company. If they start shipping and reviews are good, I may buy some, of course by then all the rigs I'm building now will have spawned many more like them from coin profit, and I likely won't need them. I suppose I'd consider selling off all the old hardware and replacing it with new for the power savings, but that can wait until products ship.

another BFL company  ::) I'm gonna stick to my gpus

not going to fall for this scam again...

I'm with you (and others) on this one.  I was wondering whether to buy an R9 290x or wait for one of these asics (two companies apparently wanting to offer these).   I'm not 100% convinced about the asics offers, and as someone recently said, the longer you stick around the Crypto world, the more careful you become.... too many things can/do go wrong in this "wild west" world!

Its time for me to see how well an R9 290x mines!

As someone was saying in a scrypt asic thread, "I thought scrypt was supposed to lock the asic guys out???".   If both SHA256 & Scrypt goes the asics way, that will be a sad day for the gpu guys!!   Not looking forward to that day.  I will probably buy into a small asic if they ever surface.

WTF LOL.


That's $8000 to $10000 in just cards alone.

Add on (PSU, MOBO, RAM, etc) x 8-10.

Then add on the cost of power at the wall and the cost of your time building and then maintaining all these rigs.

25MH for ~$9000 is an amazing deal.

The problem is the wait time and uncertainty of delivery. You don't know if something better/less expensive will come out before your product arrives.

Interesting, maybe time to grab some litecoins before the Q3 difficulty jump.

Just think of how many coins you can mine with 25Mh over the course of 6-9months+delays. Just think of the value of those coins if you held them for that long.

People already learned the hard lesson with BFL, not many are willing to give any money to those stupid companies.
And this stupid refund policies? These guys are crazy if they think they can do it.
I guess it's against any consumer protection law in any western country.

The main problem with this is that we have no idea what the environment is going to be like in 9 months time... What if there are so many people hashing due to it becoming more accessible to the public that your new shiny expensive miner will take forever to pay itself off.... New laws could trash the price of bitcoin leaving many of the alts not worth mining. The bitcoin and altcoin scene is very fickle and to make a investment that wont pay anything for another 9 months seems kinda silly. Especially if everything goes to crap at 8 months in and you only get 50% of your deposit back :/

I've just done it, and I'm doing it again. I can build a complete rig in an hour, up and running. A few thousand dollars either way doesn't matter when you talk about a 6-9 month wait. It's also not an "Amazing deal" An amazing deal was 700gh/s for the Jupiters from KNC for only $5k. If these things were half the price they are asking and shipping in a month, it would be an amazing deal. Right now, it's about equal to what a good sale price on GPUs would bring.