Bitcoin Forum

Alpha Technology Takes Pre-Orders for Litecoin ASIC Miners

Alpha Technology, the British company who announced in November it would be one of the first to bring ASIC mining devices for litecoin and similar cryptocurrencies to market in 2014, this week announced it would begin taking pre-orders for 30% deposits.

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This is the reason Alpha Technology will be accepting only 30% deposits on orders, with the remaining 70% required two months before shipping. Akram said deposits are refundable (with penalties and conditions depending on timing) if orders are canceled.

http://www.coindesk.com/alpha-technology-pre-orders-litecoin-asic-miners/

pre-orders ... dun dun duuuuuuuun  :o

yeah but notice that you can cancel your orders....bf was different in that point ::)

out of stock   ;)

Website's down...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_Kfjo3VjU

It might be a scam

i dont know that company but until now i cant say nothing bad about it. their communication is good and their plans to do this business.

"out of stock" ? ok thats not very surprising in the mining industry. i guess alot of people bought  ;)

Pre-order placed!

I ordered one and it was in the 53xx range. wow

Mine was 64xx if memory serves.  Ordered in the afternoon sometime.

Both items are currently in stock and available from what I can see....

What was the reason for making a seperate scrypt coin again?

Not possible to mine with GPU! -- Well ...

But at least there is no way to create ASICs! -- Well ...

Looking more and more like all the other alts.

Asics are killing these coins.  I believe that soon only majorly funded operations will be able to compete.  I feel we're in dire need of a solution.

Computers are killing the abacus-mined coins. We need a solution (hint - computers got cheaper)

dont think so. Litecoin is the second largest and best coin out there.

Right, but you also miss out on the degree of being "second" that it is. Also, there's no real evidence that it will scale worth a damn. Even after adding ASICs to the mix - which the original implementation was made to be anti-ASIC (oh the irony), you guys are just treading water with what amounts to a penny stock that got taken to 0.0001 not too long ago.

I'd keep that low price in mind, penny stocks tend to revisit those extremes.

The original idea was for it to be CPU-mined, so the poor folks with good CPUs and weak GPUs would have something else to mine after the mean GPU guys took over Bitcoin.

Even more irony :)

We don't need a solution. The only solution is go convince the most people to mine themselves.

Solutions are centralized.

This is the free market and we're doing fine.

Yeah we all thought asics were a great idea for BTC too.  Now people are seeing difficulty skyrocket and even their asics are no match. 

Several million dollar budget operations will affect the difficulty so much that non million dollar budget LTC asic owners will have a hard time making roi.  It's a little more than speculation when we've seen it happen to BTC. 

Litecoin is meant to be ASIC resistant, which it is.  That doesn't mean it resists the creation of asics...that's impossible.  Application specific integrated chip by definition is just a computer chip meant for a specific task.  My calculator is an ASIC...it's not a phone, but it's still an asic for solving math problems.  Litecoin is ASIC resistant meaning the effect of ASIC do not drive all the computing power to those who can afford it.  When GPU mining hit Litecoin it was no where near what it was with Bitcoin.

All this means nothing because both coins are in danger of the same fate...centralized mining.  Somehow every device on the network needs to be forced to mine, from a cell phone to a super computer...this is the only way to end centralizing.

we need ASICs to protect the weaker coins from a whale pouncing on, say catcoin, with a few 100mhashes and forking the coin.  

the more ASICs are distributed (i.e. outside the control of a large corporation or country), the more secure the currencies will be.  the solution to a single entity manipulating weak coins will be ASICs in everybody's hands.  imagine the US utopia where happiness is a warm gun in everybody's hands.  

however, i have no idea whether this alpha company is worth anything.  ASICS are coming and there's no point in fighting them.  Whether Alpha will actually ship ASICs remains to be seen.

There is a solution...

- IP address / IP range hashrate cap - this will prevent everybody from creating big farms, just make a cap of share to every IP address and another cap for IP ranges to prevent from Multi-IP addressing.

This will solve the biggest problems:

- it will not consume so much electricity
- it will be more fair play
- it will prevent biggest farmers from affecting the market, 51 percent attack possibility and centralization

An example, make a limit to a single Ipv4 address, another limit to /24 IP address range, another to /20 range etc. The same for IPv6 ranges. E.G. 2 Mhash limit to one Ipv4 address, 6 Mhashes to the whole range, and so done.

There would be people who setup workarounds for this too. Namely big boys who have large up ranges, willing to pay for VPN's etc. then you'll have ip6 to deal with sooner or later as well

Yeah there are a ton of workarounds for this that the common user can do, let alone some company with whale farms.

Not as simple... No datacentre has so many IPv4 networks to cover all demand of miners. You can own the whole C block of 256 IPs, yes. But its worthless in that case - imagine you have 700Mhash rig.

256 IP address range - you can still put only 6Mhashes. If nobody else is mining in your neighborhood.
more IP address ranges... yes if nobody mining in that town, you probably will get some Ips from it... for extra big money making mining unprofitable and only if nobody else runs a rig there.
VPN? Yes you can, but where you want to create a VPN? TOR? Everybody will use them, will be depleted completelly. Your work? You probably run a rig here. Datacentre? Everyone trying to get IPs here... Your grandma? Maybe... First you need to run anything 24 hours stable every day here and hope the connection will not fail.

It would work much better than you think. The 700Mhash rig owner would be happy if he finds IP ranges for 50 mhashes of power.

boy i wish there was some way to translate network addresses to address the IPv4 limitation.

and then i wish they could build some type of routing equipment to somehow, switch(?)  the connections dyamically so to the outside world saw one ip address but in theory i could have hundreds of miners operating on one IP.  

if only someone had invented this type of internet router(??)  they'd be rich.  if only they could stuff a few antennas on the back, they could call it a wireless router.  lol crazy