Bitcoin Forum

Introducing...The Snowball
The Snowball is the first unit of its kind. Not only is this a live, hardware wallet, but depositing coins to the addresses in this device will ensure your coins are always ready to stake on a stable, secure storage of wealth. Not only will this unit run nonstop, but now there are no more worries about forgetting to open your client or leaving a dedicated staking computer running at all times. Powered by nearly the small footprint of a cell phone charger, The Snowball aims to provide the first, and most energy efficient, staking hardware available on the market

The Maieutice Snowball runs on a very low energy operating system with extremely efficient hardware featuring a simple, straight-forward setup that we are able to provide at an affordable price. The best thing about this unit is that you only need 1 or 2 of them; it is not a large investment for an extra layer of security and peace of mind that your funds are safe and accounted for

Pictures in this post are of the outside of the unit. They are the standard photos from the manufacturer that makes the case. When we open pre-orders, we will post pictures of that actual unit, which, until that time, are under tight wraps

Availability
This is the shitty part. We are offering pre-orders for The Snowball. However, this is not to raise funds. The purpose of the pre-order is to give early buyers a nice discount, as well as provide us with the amount of components we are able to order at one time, allowing us to pass those savings directly to the consumers. Our goal with these units is not to get rich. We would rather sell 1000 of these at minimal profits, rather than fewer units at a real world markup. We want these units in the hands of those that will use them, securing Maieuticoin, and ensuring our users are earning their estimated 50% yearly stake

There will be a 5 week pre-order stage with a delivery date posted prior to sales. Should we be even 1 day late, every single customer will have the option for an immediate refund. I am writing that here, in black and white, so you can feel free to prosecute my company legally should we fail to fulfill every single promise we provide. Pre-order funds are not being used for development. They are only used to produce already-designed units. There is no fine print. We will not open pre-orders until we are confident we can fulfill every unit by our posted date. What I post is what we will do, or you get your money back. Guaranteed

When pre-orders open (very soon), we will showcase a working unit and more pictures as proof and more specific technical details. I have never ordered with a pre-order personally, so it is completely understandable if you choose to wait for the 5 weeks at the retail price. The Maieutice Snowball is officially launching 5 weeks after pre-orders begin, whether we sell 1 or 1,000,000 units. All pre-order funds will be used to build your machines. Unlike ASIC manufacturers, we have no motivation to hold, and use, these units prior to shipping. As soon as your unit is built from scratch and tested, it will be on its way to you

Ordering and Shipping
Payments will be accepted in both Bitcoin and Maieuticoin for pre-orders, but only Maieuticoin will be accepted after the 5 week pre-order phase has ended. The only reason we are even accepting Bitcoin at all is to get these units in more hands for more user reviews. Hopefully we can get Maieuticoin on either Coinpayments or Altaccept prior to the preorders going live, but neither one of them has responded to my emails. Should we not be on either one by that time, we will do Maieuticoin orders at a discounted rate manually

The Maieutice Snowball is assembled in the United States of America. We will offer free shipping to all domestic customers. International buyers are encouraged to participate, as well, but we will have more information on shipping for international customers prior to the pre-order launch

Maieuticoin Offline Staking
Maieuticoin Offline Staking will be discontinued on November 1st, 2014. I want to thank everyone for contributing to the Alpha Test. We may bring the service back, but it was mainly a test for our next Maieuticoin development

VERY COOL!  I was thinking about making something like this myself a while back.  I'm look forward to updates.

OMG this is fantastic we need one lol  :)

Put me down for one of these :)

Very good afford. Gotta buy one.

Gimme gimme gimme  8)

This is one good looking and very thought through piece of hardware 8)

Stand alone staking hardware is actually a pretty good idea. Not bad. :)

that looks hot!  I want one!   8)

Another great add on to a already wonderful coin!

Didn't this coin have a hidden premine?

Why is it still being sold on the exchanges?

Definitely not. It was fully mined out as MMXIV. Please do not spread misinformation

What does that mean?

Furthermore, what does this mean? From R3WT's trust rating he left you:

"It is true that i snuck a hidden premine in iGotSpots coin. this rating is here to share my side of the story. I paid him back .4 btc that he paid me to make the coin. He is a good person for allowing me to pay it back and moving on."

That means he stole from me, not the other way around. Notice how he left me positive feedback? This was referring to GAS Coin over a year ago, a project I killed completely on my own after discovering the hidden premine...

This is The Snowball thread. You can continue your crazy stories about me personally in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=820704

Why did you wait until Sept 2014 to leave him a negative trust rating on this?

I changed it to a more appropriate amount. The GAS Coin debacle is very well known in altcoins. Your posts are proving your lack of knowledge to this scene. Trying to spin a negative that happened against me to make it seem like I did something wrong is not going to happen. I'm done talking about something that happened over a year ago in this thread. I gave you the proper link. Use that if you want to continue this conversation

We may expand this device for other coins, as well, but unit purchase payments will be in Maieuticoin

If you are interested in having your coin included as a selection preference during purchase, contact me as soon as possible. I want to hear from coin dev teams, not fanboys. Posting "please add x," without an exceptional post explaining why, will make us not want to support that coin

For more Snowball Discussion: https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#TheSnowball (https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#TheSnowball)

Isn't this just a raspberry pi that you've installed an OS on with a bunch of wallets?  Why would I (or anyone) pay you to do that for me, when I can easily do it myself with a brand new Pi in a couple hours for $50, and without the need to trust someone else to not put a back door in the OS or otherwise screw up its security...

It is run by a Pi, yes, but we haven't even posted the price. Why would you pay for a miner if you can just buy the chips and boards?

As far as security...I am very well known around here and run an actual, legal business. I would be putting myself at far more risk than any of you if I was playing games with stealing your coins

A little more information about ordering. We have set a max of 5 units per shipping address for pre-orders. This means you will only be able to order one unit each week of the pre-order phase if you choose to max out. Once they are at retail price, there will be no minimum or maximum order size

It's a reasonable idea to give people who don't want to build this from scratch something that works out of the box I think. For some people it might be worth it, for others not. I don't see anything wrong with offering people options.

Thanks for the reply.  I'm sorry that we've never crossed paths, and so I have no reference for who's offering this, and I apologize if my comment came off a little heated.  I guess I was taken aback by the fact that it being a Raspberry Pi was never mentioned in the post, which seemed a little off to me.

As for the comparison to buying a miner vs. building one... I don't think that's 100% fair.  The biggest difference is that a miner is separate from a wallet.  You're offering to compile an OS with wallets for folks, which should be understandably worrisome.  While I trust that you intend only good things, I think you can understand where I may be coming from since you've been around a while... it would not be hard for someone to make a copy of all the private keys in the delivered products and steal funds later.  Unless you addressed that somewhere that I missed.  I suppose a person could always delete any pre-generated wallet.dat files, but that might not be a common skill among the folks likely to want this...

I'm really not trying to attach you.  I'm just trying to raise some concerns I have about this and hope you can think about them...

Completely understandable. No offense was taken at all, don't worry  ;)

That's why we used the stock images, though, so the logo was very clear on the case without us giving away too much too soon

This product is not feasible for $50. Beware, this could be a quick money scam. Just think about 2 aspect: Storage for blockchains and ram usage.

Week 0 Pre-Orders
The first round of Pre-Orders will be referred to as Week 0, even though it does not run for a full week and also does not accept Bitcoin as payment. Week 0 is now open and you can pre-order your Snowball for only 3.5 Maieuticoin. Since we are not yet on a payment processor, all M pre-orders for Week 0 will be handled manually. Simply send iGotSpots a message asking for a payment address, to which I will respond with a unique address to reserve your unit. Once payment is sent, reply to that message with your shipping information. If you do not feel the forums are safe enough, feel free to let me know and I'll provide a secure email address for you to send to. Week 0 pre-orders will ship at the same time as Week 1, but USD price for Week 1 will be higher. The goal of Week 0 is to give Maieuticoin supporters a chance to ensure they get their units at a severely discounted rate as a way for us to say thanks for sticking around. Outsiders are encouraged to join in, but we will not be releasing pictures or videos until Week 1 is launched. Week 0 will run from October 22nd through October 25th or until all available orders have been placed, in which case Week 0 sales will end immediately. Week 1 start date is still TBA. This is only an early pre-order window at a reduced cost in USD conversion price

http://mmxivcoin.com/week0.html (http://mmxivcoin.com/week0.html)

We have decided to allow this device to come ready for use with other coins. We have been asking for the last few days which coins we should add, but were not impressed with the response at a chance for shilling. Therefore, if you or your community would like these units for your chain, there will be a small one-time set up cost. The price for the first 3 coins will be .5 BTC, followed by the usual price of 1 BTC per chain added. Payment will not be made until we provide proof of a working unit with that coin

What does this mean? These units will be shipped to you ready to sync to the coin of your choice. Regardless of which coin you choose from our selection at checkout, payment will only be accepted in Maieuticoin (Pre-order Weeks 1-5 will also accept Bitcoin). All Week 0 orders will be shipped ready for Maieuticoin

I would like to see blackcoin supported

Feel free to shill for your coins here now. The more input I have, the more the devs of those coins will see that they have users interested in this option

interesting!

Really interesting!   too bad i'm not from usa cuz i would be on that week0 pre-order list


-Mods-  This is a Staking unit... nothing about mining, so why this thread was moved here?  ???
i think this sub forum doesn't bring exposure enough for this staking hardware, not a mining hardware.
The people that could really be interested with it don't visit this part of the forum.

mprep at his finest   ::)

For those that are worried that their private keys would be at risk of being copied.  The unit will ship with keys installed that hold a balance.  You will need to enter in your private keys via the web ui.  The web ui is also where you will have full access to the wallet, as your normally would in a QT wallet.

For the record...ThePeePs and iGotSpots are the only two that will post official information about the Snowball

Anything said by anyone other than ThePeePs or I about the Snowball are not official statements

Can you explain what you mean here?

"Keys installed that hold a balance"?  What balance?  And why are keys installed?

"need to enter in your private keys via the web ui"?  Do folks generate their own private keys elsewhere or use the keys that are already "installed"?

When snowball is shipped it will not have a wallet.dat file.  It will be created when it starts after first powerup.  So any keys that are "installed" will be brand new keys that the daemon had just generated (thus they will not have a balance).  To add funds to your Snowball you can do it one of two ways.  1) Transfer the funds from your existing wallet to the newlly created addresses in Snowaall, paying the required tx fee, or 2) Import your private key(s) from your existing wallet to Snowball, avoiding having to pay any tx fee, and will now have your funds in two wallets (your orig wallet and Snowball).

We have explored options with scripting for users to self-compile after ordering, but there are just too many issues that could come up with any small updates we push out. Shipping with no wallet.dat is the safest way for the buyer, and the most reliable way for us to ensure everyone gets the same product

Should there be a future hard fork, we will make it incredibly easy to update your hardware. However, we do not anticipate the need to change anything with Maieuticoin

Thanks, that's what I had expected all along, and was confused briefly from your post.

Is there an option to buy a Round 0 box with BTC?

BTC is Weeks 1-5. Week 0 and Retail are M only. Week 1 will be the cheapest and it will slowly slide up to retail price

Thanks!  I look forward to seeing the price. and maybe buying one.

Add NOBL & Diamond please

The price for the first 3 coins is .5 BTC each. After that it will be 1 BTC forever to have a coin added to list to be loaded up at checkout. We will only accept M as payment, regardless of which coin the buyer chooses to use their Snowball to stake with. We will be more than happy to add any coins that would like to pay the fee, as well as providing proof that it is working, prior to payment

With regards to overall progress with the Snowball. We are actually a day ahead of schedule right now and will have some pictures coming later today of the final test version of retail Snowballs, as well as proof that they run, stake, and are actual, real products that exist

With that said, we have sold out of Week 0 pre-orders. Week 1 will be opened fairly soon. Thanks for everyone who participated so far or is just watching to see what happens

Are all pos coins an option for this device?

There is a one time fee for the dev team or community to be added as an option forever

For anyone following this thread for information on Maieuticoin

Maieuticoin 1.0.3

---

Many changes in this client; too many, in fact, to list in separate lines. We basically took another coin, adapted everything into Maieuticoin, then did some GUI upgrades of our own. You will require reindexing the first time you open this client. This will automatically begin when it is run for the first time. Do not be alarmed. Your balance will change during reindexing, and may start at 0. It will return to where it is supposed to be by the time the reindexing has completed. Reindexing could be slow, but it is worth it to ensure that all blocks are valid

• Coin control has been added
• Graph added to QT Interface
• Many performance enhancements
• Smoother transition through old blocks
• Network data handled more efficiently

Week 1 pre-orders are now live

http://www.mmxivcoin.com/snowball.html

+1 great recommendation

Very interesting concept but hoping the dev can shed some light on how the hardware is able to handle the storage needs of a full blockchain. As it is raspberry pi based, it's unlikely it would have anywhere near enough storage space, without an expensive HDD added. RAM is a concern too. Can you address this please dev?

Using 12.8% RAM while staking Maieuticoin. Blockchain is stored on the SD card

On further thought, I suppose this is quite possible. Had my wires crossed about the size of SD cards :P thanks for your answer!

No problem. Snowballs come with 8 GB cards. We tested on 4 GB and had no issues, but I like to leave a little more room in case people want to modify their unit or add something new. We welcome modifications!

HYP has been removed as an option at purchase (no community interest)

Bottlecaps (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=241445.0) might be a good fit (200% annual stake), although I'm not sure about the 0.5 btc. Latest wallet even has a cool feature that auto-sends up to 50% of earned stake to a specified address. IMO that's an extremely nice feature in a high-POS coin. Just a passing thought.

Any word on Blackcoin being added? Could you tell us how many Snowball have been pre ordered and is it correct that batch 0 is shipped with batch 1?

I would had have interest in it with HYP, but didn't know about it
Not sure what it means do, as a device to stake HYP i would love it, but need to have the HYP wallet in it with advanced coin control

Hey! :-( No community interest or it was needed to "pay" to be in it?

So we can only stake the one coin

I am currently staking both M and BALLS on the same device

We did not charge to add HYP, but nobody showed any interest

Pre-orders have all been filled. Thanks for participating. First batch ships out December 5th

Hi @iGotSpots
If I need Snowball in Romania which are the price with shipping cost?

Im already interested in this, but I for one would be more interested if HYP was an option, that would make it a must have for me.

Are these snowball machines available to purchase right now? How much do they cost? How do I get 1?