Bitcoin Forum

Who is Bitfury?

Bitfury is an individual based in russia who popped on the bitcoin Scene in May of 2012. He created a FPGA miner with 360 Spartan 6 processors producing 110-135Gh/s using 10Kw of power. Since he has appeared on the scene one thing can be said of his posts; they are highly technical and he knows what he’s talking about. In April of 2013 he announced the creation of a 65nm asic (There is evidence he was working on the design prior to the announcement). Since then he has been working to perfect the creation of the 65nm bitcoin asic device targeting a fully optimized design with impressive power figures.

You can see bitfury's own site here: http://www.bitfury.org/


Who is Metabank.ru?

Metabank is a Bitcoin exchange based in russia. They have been in business for several years providing bitcoin financial services in russia. They are currently the primary investor for the Bitfury 65nm asic project. Metabank has started accepting pre-orders for devices but has said they will not ship outside of russia. As a result, a proxy service is necessary to collect and send out your device. You can view the metabank ASIC sales page at the following URL: https://metabank.ru/asic


Who is BitCentury?

BitCentury is a group of 3 individuals working together toward creation of various cryptocoin related products and services. You can speak to us in #bitcentury on freenode IRC.

What are the specifications of the Bitfury Asic?

Technical Details (Translated from various Bitfury Posts)

• The design is built on the 65nm UMC Process (http://www.umc.com/English/process/a.asp)
• Bitcoin Engines: 756 Rolled cores (65 Cycles per Hash)
• Expected operational frequency: 250Mhz-900Mhz
• Packaging: QFN48
• Conservative design, could be 40% smaller
• Risk interconnect and transistor variations +/- 20%
• Core implemented using full custom design process (some global place & route)
• Number of transistors per "core": 55,000
• Power estimate obtained from hspice simulation
• Design optimised for low power and minimum size rather than high clock rate

Each chip is capable of 2.8-10.4Gh/s using a 756 core design
Estimated Chip Power Consumption: 1.96-7.26W (0.7W per 1Gh/s)
Estimated Power Consumption at Wall: 1.4W per 1Gh/s (<200W per 120Gh/s Device)


What are the specifications of the Bitfury PCB/Board?

The reference design is not yet completed; but it is likely to be a standalone unit. The PCB design will be similar to the avalon with a controller containing a FTDI USB to Serial chip providing access to any mining hardware you may wish to connect (TP-Link, PI, Odroid, etc).


What Are You Offering?

We are acting as a proxy for orders from Metabank.ru for 120Gh/s devices which they are offering at 2160$USD per unit.

All units will be picked up from Metabank and taken to our office in downtown moscow. The units will be unboxed, tested, reboxed and shipped out via DHL to your shipping address. Testing will be carried out to ensure every device is operating correctly and that no one receives a DOA unit. Testing will be performed on the eligius pool server and will be done under the bitcoin address from which you paid (you will be able to see when your unit is tested and receive full rewards during the testing). Once testing is complete your unit will be packaged and shipped out to your address directly from moscow.


What is your price?

We are charging 32BTC to cover shipping, handling, and our onsite incidentals (employees, office space, etc) as well as to generate a small profit. The 30BTC 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.

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.

Bulk Pricing is as follows:
** PRE ORDER COMPLETE **

Note: Pricing is subject to change, depending primarily on Metabank's price changes which are directly related to BTC USD value; however, we will honour orders submitted with our latest posted prices.


When will units be shipped?

Metabank has announced release of devices in Aug-Oct 2013. Once we start receiving the devices; They will be quickly tested and sent on their way toward your location.


What if I want a refund?

Metabank is currently offering a 30 day no questions asked refund guarantee. We will be extending that to you in the form of a 29 day no questions asked refund guarantee. We have removed one day from the refund time to ensure that we can forward your request to metabank and that you receive all of your funds back.

We will refund your full bitcoin order amount and not based upon it’s USD value.


How do I order?

** PRE ORDER COMPLETE **

Current BitFury ASIC Status:

Chip Production Complete. Test chips to be shipped from Taiwan to BitCentury facilities for Alpha Testing in the week of June 10 - June 14.

Note: He posts primarily in Russian and his posts tend to be extremely technical. however, most should gain a basic understanding of the situation. You can view bitfury's posts at the URL below. I recommend you use Google Chrome to access that URL, as Chrome will offer to translate all the posts into mostly readable English. Look for a button pop-up on top of the Chrome web browser.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=58469;sa=showPosts


Current BitCentury Status:

** PRE ORDER COMPLETE ** METABANK IS NO LONGER ACCEPTING BATCH 1 ORDERS **

http://www.mysenselesslife.com/Bitcentury-Orders.png

Batch 10 (Ordered 06/09/2013) - 3 Devices (360Gh/s) - 5793b364d6d7534b2d25b81da2a7c43b14f537fd4d3248aa145caca0edab47e2 (https://blockchain.info/tx/5793b364d6d7534b2d25b81da2a7c43b14f537fd4d3248aa145caca0edab47e2)
Batch 9 (Ordered 06/08/2013) - 3 Devices (360Gh/s) - 6eea068f0d3dda0d6cfdcdcd7a57a1fd77ff8f7fa524ef6c2e44afd6acd6b368 (https://blockchain.info/tx/6eea068f0d3dda0d6cfdcdcd7a57a1fd77ff8f7fa524ef6c2e44afd6acd6b368)
Batch 8 (Ordered 06/08/2013) - 10 Devices (1200Gh/s) - e0bd82aeebdeed8580d0decca0299d4344ed9fcaf0fae84b730fa1ba3e4d2ded (https://blockchain.info/tx/e0bd82aeebdeed8580d0decca0299d4344ed9fcaf0fae84b730fa1ba3e4d2ded)
Batch 7 (Ordered 06/08/2013) - 6 Devices (720Gh/s) - 1049155b405758c143dfc5789c44def88e97e18eab331f9faef1b5b25acb313c (https://blockchain.info/tx/1049155b405758c143dfc5789c44def88e97e18eab331f9faef1b5b25acb313c)
Batch 6 (Ordered 06/07/2013) - 4 Devices (480Gh/s) - 362f1096ca88b2f70dc7259daa50a2aaeec809858d1224d486636c04ca01141e (https://blockchain.info/tx/362f1096ca88b2f70dc7259daa50a2aaeec809858d1224d486636c04ca01141e)
Batch 5 (Ordered 06/07/2013) - 4 Devices (480Gh/s) - 0fd3b6dab8e509a55eedc338a303ae650223e29bc012011b55bedc94cd1eb363 (https://blockchain.info/tx/0fd3b6dab8e509a55eedc338a303ae650223e29bc012011b55bedc94cd1eb363)
Batch 4 (Ordered 06/07/2013) - 2 Devices (240Gh/s) - dd4f704ce171872e70dc863c8eaa7c51a4b02062dbd2dec96de370a04e9a3552 (https://blockchain.info/tx/dd4f704ce171872e70dc863c8eaa7c51a4b02062dbd2dec96de370a04e9a3552)
Batch 3 (Ordered 06/06/2013) - 2 Devices (240Gh/s) - fa3f32c7dd65ba75dd9ac735f6007b7adb73bef90b315ea0d1c3ea56b62066d0 (https://blockchain.info/tx/fa3f32c7dd65ba75dd9ac735f6007b7adb73bef90b315ea0d1c3ea56b62066d0)
Batch 2 (Ordered 06/04/2013) - 7 Devices (840Gh/s) - 67e4f4a5430cad3097a20185139ac7e867b93abbbf804e5e948a7bd0057e3275 (https://blockchain.info/tx/67e4f4a5430cad3097a20185139ac7e867b93abbbf804e5e948a7bd0057e3275)
Batch 1 (Ordered 06/03/2013) - 16 Devices (1920Gh/s) - 1fee2541c6386d3afef2e607a653b98951182a6891f4b8aeb91d4112fe0264d5 (https://blockchain.info/tx/1fee2541c6386d3afef2e607a653b98951182a6891f4b8aeb91d4112fe0264d5)


Frequently Asked Questions:

Q#1: If it turns out that metabank and the bitfury asic are a scam, will you refund our money?
A#1: If it turns out metabank is indeed perpetrating a scam and all funds sent to them are lost; we will take a loss on any onsite incidental expenses (Employees, Plane Tickets, Rent, etc) incurred and refund the remainder of your transaction to your bitcoin address. Unfortunately we cannot take responsibility for the actions of anyone but ourselves. The amount refunded should be roughly 12 bitcoins per device (Depending on the BTC/USD value at the time of order).

Q#2: Will you accept fiat (USD, EUR, etc) in exchange for devices?
A#2: This is a possibility we are looking into; it depends on how quickly we can get a new account created for the purpose of receiving funds. I highly doubt we will accept paypal. But wire transfers are a definite possibility. We should know more next week (06/03-06/07). But due to the short nature limited availability of this offer I do not believe it will be possible.

Q#3: Will you accept funds via escrow?
A#3: Not at this time, We're not willing to incur that amount of risk on our part. We will be using your funds as they're sent to place the order for your device(s).

Q#4: Can you provide any information about DHL shipping from russia?
A#4: Information about DHL.com courier shipping from Russia (the one we intend to use): http://www.dhl.ru/en/country_profile/key_facts.html

Q#5: What is the average export/shipping time from russia?
A#5: Average Export shipping time out of Russia (4.58 days in 2009):
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/russia/average-time-to-clear-exports-through-customs-days-wb-data.html

Q#6: What will my import duties and taxes be?
A#6: At the following URL you will find a duty importation calculator for dozens of countries: http://www.dutycalculator.com/new-import-duty-and-tax-calculation/

Q#7: Are there any import regulations or limitations for my country?
A#7: Importation regulations & limitations overview per country: http://www.dutycalculator.com (click on "Country Guides" on top left and select the country you live in) /help_center/      

Q#8: What are the items which are prohibited from import/export in Russia?
A#8: List of prohibited shipping items in/from Russia: http://www.russianpost.ru/rp/servise/en/home/postuslug/goodslist
Encryption, Circuit Boards, and/or Computing Devices are not banned from export in russia.

Q#9: What outlet type and voltage will the unit operate on?
A#9: Electrical Plug/Outlet and Voltage Information for Russia  (we do not yet know what kind of power connector, adapter will be provided or if the device will auto-sense the voltage of the line (110 to 230 compatible). Assuming it is Russian, since they are shipping only in Russia, see this URL: http://www.adaptelec.com/index.php?main_page=document_general_info&products_id=187

Hi All,

My name is Nigel Brine.  I have experience in chip design (see image below), FPGA development, and signal processing, and completed my PhD in wireless communications in 2010 at the University of Adelaide, South Australia.

You may recognize me as a contributor to the open source FPGA Bitcoin miner project on github, started by fpgaminer.  I originally came into contact with senseless through his interest in this project, and have since decided to join him and digitalmagus to form BitCentury.  We are all passionate about Bitcoin and believe it has a bright future.  We have been looking for opportunities in the Bitcoin mining space, and I see our initial offering as a stepping-stone to bigger and better things in the future.  In the meantime I hope I can assist with any technical questions you may have.

This is a photo of the chip I developed using TSMC 0.18um:

http://www.adelaide.edu.au/chiptec/chip-gallery/Correlator.png

Regards,
Nigel Brine / OrphanedGland

Hello,

Just one question, are there more Informations if Metabank has just this one Batch of 366 devices?

regards
Foo

Hi Foofighter,

I can tell you that Metabank has a limited number (likely less than 350 by now), primarily because they are only creating X number of chips for batch 1, and while fab'ing large quantities of  chips is a very fast process (1 or 2 days type scenario), from the perspective of Metabank, they have to make a decision in terms of financial risk to them. It would be something like: How much money are we willing to risk on a chip that is not yet confirmed to be working (hence batch "1")? If batch 1 fails, they would want to still have money left to enter into batch 2 after the bitfury attempts to fix any design flaws, which would not be for several months later as regardless of whether batch 1 chips fail or not. This is because foundries work on a scheduled process and there are many customers from other companies waiting in line to fabricate their own asics (not bitcoin related), so even if batch 1 works, and it only takes 1 or 2 days to fab thousands more chips, they have to wait several months before the next opportunity; hence why batch 1 has limited quantity of units.

I hope that makes sense,
Luis

I am very interested in this. Correct me if I'm wrong..you are saying your FPGA is 180nm package?    I am a IT Engineer for one of the top Global -  chip / IC packaging companies in the world.  We do packaging up to 22nm.  I would need a bill of materials, etc.   If I can be of assistance, please ping me.
I have a Russain translator on hand as well :).

Very Respectfully,

GreaterNinja

Hi GreaterNinja,
No, this is not FPGA at all. This is 65nm ASIC.
Luis

Hi BitCentury,

Could you estimate when you will have the contract of sale ready?

We are currently still waiting for the contract to be drawn up. I will touch base with our firm tomorrow and check on its status. My earlier estimates appear to have been quite optimistic. Our contract needed more customization than a typical contract so we couldn't use one of their templates.

Regards

So do we send the funds prior to seeing the contract? Or can we reserve units pending the contract release and pay immediately afterwards?

From what I read, you do not know the bitfury Russian guy very well. Is really scary that he could just run away with your money. Have you ever write to him or communicate with him?? At least 1 of you meet Yifu at the bitcoin conference, but hey where is the Russian?

Alright, I'm in.   ;D

Hi everyone,

please consider to enter your order in this spreadsheed, so we have all an inofficial order status available
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmyZBD2EHCEEdG9SdENBV0l4YnNuNklrdDItMTJwdlE#gid=0

regards

Hi Rora, we are not currently accepting reservation units pending the contract; however, you may order a unit immediately and if you don't like the contract, you can request a full refund up to 29 days from  your purchase date. FYI, we have already executed two  full refunds successfully from Metabank without issues.  I hope this helps ease your decision.
Cheers,
Luis

Hi dan99,
These are the risks we all take. Nobody really knew Yifu (Avalon) well either, or the guy from ASICminer etc. Unquestionably there are risks, but also potential for high rewards. We have had some communications with Bitfury; however, we are not at liberty to disclose any details at this time, though whenever possible and with permission we will. Further, please note these statements do not stand as an endorsement of him. Sorry to have to be so vague at this time.

Best Regards,
Luis

Great, how many dozens can I put you down for?  ;D

As soon as I get my first one hashing... ∞

 ;D ;D ;D

Hi GreaterNinja,

I was referring to my previous full custom chip design being 180nm.  For our first offering BitCentury are providing systems developed by Metabank using Bitfury 65nm ASICs.  Stay tuned for future developments.

Nigel / OrphanedGland

Hi Digitalmagnus,

are there any informations how much Units are left of the ~350 total pre orders? besides of the inofficial spreadsheed here.

regards
Foo

Unfortunately It is unknown at this time as Metabank is not publishing their sales figures.

Is it too late to place an order or not yet?

I am waiting on my wire to hit my account at mtgox so i can buy some btc

We will continue to accept orders until Metabank tells us that no more units are available and refunds one of our orders. Unfortunately until that happens we will not know how much hashing power is available for sale. As mentioned, they are currently not stating the total hashing power sold, or the number of units sold/available.

Greetings,
Just a quick note to say that I'm in contact with the famous "JohnK" who verifies people's ID in these forums, and I have already paid and submitted to him my ID (passport+drivers license) etc. It may take a day or two before he confirms my ID as he is out of country at the moment, but hopefully very soon.
Cheers,
Luis

i sent the wire to mtgox today so i can buy btc and place my order

i am excited about this

Sounds good, looking forward to your order ryan.
Have a great weekend,
Luis

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

I confirm the receipt of the documents below. Please note that I am not a professional nor trained in verifying documents given, so I cannot guarantee that they're 100% authentic or came from the original owner.

1. Photo of digitalmagus's passport and Driving Licence
2. Photo of digitalmagus with his passport and Driving Licence

I divulge by request that DigitalMagus' ID has the name of Luis Henriques in both the drivers license and the Canadian Passport.
I further verify that I have sent and received a cleartext password from his work email, which matches that of the company mentioned in his Linkedin profile and his name matching that of his drivers license and passport.

I promise the safe destruction of the data after the successful issuance of this contract. No identifying data will be held by me after the issuance of this contract.

Thanks,
John
7 June 2013
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (MingW32)

iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJRspmvAAoJEINT5jezqu6ws64P/A/ldRqJcHVanf8jVgSddYED
DQ6NAKqwUt21rurJqRUAlhoP4BcFKKAEpFK01qxjICo9+96xN8JyyUodmUj7Aqby
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d6ObRRwLstJjREp+ITLjMw8LKN7N9G8GLMZ9XrGh78GqBuJ4e3/Xxn+lcyu5nTOy
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v3XwgoaHGsDSR+n8cfUn0Z30q1dMaE4jWQ9ZACUFgYTEtPOSqn1J9ZoIcajtkbby
/lehCbL7oZ3/kybADSs84xFORWAeIaHA8KUzMXLigVeqGNkSNZ7A/luTOuRfVeQr
f22kC6RDP2IfqYHK+x7yP9gbsboGkxx98MAGhHg749YY+5iUq0C7VMYtXLeakaqL
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PS: The afromentioned photos are deleted locally.

Thanks,
John

Question: how many of these units do you plan to proxy, and what value do you provide for the $1700/unit you are charging for this service?

This came out in the last hour or so:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=228677.0

Bitfury is looking for alpha-testers for the chips. He also mentions BitCentury by name. He gives a qualified endorsement of BitCentury:


A colleague and I are considering whether to offer to be alpha-testers.

Thanks stripykitteh,

As I had mentioned a few posts above, we have been in contact with Bitfury - now you can see the evidence ;-) . Also in that thread you just reference, you'll notice OrphanGland (our lead engineer/CTO) made one of the first posts, could have been the first after bitfury, but we were too busy talking to him about the alpha testing chips. Needless to say, we are aiming to be alpha testers as our ultimate goal has always been to make our own boards and ASICs, it's just we arrived a bit late in the scene to target the current nm sizes. Anyway, there's more news along these lines to come in the not too distant future. We are all very much looking forward to the resulting tests of these chips, but it would even better to verify them ourselves.
Stay tunned! :)


On another note, our sales contract was actually finalized earlier today; however, the lawyer assigned to this somehow didn't send it to us. We're not quite sure what happened. We contacted the lawfirm owner, and he left voice messages on every phone of the lawyer assigned to this, so hopefully by tomorrow sometime we will get it and post it here.

So all in all, lots of developments today:
* I got JohnK verified, hopefully to everyone's satisfaction
* We are looking to alpha test Bitfury's chips
* Sales contract is finished, hopefully we can release it tomorrow.

Have a good night everyone!
-Luis

Hi,
We will proxy as many as our customers want to buy until Metabank.ru runs out of allocated chips from their assigned wafer lot.  

The value we provide is this:
1)Trustworthy Russian staff: We have very competent trustworthy business contacts & soon to be employees in Russia that will receive the units from Metabank in Moscow. Depending on volume of sales, one or two of us may very well fly there ourselves for a period of time.
2) Secure testing & shipping facility We will setup a secure facility there to open each unit, test it to make sure it is working, package it for international shipping to you.
3)Proven Competency We are competent individuals as evidenced by our accomplishments in life and as evidenced by the information we provide in the questions that have been asked so far. You can also see 6 more pages of discussions here, prior to this thread. We recently moved the thread here so we could better manage it. Old thread worth reading: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=223656
4)Working hard to build trust with you  We are trying our best to build your trust in us. Today I was verified by "JohnK" as requested by several people here. This basically means that all along I am in real life who I say I am. I personally I am not just hiding behind some alias, and have provided my linkedin profile and have also had skype calls with some of our customers, although this aspect is not something I can promise to do for everyone due to time constraints.
5) Highly technical Senseless, and especially Nigel have a very strong technical background in this area (FPGA & ASIC design, PCB design, assembly, etc). I am less technical in this area than they are, as my area of expertise is in Network Engineering and Data Center Operations, but in short, we know what we are talking about and have done extensive research.
6) Long Term Business We're not just a bunch of guys running an overnight operation, we plan to be around for a long time as a business and have recently incorporated. In short, we are here to offer support after you receive your units.
7) Building a customer support structure While it has been a lower priority compared to everything else we've been working on, we aim to at minimum have a basic website up and running where over time we will build all technical, support and product offering information on.
8 )Unique thus far As far as I could tell, though I haven't extensively searched the forums, we may be the only Western company providing this proxy service in Russia, though if you want to gamble there seem to be several other mostly Russian individuals offering a similar service, but possibly of questionable trustworthiness.
9) Keeping our customers informed on a frequent basis: One of the challenges I've seen not yet seen well resolved with just about every single ASIC board company thus far, is that their staff is not easily accessible to customers, transparency is often lacking and customer service is for the most part seriously lacking. It's easy to talk when we haven't had a chance to prove ourselves yet, as we are not yet handling anywhere near the volumes they are, but I can assure you this is one of my highest priorities. It is risky enough to venture into any one of these operations as a customer, it is even more nerve racking when there is a huge lack of communication and support structure for the customer base.  I must admit that this is somewhat the outcome of a hashing speed arms race. It's all Engineers heads down doing the core work, while customers await with bated breath of any hint of what might be going on, often waiting weeks without any updates. Resources are extremely scarce in many of these circumstances, but now that some of these operations have millions in their pockets, those excuses should be gone, still customers are seemingly left in the side lines a lot of the times. I very much intend to improve on this circumstance with our company.

In short some of our profits are eaten up by operating costs and overhead in what we are trying to do (plane tickets to Russia, employee salaries, office space, custom exporting fees, shipping costs, etc), the rest is profit for us to re-invest in the future of our company and if we're lucky we may also end up paying ourselves some money for the countless hours we're putting into this at all levels.

Let me know if you have any other questions,
Cheers :)
Luis

Yes, I've looked at OrphanedGland's project and I am sure BitCentury will be chosen as one of the 3-4 alpha testers, especially as there is a community around your project that has a vested interest in you (and bitfury) succeeding. My colleague and I are working at a smaller scale but figured there was no harm in offering to help!

Absolutely! Good luck! :)

How much per unit are you charging for two units? Thanks

As a result of the recent declines in btc/fiat exchange we have had to slightly increase pricing to cover the unit purchases and expenses incurred. The cost for 1-4 units is currently 34 BTC each. Your total would be 68BTC for the 2 units.

Regards,
Tom Sensel

is it just me? but 90.000$ for 110GH/S?

there must be somewhere you can get that cheaper?

 :o

You buying BTC for $2800?

They are charging BTC32 for 120 GH/s.     ;)

What you are referring to is not what is being offered in this thread. The 90,000$ unit for 110Gh/s was the FPGA mining rig that bitfury developed over 1 year ago. What is currently being offered is an ASIC mining rig of 120Gh/s for 2160$. These devices are currently only available through Metabank.ru and they state they will only be delivering within Russian borders. Bitfury is the designer of the chip/device and Metabank is the distributor. Hence the reason for our offering of this courier service to picking up, test, and deliver the device to your premises. Our fee for this service is approximately 1300$ per unit (shipping fees included, Customs tax/vat excluded). You can see our current BTC rates in the initial thread stating the cost as well as the specifications of the chip / device itself.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

-Tom

1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9 are the same thing (i.e. that you are competent businessmen).

regarding 2, i am unsure whether it is normal for homes/offices to be insecure in moscow, so i'm not sure of the value here.

it seems that 8 is the real 'meat and potatoes'. fair enough: you're one of the few offering this service in a transparent manner. however, $1700 is a high premium to pay for implied trust.

best of luck, a 78% markup is too rich for my blood :)

Understood nubbins, everyone has their own cost/risk tolerance and budgets. Clearly, with 41 units sold in about 1 week so far, some people seem to like our offer. With the recent developments (Bitfury's officially acknowledging us + likely getting alpha chips for testing + me getting Johnk verified + sales contract about to be published), it is highly likely that given we are keeping our fiat price the same (BTC is slightly higher, but only because of BTC/USD price drop) I would not be surprised  if even more people find our offer to be even more attractive than before. Also, just FYI, once the alpha chips are confirmed to be working, I would not be surprised if the cost/unit would rise substancially - something not under our control at the moment. So if you are buying from somewhere else, it may be wise to do it sooner rather than later. Best of luck to you as well. :)
Luis

We'd again like to thank everyone for their vote of confidence in us, and congratulations to all those who have made their first purchases of the fastest (and lowest power) bitcoin ASIC technology bitcoins can buy today. We have just placed the 8th order of devices from Metabank now totaling 51 devices and a collective hash rate of 6.12Th/s.

If you have any questions or concerns please do not hesitate to contact us.

Regards,
Tom Sensel

Sales Contract Update: I am still awaiting a call back from the owner of our law firm regarding the finalized sales contract for all our customers. If I don't get a call back soon, I will just post our non-lawyer-approved sales contract draft which should at least give you all an idea of the terms we are considering. We would then wait until Monday to get the final version and post that immediately.
Cheers,
Luis

Hello everyone,

Please find below a link to an unofficial draft copy of our intended sales contract. As stated in the document, any and all words, conditions, obligations etc may still change pending our lawyer's final review and recommendations; however, I don't anticipate any drastic changes.

Given we still have some time until we can meet with our lawyers on Monday to acquire the final version, please feel free to review it and provide any feedback, concerns, suggestions etc. I look forward to your comments!  

The PDF has a password. The password is:  NOT LEGALLY BINDING DRAFT COPY

View document here: [EDIT: This has now been removed, as it is no longer necessary]



Thank you for your patience thus far with this process,
Luis

Your liabilities section is all bullshit. You can put whatever you want in a contract, but if its not legal then its as if it didn't exist. I really hope your partner owns your house, as if they're a scam/fail then you're going absolutely bankrupt with the liability. And don't tell me "its being done by lawyer", I would rip that contract to shreds in court.

Dogie, you can disagree as much as you like with us, but I ask that you be civil about it. As stated in numerous places this is only an early draft and anything may change. You may be quite right that some statements may not be legal, at minimum in your jurisdiction - I am not a lawyer, that's why we hired a law firm to review it. Further, if you don't like the upcoming legally binding contract, you do not have to buy a product from us or if you own one, you can request a full refund under the terms stated. We could have waited until Monday to provide only the legal version, but we released this early to allow people to judge as to whether or not they are ok with our intended sales contract proposal, and yes we welcome feedback.

And lastly, we should actually thank you, as you were the one who suggested we should have a sales contract in the previous thread. So thank you.

Regards,
Luis

:) funny

I am being civil, I'm actually trying to help you specifically. Unfortunately the damage has been done and you now have 6.5TH of orders which you are liable for if they go missing. Its not about my jurisdiction or state, its the whole basis of this group buy and others trying to pass on liability - it just can't be done.

You are offering a product, and you have a supplier. If your supplier scams you, its your responsibility. The buyers all bought a product from YOU, if YOU can't provide it then you have to refund them in full. Seriously, this entire thing is a disaster waiting to happen. If they turn out to be a scam, you'll be accountable for every penny.

I don't remember suggesting a sales contract directly either.

The contract is more or less what I was expecting. It's pretty clear that this is a principal-agent relationship for a fee, not a buyer-seller relationship. If there are defects in what is delivered the buyer does not have recourse through BitCentury unless breach of contract can be proved.

I think the contract should explicitly state when delivery is effective - i.e., does BitCentury's responsibility for delivery stop at a port of entry to the principal's country? (i.e., the principal is responsible for the product clearing customs) As a principal I'd like to see something in there about a delivery warranty. i.e., if BitCentury's courier (DHL or whoever) fails to deliver the product or damages it in transit I would be compensated (or will the delivery contract be between the customer and DHL rather than BitCentury and DHL - that should be clarified).

If anyone is uncomfortable with what is proposed I recommend asking for a refund now; I think BitCentury would be mad to draw up the contract as a buyer-seller relationship, precisely because there are so many issues at play here that they have no control over.

I'm currently studying law, btw.

Dogie, there's nothing in contract law disallowing principal-agent relationships. For the sake of clarity though that should be an express term of the contract. As long as the principal goes into it with their eyes open I can't see any problem. If BitCentury masqueraded as a seller and then later claimed only to be an agent when things went pear-shaped, THAT would be a problem and it would be "see you in court" time.

Simply, this is not a sales contract and it should be amended to make that clear.

Which is why I was failing at conveying that you can't add liability limitations into a sales contract, for a sale :D If I was him I'd still be worried even if he had the most perfect agent contract. Anyone can sue for anything and cause you major problems for years, even if there are no obvious grounds. Like the Jackson family suing the tour promotion company for billions for the alleged wrongdoings of the family doctor ^_^

Ok, sorry,  sounds like we are saying the same thing in different ways. :)

Not to be rude, but I just want to clarify this. So you are stating that the sale of a service; is not a sale?

It's evident to anyone who looks that we're acting as agent and the contract of sale is the contract of sale for our agent service; not a contract of sale for the device. Unless you're suggesting that DHL and Fedex have no taxable income (as they do not "sell" anything), then selling a service is still a sale.






 

I'm not sure where you've got that from to translate to what I was trying to say, other than that's not what I'm saying. Unless you quoted the wrong post?

This group buy was trying to design a sales of goods contract to not be a sale of goods by putting exclusion clauses in, which is impossible.

It's apparent that you would like to back peddle and argue about the definition of words, We'll have to go with simple questions in a simple format:

If you sell a service is it a sale, yes or no?

If you add a contract to the sale of a service, it is a sales contract, yes or no?

Yes. Yes, but not in this case.

The contract was specifically geared towards delivering a physical product in return for a payment.

Not trying to complicate the issue here; I want to help you guys succeed. My advice is worth what you've paid for it. ;) Also bear in mind that at law school we get taught to find problems, not always how to solve them.  ::)

The trouble element I see is that at the end of the contract the principal ends up being the owner of the hardware. At some point during the contract metabank.ru must own the hardware (even though they do not have privity to the contract), the question is does BitCentury become the owner at some point before the end of the contract? I think the answer to that is probably yes (invoices etc would be in BitCentury's name, not the name of the principal), in which case it gets harder to deny that you are not performing a sale of goods contract.

Hopefully your lawyer will either spot the flaw in my argument or be able to amend the contract to protect you, but like Dogie says you want to be careful that you don't end up with something that ends up being interpreted as a contract of sale of goods.

I last studied contract law 3 years ago, my analysis might be off. Sorry if bringing this up ends up being a waste of your time.

What you're seeing is preliminary version which was meant to convey the general attitude of the contract of service. The contract states the liability we have with relation to delivery of your package and with the relation of the seller making said product available for us to collect on the user's behalf. As it is known and as you say yourself, if selling a service is a sale, this is a sales contract stating liabilities of the service. If you ask DHL (or any courier) to pick up a package, scheduling the pick up, but the person you asked them to pick up a product from doesn't (or wont/cant) give it to them, it's not their liability. The contract in question is simply reiterating these points.

Could you please clarify something for me?  I am in the US, if i were to order through you and receive a number of these devices and they turn out to have a problem or be defective, will i have any recourse to get them replaced?

Even if it is to send it back to you and pay a fee for the swap?

Thanks!

Hi RoboCoder,
You ask a good question. We are internally discussing if and how this, or something of the sort might work. We are trying to finalize a customer contract so this and some of the other details mentioned earlier today may require some editing of our contract. Once we have come to a decision we'll announce the details. We'll get back to you as soon as we are able.
Thanks,
Luis

Thumbs up for you even any kind of contract as in this business it seems that typical sales goes:
-send me btc
-wait... wait... wait... silence :)

I hope to get my wire fast enough through so I can order one!

Good day,

Pre-orders for metabank batch 1 devices are now COMPLETE. As such we will no longer be accepting additional orders at this time.

I would like to thank everyone for their faith in us as we carry this forward. The total number of devices sold tallied 57 for a total hash rate of 6.84Th/s. We were able to confirm today that all orders have been secured. If you have orders placed with us (with the exception of one who has already been notified), your order has been secured with metabank and you will receive your device.

We will have exciting news in the coming weeks. We will convey additional information as it becomes available.  

If anyone has any questions or concerns please feel free to ask here or contact us directly.

Regards,
Tom sensel

Hi,

thanks for the great service!

I just red that metabank are already planning another Batch, are the rumors right -will you provide Info at the given time and also do this service for future Batches?

regards

I can't really make any comments at this time as to batch 2. There are to many unknown variables at this time. The chips might not even work the first time (batch 2 chips may actually become batch 1 chips if a re-design is necessary). The next 2-3 weeks will determine the course of things to come when the chips themselves are proven or not.

Hi guys,
Contract Update#2:We've received the final version from our lawyers first thing this morning, but we need some time to review it, and I'm pretty sure at minimum a few amendments will be required. We are meeting with them later today to discuss changes. We'll provide updates as they become available.
Hope everyone had a great weekend!
Luis

Contract Update#3: We met with our lawyers today, some changes were discussed. They will work on them tomorrow and we will try to provide a final version for release the day after,  so this would be Wednesday; assuming of course, nothing else needs to be altered after they are done with it, but I can say it is almost in a final state at this point as it is.
Cheers,
Luis

Hello,

I heard rumors that metabank has unpaid orders from Batch 1 and they are selling these unpaid orders shortly. Could you talk to them if thats true and inform us if we could get another device from Batch 1?

Best regards
Foofighter

The unpaid orders in question have a week to pay and that week is not up yet. If orders open up again we do plan to continue offering this proxy service for as long as batch 1 units are available.

-Tom

my funds are ready i got my deposit yesterday and if someone do not pay i will take their spot

Let me know guys

If there is a free spot pls PN me  :)

Hi,

just wondering,
have you planed how long you will test each device at your office? Will this be a matter of hours or more like a full day or so?

regards

Hi Foofighter,
We have not finalized exactly what we will do yet, and likely won't until we give it a try and find what works best. Our goal is to optimize the logistics such that your device is out the door to you as soon as possible but still undergoes some decent amount of power on testing. We discussed something along the lines of picking up the systems from Metabank, dealing with paperwork during the day,  testing the systems overnight, and packing them back up and ship them out the next morning. Then rinse and repeat. There are many more things to consider in this logistics operation (how fast can we get systems from Metabank? Will it be all at once or small batches? How reliable are the first units after testing? (This may impact how much testing subsequent undergo). How are the units  packed from metabank?  Are they delivering plain circuit boards in an anti-static bag, or do the systems come with full CNC milled aluminum boxes (Avalon style)? What is the quality of the boxes/packing material from metabank? Is it good enough for international shipping or will we need to source additional/better packing material? How many units can we reasonably process in 1 day?  etc), so I am hesitant to commit to anything specific, but as soon as we figure out exactly what works best we can certainly communicate it.

Luis

Hello everyone,
Service Agreement (Contract) Update#4: Well, it's finally ready! We appreciate everyone's patience with this, it was important we did sufficient due diligence. I'd also like to thank the individuals that provided constructive feedback and contributed to its improvement. Feel free to comment further on it if you wish or ask any questions. Over the next few days, our customers should be getting  an email from us, with a copy of your Service Agreement(s) and some basic instructions. Also, I will leave up the early draft I posted a few days back so people can easily compare the changes, but FYI after a week or so I will delete it.

Service Agreement URL: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bz7CvNpsvWycTmlDcHBzVUs0Qk0/edit?usp=sharing

Cheers,
Luis

Hey,

just checked the new contract.

So what happens now with the mining earnings produced during the testing phase of the devices?

regards

Hi Foofighter,
Good question. What you might notice in the contract is that some clauses got removed and others simplified. We were advised not to over commit, and especially not to be too specific where possible to allow for maximum operational flexibility.  In regards to the mining, our intentions are the same as before, but we were advised not to include the details in the contract. Imagine a situation where one of our staff was making copy/paste or typos in the destination BTC address and all the mining proceeds from your machine went to somebody else? Imagine we didn't discover this until later after many customers were affected. Our lawyers thus advised to remove these clauses to limit our liability as well. On a similar note, I think is important we also state publicly that from the 57 machines we've purchased from Metabank thus far, 10 of those were purchased for Bitcentury from our own funds, and yes, with those we intend to mine to get more familiar with the machines, but also for profit generation, to cover company costs or raise funding for future ventures, etc. At the end of the day, we aim to grow our business and expand into other areas, time/opportunity permitting. Building trust and being transparent with our customers I feel is critical to achieving that goal, especially in this line of business given the current environment.
Cheers,
Luis

I would imagine that with that kind of profit margin, you'd hire only the best and the brightest.



Well, so much for that theory.

Hi oaxaca,
Even the brightest make mistakes. Feel free to offer a better value service. Competition is a good thing.
Cheers,
-Luis

If there is a chance to get one of these units, PM me pls.

thanks !

Hi guys,
On the subject of waitlists for Metabank Bitfury Orders:
Thanks for your continued interest. We are not aware that Metabank has officially come out and stated that they may have additional units for sale should some of their potential customers from batch 1 not pay within a week. We believe this information is being propagated by at least 1 individual on bitcointalk.org with possibly questionable motives, but in short, we cannot confirm the validity of what is being claimed either way.  That said, it is not outside the realm of possibility. Do let us know if you find a reliable source of this information.

This situation is one possibility, but there are others which may eventually result in Metabank selling more units - or not! Odds are, *IF* the BitFury ASIC passes tests successfully first time, and *IF* Metabank is just holding off on those test results before selling more devices (likely at a higher price than before), then we might as well be ready, but really, do consider they many never sell units again, or at least not in the short term.

What Bitcentury will do then, is organize a product tracking waitlist of sorts,  wherein people that are interested in eventually buying units can email us (See email below, please don't PM me on here), and I will add you to the list.  There is no money/bitcoins involved in this, and so this is not a pre-order, but rather a waitlist for a possible pre-order. As such, we offer ZERO guarantees of any kind.

We will simply try our best to be ready to buy more units *IF* and when they sell them again.  If they do sell them, we will announce our selling price at the time and then you can judge whether or not you still want to commit to the purchase.  You will be given 24 hours notice once we have confirmation and emailed you that we can purchase more units, and nothing would be official until you actually send us the bitcoins to secure your queue order (later to be followed by a signed service agreement).  Failure to send us the bitcoins within 24 hours of notification will result in you losing your place in the queue to the next order/customers.
  
Please be sensible with your requests. Anyone asking for more than 10 units, we may require some proof you actually have the bitcoins/funds to pay for such an eventual order.
Those that have already contacted us and we have replied to you in one form or another (if unsure, please email us as per below), you will be automatically added to this list, and we will contact you over the weekend with your place in the queue & how many units.  

So, if you are interested in being on a waitlist please email: EDIT: The waitlist is now closed, so email was removed

With the following info:

EMAIL Subject: Waitlist request: Name, # units, June XX, 2013

1. Your BTC Source Wallet Address:  
2. First/Last Name:
3. Address:
4. City:
5. State/Province:
6. ZIP:
7. Country:
8. Phone:
9. # of Units:  
10. Your Email Address:

Thanks,
Luis

Thank you Luis!
Email sent...looking forward for updates.

+1

Dear Luis,

just double checked the contract but Iam wondering now why your company is legally placed at Bahamas, I thought you would have an offince in Moscow and you are currently located in Canada.

As I understand the situation, this would be just a private office in Moscow and you dont pay any taxes in Russia? Means your company is not predominatly located in Moscow? So is the adress in Bahamas just a letterbox company to save taxes?

Please explain.

Best regards
Foofighter

Hi Foofighter,
We initially looked at incorporating in Canada, but once we sat down with our lawyers, we realized it made no sense given our staff thus far is already in 4 different countries, and will likely expand in the future to others as well.  We are not a typical operation primarily based in 1 or 2 countries. While today we are looking at shipping from Russia, tomorrow it could be designing PCB boards out of Australia, designing power components out of Taiwan, PCB printing and assembly from China and running a website out of Finland. Then 1 year later it could all change. So maximum flexibility will be key to being competitive.

Further, what is considered local for me as a Canadian, is considered offshore for the other business partners and potential future investors.
Likewise incorporating in the USA in certain states is considered 'offshore' from the perspective of many other countries. Even more so when incorporating in Russia. As such, since we would be considered offshore no matter where we incorporated, we then considered various countries to incorporate in that would be more or less neutral to any of our current and future business partners, investors and ventures. With this, we considered a location that was historically stable and then obviously, it made sense to consider corporate tax neutrality which we see as benefiting everyone involved including our customers due to retail price impact, granted individual import/duty taxes may still apply.

Bahamas was only one of many options, but we settled with this one as it could be done reasonably fast, inexpensively and our lawyers already have years of experience in incorporating other companies there without any issues.  To be clear, we are not trying to weave a complex web of offshore companies and tax structures to obscure what we are doing as has been popularized recently in the media with big conglomerates like apple, google, starbucks, etc. Sorry, we have no time or any interest in this,  we're just a bunch of engineers trying to get work done as fast as possible as anything Bitcoin related seems extremely time sensitive, as such being able to get things done FAST without a lot of bureaucracy was our #1 consideration.

Hope that helps,
Luis

Speaking of getting Bitcoin related work done fast and across the globe, some of you might interested in the status of Bitfury's ASIC. On this Finish blog (use google chrome to translate to English), you can follow punin's adventure as he flies from Europe to Asia to acquire BitFury's chips from the factory, to then distribute them to all sorts of countries around the world for hard core engineer alpha testing.

https://bittiraha.fi/content/matka-alkaa

Enjoy!
Luis

For those not wishing to read the entire (very amusing) saga. The TL;DR version is this:

1. The Chips have been acquired from the factory in Taiwan
2. Punin is already trying to test them on a PCB (presumably to address Bitfury's online bet which expires in just a few hours!)
3. Bitfury has privately acknowledged that BitCentury will be getting Alpha chips for testing and punin already has Nigel's shipping address in Australia! We will be posting pictures/videos etc as soon as we get them, but it's realistic a few days away, likely next week some time before we actually receive our alpha chips.

In the mean time, here's some pictures from punin's blog that might be of interest:

https://bittiraha.fi/sites/default/files/image/matka_alkaa_14.jpg

https://bittiraha.fi/sites/default/files/image/matka_alkaa_15.jpg

https://bittiraha.fi/sites/default/files/image/matka_alkaa_16.jpg

Note: We are migrating Mail Servers right now (3:00PM PST)... please wait until we give go-ahead for any additional waitlist requests.

Edit: As of aprox 3:45PM PST mail should work for most people. If you get a failure to deliver message to: waitlist@bitcentury.com, please just try a bit later until DNS propagates around the internet.
Thanks
Luis

Hello everyone,
I just wanted to let you know that I finished replying to everyone who had requested to be put on the waitlist so far. If you somehow didn't get an email from me yet, then please email me (not pm) your original email requesting to be waitlisted, and I will make sure you are in the right spot on the list, but I am pretty sure I got everyone.

Tomorrow, I hope to start emailing customers their sales contracts, although everyone hopefully already has had a chance to read them from my previous forum post.

On the Bitfury ASIC update front, we haven't much new to report. I don't believe that as of right now, there's been any confirmation either way of the preliminary test results, although it does look like Bitfury may have missed his bet deadline for June 15th.

Hope you're all having a great weekend...ideally not glued to the screen like I have been all day :-)
Kind regards,
Luis

Thank you Luis for the frequent news here!

Also waiting eagerly for the final test results of Bitfury.

regards
Foofighter

Foofighter, you're welcome.

So the latest update is that 'punin' (the guy who flew from Europe to Taiwan to get Bitfury's chips from the factory), was not able to adequately test the chips in Taiwan. In short, he experienced some problems with the testing process, but not necessarily the chips.  There are many different ways to test ASIC chips from basic to advanced functionality. Some are very fast and crude methods that may in fact fry the chips being tested, to a wide range of ever more elaborate and safer methods that simply take longer because they require very specialized tools and may require test boards or even purpose designed PCBs... all the way to end to end testing which would actually require all software at all levels to be completed, and thus allow for a demonstration of bitcoin hashing.

Lacking the necessary tools in Taiwan, and possibly skill level, punin has already flown back to Eastern Europe and has handed the alpha chips to Bitfury late yesterday. Bitfury is thus in the process of doing some tests himself, and it looks like he may already have a PCB available by 'intron':

https://i.imgur.com/K30DoxD.jpg

Since the June 15th bet is now off the table, individual testing/proof (by people, other than Bitfury), is now less of a concern and so we await Bitfury's test results.

Cheers,
Luis

Digitalmagus, can you confirm whether the contracts have been emailed yet?

I can now, they were all emailed this evening. Thanks for your patience everyone. I thought I was going to be able to get them out earlier but 'life' happened.
Kind regards,
Luis

is this metabank the same metabank that also is the bank for PRE-PAID credit cards from Ace Cash Express such as NETSPEND

http://www.metabank.com/

https://aceelite.acecashexpress.com/prepaid-debit-card/applyNow.m scroll to bottom
 "ACE Elite™ Visa Prepaid Cards are issued by MetaBank™, pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. NetSpend is an authorized Independent Sales Organization of MetaBank. Use of card subject to funds availability. Transaction fees, terms, and conditions apply. See Agreement for complete details. "

Hi Kev7112001,
No, I don't believe it is. We are referring to: http://metabank.ru (http://metabank.ru), a Russian company.
Cheers,
Luis

sorry guys late to the post, can one still order the devices, what is the current price, is their a site that list all this info (one must hate to read all the threads all the time).

has estimated shipping changed from aug-oct or pushed back?

Hi gateway,
The Batch 1 of orders from Metabank is officially closed. Anyone can keep an eye on any possibility of more orders/batches opening up from Metabank in two main ways:
I encourage anyone interested to bookmark the 2 links below and check daily, and flag us if you see anything opening up. We are also checking daily, but it doesn't hurt to have more eyeballs scoping upcoming opportunities:
(use google Chrome for translation from Russian->English)


1) Their website: https://metabank.ru/asic
2) Metabank.ru's posts here on bitcointalk.org: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=14120;sa=showPosts

Since there is currently no way to accept new orders, we are simply setting up a wait list, which costs nothing to sign up for. See details here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=226846.msg2467253#msg2467253

Cheers,
Luis

Hi guys,
I should have added this yesterday, but have been crazy busy recently. Bitfury claims his chip is fully working! That means actually hashing too, not just passing necessary voltage tests and what not.  If you have been following any of the ASIC developments in the past year or so, this is extremely impressive in the sense Bitfury is only self-taught, and learned and designed a 65nm ASIC pretty much all on his own in a very very short time frame. When I met Yifu at Bitcoin2013, even he mentioned that Bitfury was a crazy genius guy (paraphrase), but now we may very well have proof of this.

But it gets even better. According to him, his chip may even outperform his own pre-testing estimates for speed/power consumption. Before we all break out champaign bottles and do a little dance, it's better to get peer confirmations of this, or even better, wait until we get our alpha chips (ETA aprox 2 weeks from now) and verify all the claims for ourselves, but if true.... WOW!

Here's the relevant post from Bitfury in Russian. Use Google Chrome to translate.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg2515577#msg2515577

Cheers,
Luis

PS. For those that purchased pre-orders, if you haven't yet sent me your service agreements, it would be great to get them by end of day Friday, as I should have time this weekend to process them all on my end.

Thx you for the update, Luis.

This is really great news! Cant wait to get more infos.

regards

Great news. Thanks for the update. Keep it coming.

How's this for more Bitfury news...

Bitfury started an open bet here: http://bitbet.us/bet/450/bitfurys-asic-will-work-with-power-1/

...and placed 99 BTC of his own money on the YES side. The Yes side meaning that he if he didn't deliver less than 1 W per GH/s per chip by June 15th, 2013, he'd lose his coins to the opposing betters.

Well June 15th came and went, and he missed the deadline by a few days, so he lost the bet from a time perspective. Now a few days later his chip is proven to be working and supposedly exceeding the power/Gh numbers, and so he is actually paying out everyone else who bet on the YES side who believed in him - something he never had to do.

More details here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=228677.msg2516092#msg2516092

Genius + high integrity = Awesome!  ;D

yeah, also saw that, really a nice guy!

Hi guys,
It's been a few days since we've provided some updates. This is mostly because we've been busy dealing with some administrative work in the background. FYI, we have not yet received our alpha chips. It looks like the first ones went to individuals primarily involved in producing PCBs for Metabank and similar parties that were investors in Bitfury's chip manufacturing, so this is not a bad thing. There is apparently a larger set of chips already in Europe that will be shipped out to all the remaining selected testers such as our organization; however whilst we have no exact ETA we were told 2 weeks, about 1 week ago. So let's see what happens there. In the mean time, one of the Bitfury chips was sent to zeptobars.ru (http://zeptobars.ru), which is a site that apparently analyzes chips under high zoom optical microscopes.

Here's the relevant eyecandy:

QFN packaging - execellent for thermal performance and low inductance connection to leads:
http://s.zeptobars.ru/bitfury-case.jpg

Chip without the packaging - tiny! This plus low voltage operations, should make for some awesome USB hashers one day.
http://s.zeptobars.ru/bitfury-die.jpg

If we correctly understood some of the Russian postings, bitfury's chip will have over 700 cores (crazy). This is a good thing in the sense that for example, with BFL chips there's 16 cores (avalon I think has 1? Correct me if I'm wrong). If during the manufacturing process dust or other particles get in the die's surface, it could cause a core malfunction. This is why on some BFL chips, some people are saying that one BFL device performs slightly slower than another, because 1 or 2 cores may have been damaged. When you have 700+ cores, the hashing rate differential will be less noticeable. To be clear, this picture does not show identifiable cores.
http://s.zeptobars.ru/bitfury-top.jpg

Nano art on the chip. Apparently Bitfury had some spare time on his hands ;-) Surprised it wasn't a bitcoin symbol or the logo from his FPGA website: http://bitfury.org.
http://s.zeptobars.ru/bitfury-flower.jpg

Etching materialization
http://s.zeptobars.ru/bitfury-etch.jpg

Repetitive pattern of hash calculation blocks:
http://s.zeptobars.ru/bitfury-Si.jpg

55nm is at least 5 times smaller than what we can see in optical microscope, so not all details are visible
http://s.zeptobars.ru/bitfury-logic.jpg

Hi guys,
We recently spoke with  Metabank and here's some information we'd like to pass on:

Q1: When will the machines be ready for delivery?
A1: In Autumn, around October.

Q2: We heard of at least 1 individual on Bitcoin forum that was selling Metabank devices after you announced Batch 1 was closed, can you explain this? Do you have any more units you can sell us?
A2:The batch is closed, we have not sold more equipment since we announce the closure.

Q3: Will your product be a bare circuitboard or will it ship in a case like avalon and BFL have.
A3: Most likely it will be in a case

Q4: Do you know if it will be dual voltage power supply? (110/220V). How many watts will the unit draw at the wall?
A4: Sorry, I don't know answers to either of those questions. We are not at that stage yet.

Q5: Can you explain if the interface from the computer will be USB or Ethernet?
A5: It most likely won't be connected to the computer, just the power plug. It's independent from the computer .

Q6: Yes, but how'd the computer intercommunicate with it? What's the interface?
A6: There'll be software for that

Q7: So it'll require special software to run from the computer? Which mining software? cgminer? something else?
A7: Yes. I can't answer questions like this yet. If I make a mistake, I'll leave you misinformed.

Q8: What is your estimate for when there might be a Batch 2? When is Bitfury getting Batch 2 chips from factory?
A8: I can't tell the exact dates at this point. Around the release of the Batch 1, we'll have understanding when the Batch 2 will be pre-ordered.

As we get more details over time, we'll do our best to pass them along. Right now, i'd say they're in very early stages of designing the PCBs, so obviously not all the details are worked out yet. PCB design can take a couple of weeks to a couple of months, depending on complexity, access to all the necessary equipment, engineering skill level, design flaws/re-starts, etc. Likewise for the chip assembly process on the PCBs, although that part can be done in about 5-10 days, depending on volume and availability of all the tiny components (aside from the ASICs).
Cheers,
Luis


PS. I'm a little behind on waitlist requests, but will try to get to those in the next couple of days. Thanks for your patience.

Greetings,
Just another quick update. We can confirm that our Alpha chips are officially en route! ETA = Mon or Tues (depending on time zone).  In case you are wondering, the Bitfury alpha chips will allow us to:
a) Peer review and confirm the chip's functionality, hashing speed potential and power usage
b) Allow us to start thinking about possible PCB designs in the event Bitfury ever decides to sell chips like Avalon or BFL.

Have a great weekend everyone!
Luis

Very cool!  Do you have a prototype PCB ready for them, or are you dead bugging it?

The reported efficiency numbers from the Russian subforum posts are almost unreal, it appears at low voltages he's hitting 0.40 W per GH/s.

Tacotime, what a pleasure to see you in our thread! This reminds me, I need to catch up on your MC2 Alt-coin thread (URL: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=169204.0). My initial impression was that it looked like a promising start to a real and improved alternative to bitcoin, as compared to all the other "clone-coins" out there (to use the polite terminology).

@fpgaminer: I'll let Nigel comment on that, since he's the one that will be handling the alpha chip testing.

We had plans for various tests including dead bugging, but as we are receiving the chips later than originally anticipated, we are going straight to testing with a prototype PCB.  We are submitting our prototype PCB design for manufacturing today, lead time for that is approx 5-7 days.

Nice 8)  Pics of the sexy, bare PCB would be eroticfun to look at!

Wow, seems like this project is progressing very very nicely !

Any foreseeable trouble with shipping these units to the USA ? Interested in placing an order for one.

BITFURY chip hashing against 4 block erupter usbs!

https://i.imgur.com/CYF9qEI.gif
https://i.imgur.com/2P4JZDR.jpg

How fast is the BitFury chip?

Thank you for providing that update. Does anyone know why metabank are targeting the end of the range previously quoted (August-October)? I had the impression that the end of the range was for the circumstance that the chips would need a respin/redesign before mass production. The early testing suggests that bitfury beat his power/performance expectations, so that won't be necessary. I also note 100TH are getting their chips made up into boards over the next few weeks and are targetting the 3rd week of July for production.

Are metabank just being conservative? Is it because more work is required to get peak performance (~5GH/s) out of the chip for the finished machines?

Right now it's been shown to operate at up to 4Gh/s. We'll know more once we begin testing the chips ourselves.



I believe they are indeed just being conservative. As it's been shown with other asic suppliers assembly is a tedious process with many bits you need to be sure are in stock. If any of the bits are not in stock you're looking at a 2 week delay.

I for one would not be surprised to see Bitfury ship as early as August based on the speed of the development process so far.

Hi All,

I just received some BitFury ASIC chips today.  Big thanks to BitFury for giving myself and the BitCentury team this opportunity.  We are currently waiting for our initial prototype PCBs to be manufactured.  I will keep you up to date with progress of the testing, but in the meantime check the following link for the pics: http://bitcentury.io/blog/bitfury-asics-have-arrived.

Regards,

Nigel / OrphanedGland

Hi All,

We received our prototype PCBs today, and have made very good progress with testing of the BitFury ASIC samples:

https://bitcentury.io/blog/initial-testing-of-bitfury-asic

Upcoming tests will include use of an external clock, and chaining of boards.

Regards,
Nigel / OrphanedGland

nice thank you nigel!
, any other news from metabank? Do we know how many chips metabank will use now? Or any other news from metabank?

regards

Last Metabank post : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg2683984#msg2683984
"About the timing - everything is going according to plan. No artificial delays will not.
Remained the only risky step, the production of boards at the Russian factory. By this process, we carefully prepare in advance."

Much of the information is still undetermined at this time. The suppliers are still awaiting testing results (from bitfury, and alpha testers such as ourselves). Though preliminary results appear that 2-2.5 will be the operational range of the chip. It will likely be that the units will contain somewhere around 60 chips each. We will know more once we're able to conduct a full battery of tests on the chip (Our current results are only after less than 24 hours of testing and only on a single chip).





 

Here is a video of the BitFury ASIC running:
https://bitcentury.io/blog/bitfury-asic-in-action (https://bitcentury.io/blog/bitfury-asic-in-action)

Nice...

Shouldn't your subject line be modified to say 55nm?

When are they opening orders for their products?

I think you missed it already. Pre-orders were a few weeks ago, I think they were sold out a few days after.

Yes and no. I once asked Bitfury the very same question. Here's his paraphrased response:

GDS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDSII

Correct. Sorry we recently stopped accepting wait list requests and changed the thread subject back to what it was originally "Metabank pre-oders ", we should probably change it to something more relevant to where we are at now to minimize confusion. We are not taking any more Metabank pre-orders at this time, as Metabank has not announced any more units for sale.  

As for the status of our previous Metabank orders, as has already been stated, Metabank has said they have not experienced any delays so far, but a more specific target delivery date has not been provided, they are still touting: Aug-Oct 2013.  

To provide a bit more clarity, once asic chips are in hand (and we know they have had them for about a month now at least, certainly before us), it can take several weeks to a couple of months to have a PCB designed from scratch. This depends of course on schematic and layout engineer experience, on complexity of the board, thermals/voltage/performance targets/error rates, amongst many other things. Then after design is finished, ideally access to PCB printing manufacturer is immediately available and depending on how many layers the PCB will have, whether it is double sided or not, what type of alloys are required, size of PCB and especially how many units need to be produced, this impacts PCB manufacturing time, but generally speaking it can be as little as 3-5 days upwards of a couple of weeks. Next comes the assembly process where ASICs and dozens of other components are put on the PCB boards. This is typically a 3-10 day process depending on similar factors - volume of boards needing assembly and inventory availability to all the dozens of components required to be put on the board are critical. If assembly company is missing 1 component it can delay things for a week or two easily. Lastly comes the external metal case design & milling and volume production which itself can also take a few weeks, although in theory it can be done in parallel to other processes, but can only be assembled after a PCB has been fully completed (PCB printing+PCB assembly). All in all, assuming Metabank had test alpha chips in mid June, August would be very ambitious date but not impossible, Sept should be realistic, and October should allow them some extra time in case at least 1 flaw was found and re-design had to take place which means going back to step 1 but only a couple of weeks to fix a design flaw instead of upwards of 2 months of starting from scratch.  In short, it is a relatively complex process, involving many many steps, requiring a wide range of skills sets and nearly always involving several 3rd parties who don't always meet their initial stated timelines - as has been evidenced by just about every single company out there trying to develop and sell ASIC mining gear.

While the above is a general idea of how things progress, actual timelines regarding where Metabank is at are entirely speculative at this point as  Metabank has not been very forward with where exactly they are.

On the news front, we are working on some really exciting stuff in the background that we will hopefully be able to announce in a few short weeks, but we can't really disclose any specifics right now (don't you just love cliff hangers?).

Cheers!
Luis

I call dibs if its a miner based on bitfury chips at reasonable price.  ;D

thanks for the news, really looking forward to you announcement!

Hello everyone,

We called Metabank again today, and had a long list of questions but didn't have much luck with the person answering the phone as they couldn't answer the vast majority of them, but we did manage to get *some* useful information.

Q1: At which stage of development is the Metabank mining equipment? Has the PCB design been completed? Are you testing final PCB yet? What can you share?

A1: I believe the PCB design is finished and sent off to various (PCB) factories, but not sure if agreement with one of them is finalized.

NOTE: If we look at Bitfury's recent post https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=254996.msg2717867#msg2717867, we see a brand new design for a Bitfury PCB. I have confirmation from a 3rd source that this is indeed MetaBank's PCB. I was told it is 8 layers. Below is a picture of it.  Given Metabank sold 120GH units, we can assume they will hopefully be targeting 2.5GH/chip as there are 48 chips on the board (2.5x48=120). We believe 2.5GH should be do-able so long as proper cooling is provided. Also, another guy in a forum post elsewhere here managed to achieve 3.4GH/s, but only with a huge heat sink connected to the chip.

Given each chip is 7mm x 7mm, if you slap a ruler to your computer monitor (as I did :D ), then you can see this image appears to be to scale. With this, we can easily measure the board dimensions being aprox: (23cm tall x 32.5 cm wide) or ( 9.1" x 12.8" )

https://i.imgur.com/JwLADgP.png


So, assuming the design is finished, and assuming there are no design flaws, and assuming the PCB manufacturing process as well as the assembly process proceeds without flaws, and they have already picked out their external box CNC milling etc, etc. Also typically, you first print & assemble a prototype board, then test it extensively, if all goes well, you give the order to mass produce. So it does seem indeed that an end of August delivery date *may* be possible under best case scenario; however, when there are complex boards involved, it is not uncommon to experience delays for one reason or another, so I don't want to get everyone's hopes up, but it does appear at least to be within the realm of possibility. When we asked them directly, this is what we got:


Q2: Can you give us any more precise date on when the boards will be ready for customers?

A2: It is still too early to say the exact date, as there are many steps left, so we can still only say Aug-Oct; however, maybe if you call towards end of this month we might have a better idea.


That's about all we got out of them, all our other questions they couldn't answer, but suggested we write them via email. We are going to do that in Russian (real Russian, not google's comedic transliterate). As soon as we get a reply, I will post answers - that said, we have written them a few times before, and maybe 1/3 times we get a response.  Questions are mostly of technical nature, so you guys can prepare and know what to expect. Here's some of the questions we had prepared:

1.Will there be a power supply capable of 110/220v?
2. Will there be an external case?
3. What is the targeted Watt power draw of the entire unit?
4. Can you guys start providing status updates on your website so everyone doesnt have to call you?
5. Will there be a box provided for the product that can be shipped internationally?
6. Will your device be CE, UL and RoHS certified?
7. Which software will come with your board? (i.e. cgminer?), if not, will it have an English interface?
8. Which communication method(s) will the board have:  Wifi, USB or Ethernet ?

Lastly, if you guys have any other specific questions you want to ask, maybe list them here, and we can try to ask them for the next time we call them / email them.

Cheers!
Luis

Thank you for the update, digitalmagus!

I'm holding out hope that they ship two of those boards per unit and underclock them to 1.25GH/chip, like the cscape design, for future overclocking :D

n1 update, thank you luis.

Hope that they answer the other questions too.

regards

Ladies and gentlemen,

We've just launched pre-orders for our brand new product... the LittleFury! The world's fastest usb powered bitcoin miner :-)

I'd like to keep this thread reserved for Metabank related orders, so for more details, please visit:
1) Our website: https://bitcentury.io  (watch the latest video in the blog and also visit the store)
2) Our bitcointalk thread related to the LittleFury: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=258926.0

I'll also be sending out emails shortly to everyone with a brief update related to this :)
Cheers,
Luis

Not to be a spoil sport, but the pricing is high if you plan to deliver in october. this is a rough estimate and likely a bit undershooting even, but you still won't even profit if you use this tool http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

100TH now mining with bitfury device.  Shouldn't Metabank be on the same schedule?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140366.msg2811496#msg2811496

100TH is the 1st priority customer that actually was involved in developing the reference design. Metabank could still take a little longer.

Yeah, my impression was that Metabank is the first truly 'external' customer to Bitfury/Tytus, though they do seem to be close (hard to judge if you don't speak Russian :) ).

It does seem encouraging that 100TH have got some kit online, only a little behind schedule (weeks, not months).

From Metabank:

Original e-mail:
Здpaвcтвyйтe,
B пoнeдeльник 29 июля мы дoлжны пoлyчить чипы в Mocквe, пocлe чeгo зaпycкaeм cpoчнoe пpoизвoдcтвo.
Ceйчac вaм нyжнo пpинять peшeниe, coглacны ли вы иcпoльзoвaть вaши биткoины для pacчeтoв c пocтaвщикaми. Пocлe этoгo  вoзвpaт бyдeт yжe нeвoзмoжeн.
Пo пpeдвapитeльнoй инфopмaции cyммapнaя мoщнocть ceти oceнью мoжeт дocтичь cвышe 1 пeтaxэшa.
Ha дaнный мoмeнт мы имeeм 4 вapиaнтa плaты и cпиcки кoмплeктyющиx, нeкoтopыe из кoтopыx дocтyпны тoлькo пoд зaкaз в нeoбxoдимыx нaм кoличecтвax.
Плaн пpoизвoдcтвa  ~ 2 нeдeли c мoмeнтa пocтaвки кoмплeктyющиx.
Ecли вы гoтoвы зaбpaть чипы, этo мoжнo cдeлaть нaчинaя co втopникa.
Ecли вы нe coглacны c этим ycлoвиями, вы мoжeтe cдeлaть вoзвpaт пpямo ceйчac бeз зaдepжeк.
Пocтaвкa нe cpoчным мeтoдoм вoзмoжнa нe paнee oктябpя.

Пpocьбa дaть oтвeт в тeчeниe 4-x днeй.

Translation:
Hello
On Monday, July 29, we have to get the chips in Moscow, and then run the urgent production.
Now you need to decide if you agree to use your Bitcoins for payment to suppliers. After that refund will be no longer possible.
According to preliminary information, the total power of the network in the autumn could reach over 1 petahash.
At the moment we have 4 different boards and lists of components, some of which are only available to order in the quantities we need.
The production plan ~ 2 weeks from the date of delivery of components.
If you are ready to pick up the chips, you can do starting Tuesday.
If you do not agree with these terms, you can now make a return without delay.
Delivery is not urgent method is possible not earlier than October.
Please give a reply within 4 days.

So, I know it is a bad translation... but does this mean that October is out.

It seems a little contradictory (I'm sure it isn't, just Google translate is not perfect).

It may in fact be talking about 2 different things. Can someone who speaks Russian provide a better translation or even better, more context?

Hi guys,
Glad to see you are all on the ball. Yes that google translate is pretty confusing. I specifically got one of my Russian contacts to translate that second to last line, as I was confused myself.

Google's version: "Delivery is not urgent method is possible not earlier than October."
The real human translation: "Non-urgent delivery methods (i.e. ground courier) will not be possible before October"

So, aside from onsite pickup, which is likely what we'll be doing, it sounds like they will be offering direct non-priority courier services, but not until October - and if anything they've said in the past is any indication, it probably would be only within Russia. It's now approaching the end of the month, and we're looking to make another call to clarify this as well as any other details. As soon as we complete the call and get more info, we'll be sure to post it here. At the top of the list of course is estimated delivery, which their post wasn't that clear about.

Cheers,
Luis

Thanks for the clarification.  :)

Hi guys,
We've had some further communications with Metabank, and below is what we can share. Note: any references to "we", means 'Metabank'

(paraphrased...)


Cheers,
Luis

Thanks Luis. It looks as though we will soon be at the stage where there will be more to report and updates will be more frequent, which is welcome.

Hi guys,

It seems we may have another, but this time *unofficial* update, in the sense we didn't get the below info directly from Metabank ourselves, so it is at least second if not third hand information, but just thought I'd share it regardless.

A guy by the name of Mu3aHTP0n here on bitcointalk has posted the following today in regards to Metabank devices...
Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg2890286#msg2890286 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg2890286#msg2890286)


This supposedly translates to something like:

So, this still looks like last week of August / 1st week of Sept for them to *start* making units available for shipping/pickup. I will remind you guys right now that:
a) Metabank sold at least many hundreds of units (the above post makes reference to thousands). Perhaps they can get them all assembled within a week, but if it is really in the thousands, this is definitely questionable.
b) Metabank did not provide us with an order # for each of our units. The order# we provided you guys with is directly from us, so we could track which of our customers ordered first etc, but of course all of this also depends on when Metabank gives us their units.

Cheers,
Luis

Yeah, I've also been running google translate over everything that guy has been saying; he seems to know a lot and other posters in the thread pay a lot of respect to his reports.

It would be good to get an official update, of course.

I'm probably wrong but I thought I saw a reference somewhere to having 5 boards with 8 chips each and a single backplane per device. I can't find it now though. Anyway, if it is right they would be printing 5 pcbs per device, so the number of boards could be in the thousands even if the number of units is in the hundreds. Speculation on my part.

Hi guys,
Right after my previous post yesterday, I thought I'd get my Russian contact to make another call to confirm the info and also ask a pile of other questions. I had 13 questions lined up (see below) for him to ask, again we get barely any answers out of them. At this point, I'm a bit disappointed, because while before they had a good excuse not being able to answer them because the design wasn't finished and/or they hadn't confirmed a fully functioning prototype, supposedly (and I haven't been able to confirm this first hand), they now do, and as such, most of the technical questions should be answerable. I can try another call middle to end of next week and maybe by then the info will have trickled down to the front line staff answering the phones.

So we will definitely keep trying by making periodic calls on our end, but I think at this point if anybody can get answers out of them by whatever means (and I mean in a nice way of course ;-), I think it'd be good to have others also try by whatever network contacts you have to ask questions and share your answers.  With this in mind, we will also try some alternate ways than just phone calls , and I will let you know in the next few days if and what info I was able to get.

Just so we're not all spamming the same people at the same time. Later today and over the weekend, I will try the following people (so please wait a few days yourself before you call/email/pm these same people, unless you are good friends or have been able to communicate with them before).

a) timur (via email), the head of the Metabank operation, we have his email address, but maybe 1 out of 6 times the guy replies back
b) "metabank.ru" user in this forum
c) bitfury
d) Mu3aHTP0n user in this forum who claims to have a direct contact with Timur, who is the head guy running the Metabank operation.
e) The 65nm Russian thread that Mu3aHTP0n participates in.
f) punin/tytus - although they are not involved directly with the metabank operation, I believe the Metabank chips were supplied by them and they speak Russian. I'd rather not bug these guys too much, as I know first hand that they have lots going on with their own operation, but will make at least 1 attempt.

Here's the little info I was able to get from our Metabank call yesterday... I will quote verbatim from my Russian contact's phone call the info he emailed me this morning....



The questions I had lined up....

1. We heard you guys have 5 boards hashing and chip hashing is at 2.9GH/s, can you please confirm this?
2. Will you be providing a case? What kind of case will the units have?
3. What is the current best case scenario ETA for when customers can go pickup the units from you? (Should be last week of August or 1st week of Sept, if longer than that ask why)
4. The units we will be picking up, are they going to be inside cardboard boxes that can be shipped long distance (i.e. will they have enough Styrofoam/sturdy box that can survive shipping?)
5. Can you please give me the exact address where I can go pickup the units from you?
6. Will there be a power supply capable of 110/220v?2
7. What is the targeted Watt power draw of the entire unit?
8. Will there be a box provided for the product that can be shipped internationally?
9. Will your device be CE, UL and RoHS certified?
10. Which software will come with your board? (i.e. cgminer?)
11. Which communication method(s) will the board have:  Wifi, USB or Ethernet ?
12.  How many chips will each unit have and what kind of cooling will be used on each chip because at 2.9GH the chips will be well above 80 degrees Celsius.
13. What are the dimensions and weight of each unit? Will it be a single board or a multi-board (i.e. avalon / H & M like c-scape setup)


Thanks in advance for any additional info people can provide.
Cheers,
Luis

Hi stripykitteh,
Thanks for this, if true, then it would mean that the previous design image we posted from bitfury may not have been a final design, or maybe they have multiple designs going on. I really wish the info was easier to attain. Let's see what we can figure out, hopefully very soon they will be more forthcoming with updates/info so we're not all left guessing.

Cheers,
Luis

Well that's disappointing.  Looks like the c-scape based boards will ship before Metabank's design ... and those are U.S. local and were bought much later.  :-\

On the other hand, we paid less, so it's not all bad.  I'll keep dreaming and hope Metabank can deliver early September.

Thank you for keeping us up-to-date, digitalmagus!

Hi fpgaminer,
Well, assuming the "Mu3aHTP0n" guy really has direct access to Timur, and assuming the Russian text translation above isn't too mangled, I'd almost trust his info more than the front line guy answering phones at Metabank who can't seem to answer a single technical question (yet). So at this point we have 1 guy saying end of august/1st week of Sept, and another guy saying 3rd week of Sept.

As for c-scape boards. Yes the bare boards are ready and already at generation 3, which is pretty amazing actually. However, none are available until October now for US delivery as per MegaBigPower: https://megabigpower.com/shop/, although I think he sold a few (dozen?) August units, and probably likewise for the EU distributers (puinin/tytus) over at: http://www.bitfurystrikesback.com/shop/.

As far as I understand only initial investors like Metabank, punin/tytus and Dave of 100TH got July chips in any substancial volume, anybody else who wanted Bitfury July chips had to buy them at the very expensive price of $308,000 USD / 3,000 chips.  I have a feeling they didn't sell too many of those reels if any at all, but maybe somebody did buy 1 or 2? I have no idea.  More than likely people bought 3,000 chip reels in volume for the October delivery @ $60,000 USD, but this would mean no high volume chips hitting network until very late October or more realistically, some time in November from Bitfury perspective.  This of course, excluding the 100TH project. I haven't kept a close eye on Dave's thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=251966.0) , but I believe earlier this week he mentioned that his units are in the process of being assembled, which means at least part of his 100TH by end of this month being up and running is not out of the question.
Luis

First proto pics here`?

https://metabank.ru/asic

https://metabank.ru/images/asic/asic_board.jpg

https://metabank.ru/images/asic/asic_miner.jpg

Anymore infos on those pictures in another thread? Those seem a lot of hardware errors, also ~1,9% rejected. anyone can tell what the "SHORT test 6s" parameters tell? 1st half? 2nd half?

Nice!  Thanks for the cross-post Foofighter.

Hi guys,
My apologies for no posts in the past week. I was sick for several days and then inundated with backlog of work and other personal stuff. I will try to provide an update as soon as I am able to.
Thanks for your patience,
Luis

PS. Thanks foofighter for posting the prototype board pic.

Get well soon and hopefully you can give us a update on when we should start seeing the products ship. Thanks.

Hey Luis,

pidobir mentioned something that shipping starts at 5 of september, can you check this info?

 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg2964113#msg2964113
 1. Cases will be made of plexiglass
 2. MetaBank will receive 1400 boards in 8 days.
 3  ATX PSU will be in the devices.
 4  Photos will be tomorrow.
 5  Devices will be testing  before shipment

Thanks guys. I am fine now, but my cold knocked me down in bed for several days.

Here's the updates I have so far:

1 - Email to Metabank from several days ago still no reply back
2 - Email to Timur from several days ago, still no reply back
3 - My main Russian friend in Moscow is ready to deal with orders, but obviously there's none yet.
4 - I've spoke with Bitfury. He has some portion of his own purchased chips being handled by Metabank, that said he is not in daily contact with them, but obviously has contacts high up, likely Timur directly. He said that as far as he knows, Metabank is still on track for a late August / early Sept delivery.  Bitfury doesn't like to deal with customer relations as he'd rather spend his time heads down doing technical work. You may have noticed he hasn't made a bitcointalk post since late July. All he told me is that he is very busy "working".
5 - I've created a bitcointalk.org acct for my main Russian translator (not same guy as in Moscow). I will be asking him to start interacting in the 65nm Metabank threads later this week to ask our questions and get back to us here on generally what is going on. I'll also try to get him to talk to Mu3aHTP0n.  This as opposed to me doing it in transliterated Russian and likely being the target of jokes/insults - as already goes on there daily.
6 - My goal for this week is to start my Russian Visa application form. I am *potentially* targeting a trip for around 1st or 2nd week of Sept, but this depends on various factors including: a) Getting holidays approved from work (this should not be a problem) b) Getting a visa timely approved (Russian Embassy in Canada states one can be obtain in as little as 3 business days {excluding processing time by visa agent companies that deal with embassy} for rushed requests, but no idea on approval rates ) c) Metabank actually announcing delivery/pickup dates or customers showing they actually received working units d) Booking an available flight.

While I fully trust my main Moscow friend  as well as his more technical work associate, given the size of our orders and to ensure everything goes as smooth as possible we (bitcentury) have decided that if I am able to go to Moscow to oversee the delivery operation, that I should go. Again, I offer no guarantees on this part at this point, but am working towards this. If in the meantime Metabank delivers earlier, I still have my friend in Moscow ready to start working on our orders.

I'll keep posting more details as we get them. In the mean time, keep an eye in the usual places (65nm Metabank thread,  and bitcointalk users: Mu3aHTP0n, Bitfury, Metabank.ru) and by all means, please keep sharing info on here and asking questions.

Cheers,
-Luis

Hi foofighter.

pidobir (his posts: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=50909;sa=showPosts), is in a similar position to us, in that he is also waiting for orders from Metabank although on a smaller scale. My understanding is that he ran a group buy operation. In his posts he has claimed several times to have been in contact with Metabank. Obviously, I can't vouch for the statements he makes as I don't know him, but given Metabank's lack of public information announcements it doesn't hurt to keep an eye on another guy who claims to have info. When we make another call, I will try to get confirmation on dates.

Luis

Thank you for the update!

Thanks for the update guys, I don't know how many outside russia ordered via metabank, but finding information is very hard, the russian thread is full of shit, insults etc. So any updates given are appreciated a lot - keep it up! :)

Hi guys,
As promised I've asked my translator to make a post in 65nm thread and ask Mu3HTP0n to ask Timur some questions. Here's his post:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg2995610#msg2995610

Now let's see if we can actually get some answers. He will also try to call Metabank this weekend (assuming they answer phones on weekend) and then I'll let you guys know if they provided any answers to the below questions.

Here's the English version of the questions:

In other news...
1. My plane ticket to Moscow has been purchased today. I will be there somewhere around late 1st week or up to mid 2nd week of Sept. I don't want to disclose exact dates for my personal security, but will post from Moscow to say that I am there, once I am there :).  This is not guaranteed yet as the Visa approval process will take almost 2 full weeks and I won't know if Visa is approved until literally a few days just before I am supposed to leave.

2. We also looked at a Ukraine thread where they were talking about Metabank. See here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=186234.msg2954355#msg2954355
Specifically, they posted this picture:
http://s019.radikal.ru/i606/1308/87/968b74ded8b7.jpg

Note that this is not necessarily what Metabank will be shipping. This thread is primarily related to Ukrainian people who bought Bitfury chips and are doing their own thing. Just wanted to clear that up. Getting back to the 65nm thread, the Mu3 guy (sorry not typing out his weird alias every time), said he'd be trying to get a picture of the finished units soon. Once we have those hopefully a lot of questions will be answered as well.

Have a great weekend everyone,
Luis

Thanks for the update. Hopefully we can get a shipping date within the next few weeks. Cheers.

Looking good fellas.  Thanks for the constant updates and keeping everyone in the loop. 

Hello again,

We called Metabank and a little information is below, but first some ...

Comments to our questions from the 65nm Metabank Russian thread (paraphrased):
-  It seems at least a few people in the 65nm Russian thread liked our questions.
- One said, come on Timur, answer the questions, don't wait around for Vasily (Mu3) to do it
- A few sarcastic remarks:  "yeah, let's hope they will certify the devices everywhere possible, it'd take time exactly till october"; "otherwise "an uncle vasya the local electrician" [russian fig. of speech, like "average joe the electrician"] can show up like: "hey, you're mining without a certificate!"
- SectorZero is expecting the system to be 'frying' like the avalon his friend has in the basement.

My observation:
- If the chips really are clocked at 2.9GH, expect these systems to produce a *LOT* of heat (If 5 blades * 8 chips = 40 chips, producing ~100 degrees Celsius worth of heat). Whatever cooling they provide is going to be critical to keeping the system stable. In any case, be prepared for dealing with all the heat these boxes will generate.

Metabank Call Aug 24, 2013:
- The devices will NOT have any certifications (i.e. UL, CE, RoHS, etc) because this would delay device availability by at least 1 month. We can try to label them as 'computer engineering prototypes' or something of the sort - if you have some good advice for this, we're listening. If they ship with standard PC power supplies, we won't have to worry about UL certification as they should already be certified. As for RoHS, that's an option you select when you get PCBs printed. Typically costs about 15-20% more, but ensures there is no lead in the product. They still allow non-RoHS PCBs to be printed even in North America, but only for prototypes. For consumer products it is required to have RoHS compliance, although not all PCB manufacturers really enforce that. The CE certification would be much trickier.  Just to be clear, this will not be our responsibility if customs doesn't clear it because of lack of certifications. On the flip side, Avalon's boxes were not CE certified, and the vast majority of them cleared customs without issues, we think primarily because they looked like computer boxes.
- They are on target to start "unloading" at the end of this month or first week of September. (I will have to get clarification on what "unloading" is meant here exactly, but I assume it means unloading into customer's hands).
- Not all devices at once, but first orders get devices first. (Note that we didn't start offering our service until Metabank was selling units for several days, I'd have to go back and check, but the bulk of our orders were even several days after that).
- The device box is made of plastic, not plexiglass
- There will most likely not be any packaging provided for people picking up the boxes. (FYI, we {BitCentury} have already started discussions on how to provide proper packaging, boxes etc for our customers, so we'll do what we can here to try to make sure the units arrive in one piece to you. The good news is that both Tom and I have experience with properly packing and shipping expensive circuit boards from past jobs).
- As for the technical questions the guy answering the phone could not answer them, but we mentioned that others want information too and to please post technical information in the forum. He said they will do, but who knows. They also asked us to email our technical questions to them before (we've done it at least 2 or 3 times) and never get a reply - both in English or Russian.


That's all we have for now folks.
Cheers :-)
Luis

??

Are those chips you guys (DDN?) ordered? I see a living room with food and tea, so I guess this is not metabanks facility.. :D

this is russian pizza.

Thank you for the continued communication, digitalmagus!  It is much appreciated.

The 'pizza box'  pictures DDN posted above are what you would get if you ordered the 3,000 chip reel of Bitfury chips. DDN is not related to BitCentury, but thanks for showing us those pictures DDN. I hadn't seen the reel pictures yet.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3028583#msg3028583
new photos  ;)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20909492/IMG_0068.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20909492/IMG_0069.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20909492/IMG_0070.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20909492/IMG_0072.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20909492/IMG_0073.JPG
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20909492/full_assembly.pdf

Nice :)

When you have a look inside, it really looks bad-ass-russian. huge capacitors :D. Why are there so many different capacitors on the same spot for different boards? Odd.

It looks like those boards are hard soldered to the "master board". I see a lot of damaged units after (bad-ass-)russian parcel service..

16 boards with 8 chips = 96 chips. Anyone knows the specs at which the chip will/should run according to metabank?

Yeah :(

such a box is not able to withstand a travel around the world, those cards with relatively heavy heatsinks will come loose and destroy themselves.

I hope BitCentury ships them disassembled.

spiccioli

It would be good to know whether this is metabank's unit or some other project's.

I can only see little fans so this looks like a low-power, low-hash per chip, minimal-cooling system.

Bitfury's chips are very low power, those units should be rated at 120 GH/s and should need as little as 100 W.

spiccioli

Yeah, but bitfury's chips can be run at different voltages. There had been talk about running them at a higher voltage to get more performance per chip, more like 2.9GHash/chip and 170W for the device. That's why I'd like to know whether this is really the metabank device or not.

The last picture of Metabank's proto PCB had white soldermask ... so, who knows.  Whatever it is, I want it :P

Looks sockets to me.

First,
Thanks to fsb4000 for the post with the links to the pictures, you beat us to it :)


I have a feeling the pictures shown are for the "double" machine where they posted about it in the 65nm thread before (sorry, I hadn't mentioned it before). So by double I think they mean 240 GH/s, which kind of makes sense since I am seeing 11 blades in this one, although some of them look different (silver vs beige/black capacitors), so not sure what's going on there - probably this is an early prototype with different cards.

The picture on the Metabank.ru/asic site shows 8 ASIC chips per board, and above that it states they are rated at 3GH/sec each. So I would extrapolate that to mean 8 asics * 3GH/s = 24GH/blade. So you only need 5 blades @ 24 GH each to get 120GH/sec.  So I seriously doubt they will ship a box with around 11 blades for a 120GH product.

They also mention up to 1.6W/GH (not clear at what voltage that is though). So at 120GH, in theory it'd be a max of 192 Watts just for the ASICs alone, not including power required for all the other "doodads" on the PCBs. But should be well under 300W, maybe even less than 250W, but we'll find out I suppose. If the watts per chip is on the low end (0.85W/GH) or aprox 1/2 that, then obviously it'd be closer to 100-125W's.

From our own tests a month ago (see bottom of this blog post: https://bitcentury.io/blog/initial-testing-of-bitfury-asic ) , when we tested above 2.4 GH (last entry at the bottom), the chip temperature hit 80 Celsius and kept rising, and power consumption hit 2.52 Watts/chip but the hashrate was unknown. We didn't wait around to find out the hashing speed because we had limited alpha chips and didn't want to kill any with excess heat (we had no heat sink for these tests); but if we assume 3W per chip for 3GH/s, then with 40 chips (8 chips * 5 boards), we're looking at 120 Watts + power required for all the other PCB components etc. So highly likely under 200W.  This is all educated speculation though ;-)


There is a very high chance this is indeed the Metabank device. I base that guess on the look of the blade PCBs. They look nearly identical to the one they posted on their site:
https://metabank.ru/images/asic/asic_board.jpg

You'll note the latest pictures show a green PCB instead of white, but the huge black/beige capacitors are a dead give away.

As for whether the blades are soldered on the master board or sockets, your guess is as good as mine - I can't quite tell from the pictures. My concern looking at this box is that I don't see any screws for opening it up, so hopefully they don't glue it shut, in case we need to open them to properly secure the blades before shipping. Further, I wonder if those two fans in back of picture #73 are going to be providing sufficient airflow to run these things for prolonged periods at room temperature.

Lastly, I'm still not clear on the PC connection type. What we can see in picture #72 on the bottom right is a Raspberri Pi, and those have both USB and Ethernet connections, but not sure which one(s) the software will support. In Picture#73, I don't see any cables coming out of the Ethernet port, so not sure if this unit was even plugged in or what.

The good news is that if these box dimensions are in milimeters as per the PDF file, then the box is aprox 1/2 the size (for the double hashing unit!) or less of an avalon with twice the hashing power and 1/2 or much less the power consumption. Not sure if they just made 1 box for single and double hashing units, or whether they made a smaller box for the single (120GH) hashing units.

We will evaluate the best way to secure the blades once we have a box in hand, but I am definitely open to suggestions on how to minimize the blades coming lose. I am quite aware of the avalon shipping horror stories, so, I too would like to avoid those!

Thanks for the update Luis. I wasn't aware that there was a 'double' unit available, which I agree this looks like.

A friend with an electronics background said that the silver (tantalum) capacitors are a higher-spec than the black and orange ones. Given the reports that metabank were sourcing components from different suppliers I guess the had to grab what they could. He also thought there would be room in the case for 3 80mm fans, though only 2 are visible in the pictures.

Still way too early to pop champagne corks yet but so far, so good.

Looking at the test data from their previous update, they're getting 22 GH/s per card.  That's 242 GH/s with 11 cards; matches up perfectly with the double unit.  Looks like us single unit guys will luck out.  They'll need to use 6 cards, which is 132 GH/s  8)

I can't imagine they're going to connect to a PC.  As far as I'm aware, the only working mining code for Bitfury chips is in a fork of cgminer, built specifically for the RasPi.  I'm sure they're using that, and thus these units are self contained, and will only require ethernet.

Great work, metabank!

Sheesh, I actually own a Pi and I didn't notice that! So it looks like it will be standalone.

It looks as though some early orders have already been delivered:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3043321#msg3043321 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3043321#msg3043321)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/v93tfala2x9zykf/P1040504.JPG (https://www.dropbox.com/s/v93tfala2x9zykf/P1040504.JPG)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nfhcgazavzcykeu/P1040503.JPG (https://www.dropbox.com/s/nfhcgazavzcykeu/P1040503.JPG)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p0lq2orxjkiths8/P1040502.JPG (https://www.dropbox.com/s/p0lq2orxjkiths8/P1040502.JPG)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8jhmred71ntoftv/miner.png (https://www.dropbox.com/s/8jhmred71ntoftv/miner.png)
http://youtu.be/Cs_jdbISpOo (http://youtu.be/Cs_jdbISpOo)

This was a 240GHash order. Note that there are 10 cards, not 11.

The only downside is that it appears the device as shipped is about 18.5% under the claimed hash rate. This owner was getting 196GHash stable. As well as I can tell from Google Translate there is talk of updating the driver software to improve this.

Thanks for that stripykitteh,

I've just checked my email, nothing in from Metabank.

As for, legkodymov (according to my translator 'oolex') appears to be a Metabank employee or contractor  but we are not 100% clear on this. Oolex explained that the previous guy we were getting forum info from "mu3" was having his questions answered by this "legkodymov". So at minimum legkodymov is  very well connected with Metabank, but we also couldn't find any "hey I'm legkodymov and I work for Metabank" type posts though.  These Russian guys sure like to keep everyone guessing, heh.

At any rate, legkodymov also stated here... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3045506#msg3045506
.... "Let's keep our fingers crossed that everything is going to be alright and in 3 weeks time we'll have everything unloaded (shipped)"

Oolex also analyzed the video, no major clues there, just observations of the color "like a new year spruce tree" (because PCBs are green), and "the case is made of plastic".

I've asked oolex to post some questions as follows. They should be up within the hour or so. Questions will be:

Ok, and now it looks like somebody from Metabank is blogging about their Bitfury products. Finally, some official info:

http://bitfury.metabank.ru/

Very exciting news!

Ok, so after reading the plethora of posts today in the Russian 65nm thread it seems nearly all the questions we had, have already been either asked, mostly answered or sufficiently implied ;-) Here's what we were able to dig up in response to our own questions. Anything in ( ) brackets is my commentary.

When questions are asked about Metabank and legkodymov replies, he always replies with "we" and offers technical info nobody else has, so it may be safe to assume he works for Metabank or is heavily involved with them on the tech side of things.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3041979#msg3041979
"alexxy: 'in the meantime, metabank, as i was told today on phone, yesterday started sending the orders ;)"

then 2 posts down... from user fsb4000:

"1) The first shipping started yesterday, strange that the first buyers didn't spread the good riddance.
2) Expansion options are going to be similar for 120gh/s devices and more powerful ones (double devices). 120gh/s will have slots for 8 boards, but with 5 installed. The double units with 240gh/s devices there slots for 16 boards, but 10 are installed 10. So i'm not that much against double devices anymore. At least, as many extra boards can be installed.
3) power supplies are sized appropriately for the number of boards provided"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3042096#msg3042096
"Sergauskazz: interesting... i paid for my devices in the first several hours, the page wasn't public yet, but i haven't gotten any emails or phone calls...Ok, I now called Timur, unloading of the first devices was confirmed. mine aren't ready yet, apprently, there must be more earlier comrades. waitin'."

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3043321#msg3043321
"hooray (the user who posted the pics): Tonight at 1:11 AM (not a typo) near to metabank's office I got the first 240gh/sec devices (in one case [meaning double]) it happened that the first lucky owners are me and my colleagues. During the meeting we got a feeling that metabank guys are sleeping at the office, assembling the devices. They were very tired, but full of enthusiasm. Respect them for the work that they're doing, and that they aren't feeding the trolls on this forum instead.

After receiving the box, because of some weather-related circumstances, it took us long to reach the installation place and only started it [since this point he speaks of one device] early in the morning, then i fell asleep, that's why i'm writing just now.
At this moment the device is stabily generating 196gh/sec with 0.7% of rejects (chips aren't overclocked). As the guys at Metabank said, the software has to be improved a bit, updates will be published on the website (blog?). Apart from that, the web interface isn't working properly, they also promised to fix it in the upcoming days. (Then he posted pictures and the video)"


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3043424#msg3043424
"DarkSova: What is the temperature of aluminium heat sinks on chips when you tuch them, not overheating?
UserPC: Heat sinks aren't on chips, but on the rear side of the board (This is expected due to QFN48 chip package, heatsinks must go under not on top). Temperature of the chips is easily tolerable by a finger. I don't think it's more than 60 degrees. (So this sounds like the heatsinks are doing the job, but obviously chips aren't hashing at 3GH either.)"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3043618#msg3043618
"integ: Is it possible to sleep nearby the device? (question about fan noise)
userPC: [Yes], normal pc tower makes more noise"


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3043977#msg3043977
"SectorZero: I doubt that just by software fix you can get 240GH from the current 196GH. Chip simply doesn't work on 3gh (this is not necessarily true), and if you take it as 2.7gh [consider its real power] then apparently there wouldn't be enough chips for everyone. maybe the buyers will get extra boards in the future. Otherwise it's not nice.
legkodymov: boards come in standard form without extra tuning. If you work on each board for an hour, you could get 3GH. If you're interested in that kind of a device, it'll be delivered LAST."



So, as per some of the above posts, it looks like Metabank has actually started delivering!, at least in low volume. Now before we all get very excited, note our first machine wasn't purchased until June 2nd, and Metabank started selling several days before that according to this spreadsheet put together by  fsb4000...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmyZBD2EHCEEdG9SdENBV0l4YnNuNklrdDItMTJwdlE#gid=0

... which is not entirely accurate of course, but a good effort none-the-less. You'll note we have 57 devices listed which is accurate, but they were not all ordered on the same day, but rather spread over about 10 days. Also, please note this spreadsheet was put together from forum posts that he was able to find, so in all likelihood there are even more orders not listed. If you do the math, before June 2nd there were at least 113 boxes ordered. So it may still be a while yet before we start getting ours, but I will be checking our email daily now, and will try to call metabank tomorrow to see if we can get any kind of ETA. Failing an ETA, as per legkodymov, he hopes to have all orders delivered over the next 3 weeks, so if they manage to achieve this timeline, this would put us at Sept 20th to receive the last boxes from them.

Again, I expect to be in Moscow well before the 20th (assuming the Visa/customs/consulate gods allow me), and I can tell you I plan to be there past the 20th, so we should be covered.
Cheers,
Luis

Sounds to me like Metabank overestimated the performance of the chips, and thus didn't order enough of them and/or didn't order enough of the right resistors.  *shrugs* Oh well.  I'm glad they chose to ship as-is; better a slightly underperforming device now, than a proper device some undefined time in the future.

Thank you for the update digitalmagus!  My excitement shall continue...

Hi guys,
Just thought I'd drop another update. In case you haven't noticed the page count of the 65nm Russian thread has increased by 100 (!). Sifting through all the trolling has taken many hours. A large portion of it is people bitching about only getting 96-105GH instead of the 120GH, the delivery time and number of units delivered per day (as of yesterday estimated to be somewhere around a total of 29 - not the initial 40 per day they mentioned). First, let me start off an update with an email that came directly from Metabank yesterday and that we've translated without any omissions as we want to be 100% transparent with our customers - you'll know what I mean when you are done reading it. Anything in brackets () are my comments. I've also highlighted key points.

METABANK EMAIL:

In regards to the last section on refunds, we regret to inform that unfortunately, it is too late for us (BitCentury) to extend this offer to our customers. As per our contract, the offer was available only for the first 29 days after purchase. At this point, we've incurred substantial operational costs that as it stands if we're lucky we'll either break even or make a small profit - we too were surprised at the abrupt end of sales by Metabank and had counted on selling many more units. In a way we were lucky we had just broken even on the day it ended - given our operational cost assumptions which thus far appear to be very close to our estimates. Any refunds now, even a small volume, would put us in negative financial territory.

And here's a few other useful posts I was able to gather by skimming through over 100 pages of the Russian 65nm threads....

Tech related posts:
How to edit cgminer.conf through ssh/WinSCP to point to another pool other than ghash.io
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3067979#msg3067979
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3068380#msg3068380

Sept 3rd bullet point summary of past ~100 PAGEs of 65nm Russian thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3069643#msg3069643

NEW Russian tech thread related to configuring and optimizing Metabank units. This one will hopefuly have way less spam and more useful content. We'll definitely be keeping an eye on it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=287147.0

I've stopped reading (for the time being) the main 65nm Russian thread after page 310 (Already at 330). If anybody else has other useful info they extracted, by all means share it.

Cheers,
Luis

Thank you for the update, digitalmagus.  I'm fine with the no-refund policy; expected no different.  I'm still excited the get the units.

As in, they're shipping 29 units per day so far?  That's not bad at all.  Any estimate, based on that figure, of when our units might be ready for pick-up?

By the way, there has been a few technical updates on their blog here (http://bitfury.metabank.ru/).  Nothing significant from what I saw.

Hi fpgaminer,
You're welcome. No, I had read 2 estimates. One That they had shipped a total of 5 units which I think possibly was just the number of people that came forward on the thread talking about their units, and then a few pages later, somebody posted that according to their estimates a total of 29 have shipped (over the period of several days - so not 40 units a day as Metabank had initially estimated).

The last thing I read yesterday was that one guy believed (not sure where he is getting his info) that they have now shipped aprox 10% of all units, although I have no way of knowing if that's accurate or not.  (sorry I lost URL)

Another guy just yesterday...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3095676#msg3095676

...Thinks that perhaps this week they finished May 31st orders. Since our first order is from June 2nd, this doesn't sound promising unless they quickly ramp up production volumes, which they say they are doing.

I don't think it's public knowledge exactly how many  all units add up to, but if the public spreadsheet is any indication, there's at least 419. So with the more optimistic 10% estimate, that's 41 units shipped would still put us well below our initial order (aprox #113 best case scenario); however, there's also rumblings in the forum now that metabank may be delivering at least some of the units out of order, which is concerning (look at green highlighted sections of google docs spreadsheet I posted before), especially since we still haven't gotten any communication from them to come pick up any of our units. fsb4000 also just wrote yesterday "Well finally the first person who received the device and that does not look like a friend MetaBank. This gives hope that soon I'll call"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3095766#msg3095766

I'm going to try to arrange for my translator to make another call early next week, and see if we can get some realistic ETAs, even though Metabank has asked people not to call - but what else can they do if they don't offer info up front!? Lastly, sometime this coming week, I will be away on my way to Moscow. My visa has officially been approved, so now just waiting for the courier gods to send me my passport back before I have to leave.

Have a great weekend everyone,
Luis

Ok found the source of the "10% of all units shipped so far" (As of yesterday). It's directly from Metabank, so that's good.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183368.msg3096944#msg3096944

Cheers
Luis

Hi guys,
We managed to get another call into Metabank yesterday after many hours of re-dialing due to busy signals.  They didn't want to talk very long due to the call volume, but here's the latest updates we managed to get from them:

1. By default Metabank is assembling double hashing units. This is to save on assembly time, but obviously cost (to them). If you've ordered a single unit from us (BitCentury) we'll obviously need to get them to provide an individual unit. If for example you ordered multiple units but for a total of an odd number (i.e. 3), expect to receive a double hashing unit + a single unit.  Whether this is good news or bad news, depends on one's perspective I suppose. If you have a major objection to getting double units, please email me ASAP (luis@bitcentury.io) so I can take note and see what I can do about it, but given we're a proxy service, I make no promises - we get, what we get. In short their explanation/justification was that: " We sold GigaHashes, not boxes. So, so long as we deliver the gigahashes sold, it's not our problem if it all fits in 1 box or 3".

2. All units will be tested and assembled by Metabank prior to handing  over to BitCentury. This is contrary to what a few select customers were reporting earlier in the 65nm Russian thread, where they picked up all the pieces individually, then got home and realized something didn't work or fit together properly.  On this note, we will still test the units ourselves prior to shipping to you - just in case!

3. On that note, if we do encounter faulty parts, Metabank says they will offer replacements, so this should be relatively easy for us to do, given we will be doing the testing in Moscow.

4. The software, contrary to some suggestions in the 65nm Russian thread (one guy reported having to reboot every 2 days), is not buggy, but expect updates for "optimization" - whatever that means.

5. When we asked for ETA of when we can start picking up devices, the guy on the phone said he didn't have the list in front of him, but he said assembly/testing is rapidly ramping up this week and they are still targeting to deliver everything by 15th. This is somewhat noticeable in the Russian thread, as more and more people are claiming they received their units, but actual official numbers are not available it seems. As of the time of this posting, we still have no email from Metabank requesting we come pick up the units.

That's it for now.
Cheers,
Luis

Keep them updates comin'!  It helps distract me from watching the Oculus shipping thread(s)...

No problems here.  Heck, you can round up my order if you're lazy ;)

Thanks for the update; it sounds like an interesting time for all involved.

Not taking a shot at you Luis, and while I actually think compared to other vendors Metabank has done better than average so far I'm nevertheless intrigued that on one hand Metabank are using the justification that they sold GHashes, not boxes, to ship fewer physical units, but at the same time they are apparently underdelivering on the GHashes they promised.

Those of us like me who only ordered 1 x 120 GHash unit will be hoping that we're not unfairly punished with late delivery because we didn't order 2 or more units. I know, nothing you can do about it.

I am sure you will have enough stories to write a book by the time this is all done and dusted!

Hi guys,
So we made yet another call tonight, as the guy rushed us off yesterday. Here's some additional info:

1. They (Metabank) are having a meeting tonight as other people and other group buys also ordered multiple individual units, so they will have to deal with individual units one way or another. Right now, they are preparing most of the units as either doubles or even triples, but the reality is they have already shipped individual units, as many of the first units were individual units. I have a feeling this has more to do with their costs and time/effort to have to assemble & test more units, than if they combined many of them - but that's just my speculation.

2. When we asked for an ETA, the guy really would not commit to any date at all. All he said is that we (Metabank) really have to stick to the order sequence and if we have any problems and have delays we can not have people show up because we told them to come on X date based on an estimate. When we have units ready, we call the people in the sequence to come pick up the units that have been assembled and tested.

3. We asked if they were still targeting the 15th of Sept to have all units assembled, tested and delivered. He said, yes that is still their target date, but this is only an estimate and goal and cannot be guaranteed in any way. Also given they are already about 1 week late on their "40 boxes per day" initial target, I seriously question all units shipped by the 15th, but we'll certainly be ready if that's the case. The 15th is only a few days away now, so it's not like they are saying "two weeks" ;-)

We also confirmed a bunch of other details, like pickup address, procedures, time of day they are open etc not so much relevant to our customers.

As far as the units not being 120 GH, we totally hear you guys on that, but there isn't a whole lot we can do about that, believe me, at least 75 pages (!) out of the 350+ pages of the Russian 65nm thread are people complaining they didn't get the 120 GH and only 96-105 or so. Hopefully like the avalons and BFL units at some point somebody will figure out how to overclock them and share with everyone.

Regards,
Luis

I would strongly recommend not to rely neither on Sep 15 nor on overclocking.

It seems that Metabank will be done with shipping not earlier than the end of September (or even later).  This is a total BS about 40 units per day. Or there are some hidden customers noone knows about. The whole Metabank preorder was about 400 pcs of single units. Ten days to ship at specified rate. Why does it take longer then?

As for overclocking - Metabank runs its chips at 2.5-2.7 Gh/s. It means that overclocking to 3 Gh/s will raise power consumption might be one and a half or even two times. Besides, each device is "missing" an additional extension card which would drive device up to 120 Gh/s at 2.5Gh/s chip speed and regular power consumption. E.g. Metabank's devices don't really have any hoarded resources to rely on.

I've personally made a refund. I recommend that you reestimate profits from October shipped units - will they cover network hashrate growth?  I don't really think so.

The former Metabank's customer.

Пpивeт из Mocквы!   ;)

- Today we went to the Metabank offices and met with Timur (owner) , Anatoly (aka. legkodymov - main hardware engineer) and Vasily.
- When we asked when our units would be ready for pickup they explained not until late Thursday but more likely Friday, the 20th of Sept, as per one of their original posts.
- I asked then, why they kept saying 15th on the phone, and what they meant was they would receive all the PCBs and various other components by the 15th ready for shipping. So obviously a miscommunication/lost-in-translation there somewhere. My apologies for this.
- We requested to receive as many units early as we could (before the 20th), but they agreed only on the basis if we would assemble them ourselves.
- We agreed to this, as their main obstacle to deliver all units by 20th (assembled) is the man-power required to do so.
- By late Monday or Tuesday morning, we will have a fully functional "sample" Metabank box, which we will use as the blueprint to assemble all the other boxes.
- To be clear, assembly does not mean soldering components - I made sure we were clear on that. We will just receive motherboards, hashing units with heat sinks already attached, power supplies, raspberry pi's  and the exterior cases as well as all necessary cables and screws.
- Between Tuesday and Friday we are expecting to receive many of these components, hopefully all of them; however exactly how many we will receive on what day will be further discussed when we meet with Metabank again first thing next week. They needed more time to review their inventory; however in theory if they get all components by 15th, this should not be a problem - but I will provide another update after our next meeting.
- They also confirmed that if we found any components that didn't work, we could just come back and exchange it. They are keeping spares for this purpose.
- In regards to the issue with the single units, they explained they would be able to give us some (less than 20). This should cover all the customers that ordered only 1 unit, but is not enough for those that bought multiple units through us for their own group buys.
- We really pushed to get more single units, but they said that their contract with the external box manufacturer has ended and he is not going to make more.
- I conceited that, ok, we (Bitcentury) will use some of the external boxes from the units we bought for ourselves and give those to our customers, but we still need more single motherboards.
- They explained that, this too could be problematic because their order of PCBs was completed a long time ago, and they are almost all delivered already. To make a new order would take many more weeks, not to mention cost. They said, possibly some time in October, perhaps they could do it.
- So I requested for them to just take some of the double or triple units (which have 2 motherboards) and split them into single units.
- They said it's not that simple because overall there are 2 types of motherboards. I'll call them type A and B. Type A is used for the single devices and has 8 slots for hashing boards and an onboard connector for the Raspberry pi. Type B has also 8 slots, although only 7 may be used for hashing boards, and it has no connection for the raspberry pi easily accessible.
- To build a double or triple unit, you need a little small IDE-like cable (excuse my ignorance, I will post pictures tomorrow) that interconnects motherboards type A and B together.
- A single unit is filled with 5 hash boards on type A motherboard, a double with 10 (using TypeA+B motherboard), and a triple has a total of 15 hashing boards (8+7).
- They mentioned that one possible solution is if we split a double into a single, the Type A will accept raspberry Pi, but to do the same for the Type B requires some minor soldering and a small component. I will post some pictures tomorrow to explain this more clearly, and so after the pictures, feel free to also ask any technical questions you may have so I can write them down and ask them for when we meet Metabank again first thing next week.

Thanks everyone for your patience and especially your civility, considering all of what goes on around these threads :)
Have a great weekend,
Luis

Great news to hear!  I hope you have time to also enjoy the trip; I'll bet Moscow is very beautiful place.

Thank you for taking the time to write out these detailed updates.

Hi guys,
As promised here's some pictures of the Metabank box we saw when we met them on Friday. We only had about 2 minutes to look at the box, so didn't go into many technical details, but picture number 2 explains a few specifics. I forgot to mention two details yesterday: 1) the plastic box indeed has its various walls glued together and the plastic may not survive international shipping if the box is dropped. The plastic is thin and I can bend it with my fingers a bit. We will of course do our best to pack it well. In image #2 you can see all the silver colored capacitors. Not all hashing units are like this, as seen in previous pictures, Metabank has confirmed that we may get random hashing cards with the bigger capacitors mixed with the silver ones.

Image 1 - Overview of box (excuse my fuzzy picture). I believe this is what a double unit would look like with 10 hashing cards.
https://i.imgur.com/XIm0HES.jpg

Image 2 - Main picture explaining details. Behold my awesome Photoshop skills!
https://i.imgur.com/rTdtySW.jpg

Image 3 - showing power connectors of Motherboard Type A and B, as well as Raspberri Pi IDE-like connection.
https://i.imgur.com/gRxe7ir.jpg

Image 4 - Zoom in of inter connection of motherboard Type A and B
https://i.imgur.com/GA4QNoN.jpg

Image 5 - Picture of the Metabank building. There are many business' in there, and in fact Metabank isn't even a business recognized by the reception desk, they are registered under a different name. You can make out the word "bank" in the blue/white Cyrillic sign outside, but that's actually for a different bank inside the building.
https://i.imgur.com/vI084y3.jpg

Image 6- Proof that capitalism thrives in Moscow  ;D Although the guy on the left doesn't exactly look like he's "Lovin' It"
https://i.imgur.com/MH5gdWz.jpg

Thanks for the pictures Luis!

May I ask what the PCBs are powered by? Looks like Type A motherboard by the ATX and P4 4-pin and Type B by a 6-pin PCI-e? What about the Pi?

Also do you an an idea on the packaging yet? To protect the motherboards and modules you should probably put each into anti-static bags and carefully bubble wrapped possibly spaced with airbags or more bubble wrap and all fit into the case. Any remaining space in the case filled with more bubble wrap to prevent anything moving about.

Good questions. Like I said, we only got a couple of quick minutes to look at the box, so after Monday/early Tuesday, once we have one in hand, I can confirm these and other details.


We have sourced some types of packing material such as bubble wrap, certain sizes of boxes and we are going to confirm on airbags as soon as possible. Nearly all the packing companies are closed on weekends. We still have some details to finalize which are specific to the size of the various components we are packing. Thus we can only provide more information late next week after we get the sample box in hand and can take precise measurements and then confirm packing material with packing companies. I will provide details and pictures as soon as I am able.

Cheers.
Luis

Hi guys,

Here's the latest update:

- We went to Metabank late yesterday evening to pick up our sample unit (a single).
- After 1 hour wait in the reception, legkodymov came down with our unit.
- We opened it up, 1 motherboard type A , 5 hashing cards, 1 raspberry pi, 1 power cable, and (first) surprise... a 230V-only power supply (no 110V/120V switch on it).
- Over the course of an hour we waited there, another 7 or 8 people showed up, and we saw at least 4 or 5 other units go out the door. So they are definitely starting to ship.
- I asked legkodymov how many units worth of components I could pick up tomorrow (Tuesday) and he said, we can't pick anything up until the 20th (surprise #2) and they can only ship triple units to us (surprise#3), and that any spare parts would only be available after the next weekend or probably october (surprise#4) - some of these are obviously a deal breakers.
- Obviously this is not what we had agreed to on Friday, and so I immediately asked to speak to Timur. He wandered off, and never came back.
- After waiting a long while, we tried to call Timur directly (we have his cell), and nothing, no response.
- Another Metabank employee was also there helping to deliver units and get signatures of confirmation from customers that they received units. When I asked him where was Timur, he said he did not come in today and that at this hour (around 9Pm or so) he is sleeping as he was supposedly programming all day and working long hours. I also learned that he only comes into the office maybe twice a week, which they neglected to tell us before, but that he expected him to be at the office tomorrow (Tues).
- Once we got to our place, I immediately tried to power up the box and (surprise #5), the box was DOA. The power supply would not even power on.
- Thinking it was a short with one of the cards, I disconnected one at a time from the motherboard, then after that still didnt work, the fans, then tried different wall outlets, power cables etc. Needless to say after 1 hour of troubleshooting, I gave up and called Metabank.
- Surprisingly, I got a call back from legkodymov. I asked him why he wandered off and didn't tell me TImur was not even in the office that day, he appologised and that he misunderstood what I had said. In regards to the DOA unit, he was surprised it didn't work as he explained they had just finished testing it. He requested I take a picture of the unit, which I've done, and am now waiting for his reply (after 11AM Moscow time).
- We have also in the mean time found a store with anti-static bags, and are going to buy a few this morning to confirm they fit properly.

All in all not a great experience (understatement), most troubling was the change of direction in what they said from Friday; however, I am going to talk to them again ASAP, specifically Timur if I can to sort this out, as obviously this is not a good situation for any of us.

Some other things we learned:
- Weight of a single unit is 4.61 Kg (without packing material).
- Width = 45cm by 44.5 cm length and 10 cm height - this is the same as was posted a couple weeks back in the PDF file provided by Metabank in this thread.
- How the raspberry Pi is powered isn't confirmed since the box was DOA, but only the IDE cable was provided, so I am assuming it is through that.
- All the hashing cards are very loose in the box, any tilting of the box and you can hear things drag around, especially the raspberry Pi.
- The hashing cards don't have to be installed in sequence. There can be gaps in between. Below in pics you can see how metabank delivered it to us. They set it up so each card was in front of a fan.
- Another miner at Metabank reception mentioned to us that the triple units come with more powerful fans. Not sure on the power supply. They said ours was 500W, which is way overkill for a single, but there was no easy way to verify this as there was no sticker indicating this. We didn't remove the power supply out to see if there were stickers on the bottom side.
- Here's 3 additional pictures we took of our DOA sample box:

1. Top View: https://i.imgur.com/7tJTo6J.jpg

2. Raspberry Pi & power view: https://i.imgur.com/AXuyuBF.jpg
- Note the carrugated cardboard under the motherboard. The motherboard is not screwed down either, but doesn't move too much due to the weight of the hashing cards unless you tilt the box.
-  Legkodymov at one point explained that if anyone unplugs the raspberry Pi IDE cable and puts it back backwards (observe the red line on one side of the cable), it *will* kill the Raspberry Pi and possibly kill the motherboard. So users beware!

3. Top view of hash cards: https://i.imgur.com/GLCfWr1.jpg
- Note that on the flip side of the PCB, just under each capacitor, the heat sink for that card has been drilled or sanded down forming 3 concave grooves. In this picture it is very evident on the left most card, but this has been done to every heat sink on each card. I imagine this has been manually done to prevent some kind of a short with a connector on the PCB. Stuff like (drilling/sanding holes, not to mention cutting out pieces of cardboard to put under the motherboard) is probably adding to the labour required to prepare each unit. Also note that the cards sitting right beside each other have the heat sinks touch the capacitors. This happens at the top (seen in the picture), but also to the capacitors below the heatsink (not visible in picture). I dont imagine this is a problem unless the heatsink gets excessively hot.

Overall, this definitely looks like something that came out of a workshop, rather than any kind of professional fabrication.

Regards,
Luis

Have I mentioned that these frequent updates are great?

By the way, have you seen http://bitfury.metabank.ru/?p=37 (http://bitfury.metabank.ru/?p=37)?  Shows a couple of points to check for shorts, assuming you have a multimeter handy.

I don't care if it looks like a purple dinosaur, as long as it hashes when it gets here :P

Units will have to be disassembled before shipping or we risk getting them destroyed and in small pieces :(

spiccioli

So yeah the Pi is powered by the IDE cable and as you pointed out plugging that IDE cable in incorrectly will kill the Pi. The Pi is powered by 5v and GRND wires on the IDE cable.

Bad news all around really isn't it :-X Some of us wont have problems with the PSU but others may have to buy a PSU if you're sending to anyone in the US or other 120v countries. Delays on triple units and more delays for double and single units.

Hopefully there is some good news from Timur. Sounds like they're extremely busy.

Ok, I just called Timur to see if he was in the office. He is out in meetings with his suppliers, but he has acknowledged the unit that is not working and requested I bring it in. Very likely it is a short somewhere. More importantly, he stated that he is able to get enough single units for us from his supplier(s) and will try to deliver as many as possible tomorrow and Thursday.

Given this is a complete 180 from what I got from their lead engineer just a few hours ago, at this point I'll believe them when I see them delivering all the units. Until then, just need to stay on top of the situation. Hopefully, I will manage to see Timur later tonight and confirm things when I drop off the unit that is not working. We now have several of their cell phones and they haven't ignored calls, so that's something.

Thanks everyone for your patience and sorry for the ongoing drama.
Luis

@fpgaminer, I don't have a multimeter with me unfortunately. What I did learn from the lead engineer is that one of the things that causes the power supply not to start is if there is no hashing unit seated in the very first slot - that is the slot closest to the power supply on Motherboard Type A. If this happens, you have to wait at least 15 minutes or so for the power supply to clear the short (excuse the non-technical terms), and then try again with a card seated in the first slot. I've tried this and just heard a little "poof" sound from the power supply, whereas before just turning it on and off with different slot configurations didn't make any sound, but having said that I haven't been able to replicate the "poof" either. LOL@Purple dinasaur. The case actually looks nice from a distance.

@trinsic - You are correct, units shipped to North America would require a power supply swap out for 120V; however, please don't rush to buy one just yet, I will try to remember to double check this detail, that it is indeed only 230V power supply, with metabank tonight. I can confirm that I don't see any voltage button switch on the power supply and it only says 230V on a sticker, so it is highly likely it does not support 120V. I'm hesitant to remove the power supply and look under it or even inside. The entire system appears quite finiky (sp?) so I'd rather not touch it too much. And yes, we will definitely be individually wrapping each card, likely with bubble wrap after they are inside anti-static bags.

Good news folks,

I met with Timur and Legkodymov face to face today at Metabank. Long story short, Metabank will start delivering large portions of our batches starting late tomorrow, and hopefully by Saturday or Sunday we will have received all units. This also means that shipping is likely to start by Friday at the latest. The first few units will take a lot more time, until we get the packing process assembly line well established.  I will be sure to provide updates on which order #'s have shipped, and will be emailing tracking numbers etc. The other good news is that Timur confirmed that they will provide sufficient single units to cover all individuals that ordered only 1 unit, as well as 1 or 2 individuals that did group buys through us that also required some single units. For others, we will be shipping double or triple units depending on how many were ordered.  Timur said he would be there tomorrow for the start of the deliveries, but also I made sure that we were all on the same page as far as what would be delivered to us tomorrow so that no more flip/flops (pardon the FPGA pun) of information occurred.

Further to this Legkodymov  also started talking about that they are working on a way to do away with the motherboards and just interconnect the hashing units with IDE-like cables via various board pin-outs, and that a design should eventually be published. The goal of this is to increase the physical space between hashing cards such that double fans can be mounted on every heat sink to better cool the chips and overclock them closer to 3GH/s. Your units won't ship like this, this is just a work in progress that you may choose to implement yourself down the road once the design is published, so keep an eye out for that.

As to failure rates of equipment. The explained that they test all gear for a few hours before handing it over to their customers such as ourselves. In their experience they have aprox a 10% failure rate which we, the customers, should never see.  From all the units they have shipped out so far (not sure the number, but easily several dozen by now), only 3 hardware problems have occurred (including mine, which perhaps I triggered myself). I asked what most of the 10% of the failure rates were, and they said it was PCBs or something gone wrong in the assembly process. The bitfury ASICs themselves appear to be quite reliable, and no problems with power supplies, fans or raspberry pi's (which BTW have a 4GB SD card). If we do encounter any faulty parts during our testing process, Timur has confirmed that we will be given priority to have hardware either fixed or swapped out such that everything is dealt with before I have to leave Moscow.

In regards to the power supply voltage, even they weren't 100% sure if they were dual voltage or not as nearly all their customers are from Russia and they have no need for 110V, but they believe highly likely they are not dual voltage and only 230V. So customers in the USA, unless you have specifically modified your power panels to support 230V outlets (not something that is ever done by default), do NOT plug in and use the shipped power supplies as it may cause major problems or even be dangerous, you will have to source your own 110V power supplies that should be readily available at most computer retail or online stores. Estimated power wattage use at the current un-overclocked chips for a single unit is believed to be around 130 Watts, with spikes up to 165W. This is second hand information, and unfortunately I don't have my KillaWatt here to inform you ahead of time, but I hope as a community we can share some info with each other.

The sample box will be swapped out tomorrow, I decided not to bring it in today for a few reasons.

That's it for now folks, look for another update after we collect a bunch of units less than 24 hours from this post.

Cheers :)
Luis

Oh and PS., we also did a stop over at DHL to confirm a few details, and guess what... "In Soviet Russia..."  - http://tinyurl.com/insovietrussiahaha (http://tinyurl.com/insovietrussiahaha) - ... The customs people work for DHL ;-)  No conflict of interest there huh?! But hey, this should really work to our advantage and hopeful minimize any outbound issues. We actually showed the DHL lady the box and the insides, and she said "hand made computers" should be no problem to ship.

Great work, Luis.

That is correct Luis. Customs has an office within DHL offices too here in my country (EU) and each clearance agent from DHL has his own customs official were they work very close.
Sorry to intrude, I do not belong in this GB but you are doing excellant job, awesome!

I like this Timur guy.  Give him a high five for me!

Feel free to leave the PSU out of my order, to save on shipping and customs issues.

Heck, I'll record a short documentary.  Some nice footage of the miner in its natural habitat, hunting wild Bitcoins amongst the trees.

Thanks fpgaminer,
Yes, the shipping costs are like 30% more than we anticipated. Moscow ain't cheap. If anybody else doesn't need the power supplies, we'd really appreciate it if you could let us know that you don't need them, as they are at least 1/4th to 1/3rd the weight of each box and significantly impact our cost.

Speaking of power supplies, here's some pics from the sample box we got that may help people make decisions. Keep in mind this is for the single (120GH potential) box. Again, I'm told power usage peaks at 165W (probably during power on), so 500W power supply seems like overkill to me. I will try to ask metabank tonight why they are shipping with 500W.  Note that if you intend on overclocking the hashboards eventually, then 500W may not in fact be overkill, as power draw goes up substantially with even minor GH/s gains.

Note the "230V only" to the left of "Attention" section.

https://i.imgur.com/UEWuoUM.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Z35LV5V.jpg?1
https://i.imgur.com/OFQ1p4S.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/0f5xgwA.jpg

Hi guys,
Awesome news! We picked up ALL units late this evening, or should I say morning. It's 3:30 AM Thu Moscow time,

Tomorrow we expect delivery of all our packing gear by mid afternoon. So after that we can start packing the first few units and start testing the next set. If all goes according to plan we might be able to ship the first units Friday morning Moscow time. If not, then Saturday morning. So the last piece of the puzzle for us to start shipping is all the packing gear. We've ordered cardboard boxes, anti-static bags, foam support bags for the corner of the units and massive rolls of bubble wrap.

More details to come as I have time, but the priority right now is acquiring that packing material.

Also, I've gotten emails and PM's from various customers which I'm sorry I havent been able to reply to yet, but will do so very soon. Thank you to all who email/pm'ed about the power supplies.

That's it for now, I need to get some sleep.

Luis

Woohoo!

You got all 57?? Did you updated the list?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AmyZBD2EHCEEdG9SdENBV0l4YnNuNklrdDItMTJwdlE

No we did not update the list, that is somebody else's list and it's not 57 physical units due to a few doubles and twice as many triples. But logically, yes, 57.

We are starting to setup some units for testing. The first 4 units are now testing for the first 3 orders. They are each mining on Eligius pointing to the customer's respective bitcoin address. If you are in the first 3 orders, this is how you'd check your shares, hash speed etc.

http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1PCP6C9KuGgHzT9tF1UXYgHXXAmzFxkimA <--- put in YOUR wallet address from the contract you signed.

I think we will test each unit a minimum of 2 hours, but the total time for each unit after that will be pretty random. It will depend on how fast we work after we get packing gear, when we go to sleep, get breaks, etc. In some cases they will test for many hours overnight.

Our goal is to get through all units tested as fast as possible, because if anything is obviously wrong, we need to deal with it ASAP. We already found one unit that is 50/50 about powering on, so we are not shipping that single unit.

Luis

Man this is moving fast!  Great work, BitCentury!

Any estimates on when units will start shipping out?

Oh, thank you.  Guess I got too excited and didn't read the whole thing.   :P

Great news for all, cool to see Timur pull through and to get all the ordered units at once!

I'm batch 3 so I'm probably a few days away from seeing any testing. Won't stop me from checking at every available wifi hotspot through Japan :D

I have a Bitcentury order (Batch 1 order 6) can you give any info on when it will ship? Will you email out tracking nr? (US shipping. Need NO power supply)

Hi guys,
Here's the current status as of 8:30PM Moscow time 19th Sept.

* We received all packing material! However, we have yet to begin packing aything, but the night is young and we have caffeine
* Units up to order #7/23 (re: your contract), have either been tested or are being tested right now.
* Testing process is getting more optimized now
* I've started working on some basic documentation so you'll know what to do when you receive your units. I intend to put at least some basic instructions on paper for the German customers in German (google translated) to help with customs.
* The packing process is going to be time consuming. We are making our own boxes from other boxes as we couldnt find boxes that would fit perfectly (after calling and checking out 40 different companies!). So lots of exacto knife and duct tape action involved, but overall I'm happy with the solution we came up with. I will try to take some pics tomorrow of what they will look like packed.
* So as of right now still targeting Friday morning delivery of at least a couple of units, but we'll see. We're all a bit sleepless over here :)
* I will try to finally get to most people's correspondence after this post. Thanks for your patience.


Lastly, just in case everyone wasn't drooling enough, just thought I'd share some pics taken just a few mins ago.

1. Raspberry Pi connected to a triple unit
https://i.imgur.com/i3lFgay.jpg

2 Raspberry Pi Ethernet connection through last slit in front of box. There is no hole in box for raspberry pi, so this is the best way to access it from network.
https://i.imgur.com/OY1SYoP.jpg

3. 750 Watt power supply of triple unit.  Singles & Doubles come with 500W power supplies.
https://i.imgur.com/kg4S83h.jpg

4. Double unit hashing away.
https://i.imgur.com/0S0vks7.jpg

5. Top view of triple unit
https://i.imgur.com/aR50rEz.jpg

6. Showing motherboard type A & B interconnection cable.
https://i.imgur.com/sLIlphu.jpg

7. Side view of triple unit. The white stuff at the edges of the heat sink is excess thermal paste that can be wiped off with a dry cloth if you really want to.
https://i.imgur.com/MRmBBbT.jpg


8. Top view of stacked units. The boxes are actually strong enough to stack them at least 10 high; however, I would not recommend it! We are in a hurry and don't have proper racks and shelves, so we are stacking a few. If you do this even temporarily, please make sure the power supply "flower" holes (same as drawn inside bitfury ASIC) are NOT covered, so air can ventilate. "S7", "D2", "T3" etc pencil markings just means Single#7, Double#2, Triple#3.
https://i.imgur.com/0i9kLIQ.jpg

9. Aren't they beautiful? :-D
https://i.imgur.com/sE4sS2v.jpg

10. Sad and idle Bitfury ASIC mining machines, orphaned and looking for a good home ;-)  To be tested next.
https://i.imgur.com/5RVdVBr.jpg

Hi acayne,
I can't comment on this publicly, but we will follow DHL's advice we got earlier this week in order to ensure that customs clearance is as successful as possible. Sorry I have to be so ambiguous.

Timur not only pulled through, he went way above and beyond my expectations when he actually personally delivered all the units to us (past midnight, no less)! These guys are all working around the clock... for weeks.  I also got to visit Metabank's workshop where they assemble all the units. Let me tell you, they have a good sized team working on these units, and have lots in stock to continue to deliver for a while.


I told that to my co-worker here helping with testing, I think he feels pretty special now ;-)

I am hoping to ship all units ASAP, meaning a few short days here. Yes, we will definitely email out tracking numbers! Thanks for the info on your order re: power supply, much appreciated.

Luis

I have a piece of the swede75 machine please handle it with care

Kid gloves, furry kid gloves :)

I hope Sealed air instapak "gloves" will do ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K8Q1uLKI7U

Totally bad-ass! Thank you for taking care of our little babies :)

Awesome.  It looks like mine's in testing now.

You can ship mine without the power supply also.  Maybe you can sell the power supplies back to Metabank.

Are you shipping them with the hashing modules connected to the backplanes so that they're ready to mine?  It doesn't look like there is much physical support holding them in place.

I would prefer to see the modules individually ESD-bagged and bubble-wrapped and shipped each surrounded by some kind of cushion (peanuts, foam, paper, etc.)

Peanuts are for peasants, I want mine packed in Cashews!

We will be removing each card from its slot, putting it inside an antistatic bag, bubble wrapping it, laying it horizontally inside the box and taped down if required (likely for singles and doubles). Then the box itself will be bubble wrapped, and surrounded by instapak foam, inside a triple carrugated cardboard box, with an extra lid on the top and the bottom. Then more duct tape. One can never have too much duct tape :)
Luis

PS. Time permitting, I will try to make an unwrapping instruction video, so you will know how to get mining within 15 mins or so. Failing that, I will provide text instructions and answer questions here.

That sounds pretty good.  If you can fill any large voids in the inner box (and outer) with some kind of packing material, that would be even better.

@Bogart, I sent you a pm. Please reply when you get a chance. Thanks.
Luis

There is a problem with the metabank miners. Specifically the rPI runs out of memory after awhile when running cgminer. I have created a watchdog script to monitor if cgminer is running or not and to reboot the rPI if cgminer dies or is not running.

Login to rPI via SSH

type "sudo su -" to gain root access.

type "nano cgminer-cron.sh"

Insert the following code:

Save the file and exit (ctrl + x)

type "chmod +rx cgminer-cron.sh" to make the file executable.

type "export EDITOR=nano ; crontab -e" to edit the crontab scheduler.

Insert the following code at the bottom of the file:

Save the file and exit (ctrl + x)

.....

Additionally.. Modifying the server / pool information from the web panel does not save it on disk. In order for your configuration to survive a reboot you will need to modify the cgminer.conf file on disk.

To modify the cgminer.conf file on disk type (as root) "nano /home/pi/.cgminer/cgminer.conf" and edit the cgminer.conf to your liking.

Save the file and exit (ctrl + x)

Hi guys,
When I spoke with legkodymov on Wednesday face to face, he explained that he is working with Lukr-Jr to have a BFGminer version for metabank units in the near future as there's several bugs with the existing cgminer as per above. Luke-Jr has some early beta's, but I'll let him speak about his own software. In short, it sounded like it would be more reliable. Also Metabank said there will not be a second batch of units; however, they will be making more units for themselves and thus will be improving their products and software and my understanding is they will release most of that info.

Status update:
1. By the end of today, all customer units will have been tested.
2. We had one of the first singles that appeared to have random booting issues, but it may have just been a particular plug on one of our powerbars. We will re-test this unit more thoroughly. We also found 2 triple units that had sub-par hashing rates, around 200Gh-250Gh. We will analyze these in more detail after all remaining units get tested. Our gut feeling is a few poorly performing hashcards in each of the triple units. If we can identify these, then maybe we'll just swap some around to at least get 1 unit upwards of 300GH, and then take the other back to Metabank as soon as we get a chance.
3. We have packed 1 unit for shipping so far, and plan to still ship 2 units later today.
4. After today our shipping volume should ramp up significantly each day, as that will be our primary focus. Until now, our #1 priority was unit testing.

And now for packing pics... This was our first attempt...

I am almost confident we could drop this thing down a small flight of stairs and the unit would still hash afterwards, but don't worry, we don't plan to do this level of unit testing ;-)

https://i.imgur.com/5yhIsDw.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/BSlmcc2.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/FM3w2yb.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/c7KR8mm.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/2pGLcK5.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/FbfqxhD.jpg

Well done guys.

The postcard is a nice touch.  :)

Some other info I got on Wednesday from Metabank, that I havent had a chance to pass on yet.

1. The Metabank web interface hashrate display for cgminer is not reliable for accuracy. It's better you rely on your pool's hashrate, or run cgminer from the raspberry pi's shell via ssh.
2. One nice thing about the web interface is that you can easily change pools with it.
3. Next version of the web interface will display performance per hash card. No ETA at this time. Metabank is a tad busy getting all units out the door.
4. There is a temperature sensor on each card. There are 2 LED's on each hash card. One green and one red. Either can blink or go into solid state. Right now, if the red LED goes on (except during boot procedure), it may mean that card's temperature is too high. One of the metabank guys actually touched the sensor while the unit was on (not that I'd recommend doing that), and the heat discharged to his finger, and then the red light went away. Obviously this doesnt change the temperature or solve any overheating problems.
5. FANs:. The Single and Double units have 3x 3000 RPM fans. The Triple has 3x 4000 RPM fans.
6. Power Usage: The Singles will use aprox 160Watts, doubles ~350W and triples ~500W.  This is all at default hashing speeds out of the box, and at 230volts. Expect a bit less efficiency at 120V for North American customers (i.e. more watts will be used).  So this should help you buy a power supply. I'd like for some of the more electrical experts chime in, but what I heard is that if a device needs, say, 80 watts of power, the absolute minimum power supply size should be 100W. So the basic rule is never exceed 80% of the rating of the power supply. That said, different vendors will have different efficiency ratings, and to be safe, you may want to have it at even much less than 80%, although some may allow for higher safely. Also expect about a 5% variance of power usage upwards during bootup procedure as compared to normal operation.

There's an entire science to optimizing energy efficiency, and so I'm not going to pretend to know what I'm talking about here, so please speak up if you understand these sorts of details and can help your fellow miner :)

7. When you connect your units to your LAN's, the raspberry pi will acquire an IP via DHCP. You can find out your unit's IP by either by doing a subnet ICMP sweep (google angry ip scanner), or by connecting to your LAN router and checking the ARP table. Some routers may actually identify the unit as raspberry pi as my asus here does.

8. After you get the IP, simply http to it, or ssh to it.  In either case, ID=pi PW=raspberry

9. You can view cgminer logs via web interface or by command line: tail -f /var/log/cgminer.log

10. You can stop or start cgminer as follows: (via SSH only)
sudo service cgminer stop
sudo service cgminer start

I've noticed a few times during testing that when we first power on the units, lights on all cards remain solid green indefinitely. We've learned this is because cgminer didn't start properly for some reason. You can either reboot the unit (takes about 1 minute or less), or ssh in and restart cgminer.

Thanks for all the hard work, BitCentury crew! 

/me crosses fingers.

Great progress guys! I'm looking forward to mine (pardon the pun) soon. Can anyone suggest a pooled mining profitability calculator that takes into account the increasing difficulty so I can figure out break even and stuff like that?

I'd like to invite every new owner of a BitCentury/Metabank unit to join HHTT (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=269042.0) pool.

This is a small pool and needs to grow to reduce variance.

Now, if just one or two of you join it it will help but it won't make a big difference, but if ALL of us (I'm waiting for a unit as well) join it, well, it will become a medium sized pool and every one of us will have a few added benefits:

- very small fees
- half of each found block's transaction fees goes to the user that finds it
- low variance
- rock solid

and we will help the bitcoin network spreading our hashing power to a different pool (than btcguild  ::) ).

Think about it!  ;)

spiccioli

ps. for sabd question, I use this one lately: http://www.btcinvest.net/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php

Hi guys,

Status update:

1. We missed Friday's DHL time of day deadline for out of country shipping, so we just held off until today (Sat) so as to save time and manage logistics.
2. We have the first 2/23 orders fully packed and ready to ship today. This consists of 4/32 units. We've scheduled a DHL pickup.
3. We finished testing all customer units. The outcome was that as previously stated, we have 4x triple boxes that are significantly under performing, and we are going to get Metabank to swap them out; however, this may take another day or two.
4. Some of the units will have to ship slightly out of order. This is for two main reasons. First, metabank aggregated individual 120GH units into doubles and triples. So customers that ordered say 3 units, but across 3 separate days, may now receive a single triple unit on 1 day. We are delivering these units based on their first order date. Secondly, for a few customers, Metabank provided the above mentioned triple units that are not quite performing to spec (getting as low as 150 GH to a max of 260GH, when according to metabank they should be hovering around 290-330 GH).  I hope this is not a big deal in the sense that I still plan to ship all units by early next week. So we're talking about 2-3 days delay at most, not weeks.
5. We are starting to optimize our packing & customs process, so I hope to ship a few more units tomorrow, then probably by Monday a large amount if all goes according to plan.

Kind regards,
Luis

The above mentioned units have been shipped. Tracking numbers will be emailed out for the first 2 orders in a few hours.
Thanks,
Luis

Hi guys,
Status update:
- Went to Metabank tonight with 4x sub-par triple units. Swapped out for 4 others which they say they've tested at ~300GH/s. I have started testing 2 of them, and will test the other 2 tomorrow. As soon as we see these are good to go, we will proceed to start shipping them.

Either way, if all goes according to plan, expect more shipments late tomorrow (Sun) Moscow time.

Cheers! :)
-Luis

Keep up the great work, BitCentury!

Hi guys,

The last couple of days have been exhausting. I will post details as soon as I have time in the next couple of days, but long story short we have some bad news in the sense that we are not going to be able to ship any of our customer's units. The good news is that you will get a full refund from us.  This morning we got a call from DHL regarding the first 4 units we shipped a few days ago which got stopped by export customs due to lack of an "FSB" (Federal Security Bureau... aka. the new KGB) notification ID# (I will explain what this means when I get a chance).  Today we picked up the units from DHL, and headed straight to Metabank along with all the other units that we spent days testing and packaging carefully. Metabank has already issued us a full refund late this evening, and we'll do likewise with all our customer in order of who paid first as soon as we're able, but likely after I head back to Canada which will be this week . Refunds will be performed in bitcoins and for the amount you paid us. We still need to sort out some internal details but generally speaking, that's the plan.

Our sincere apologies this did not work out as intended.
I will write more details soon, but I just wanted everyone to be notified immediately of the situation.
Kind Regards,
Luis

Well, that explains what happened on my DHL tracking.  It got me all excited too, saying it had been delivered :'(

This is really quite disappointing; was hoping to get the new miners in in-time to replace the current power hungry beasts.  Oh well.  No hard feelings against the BitCentury team; I appreciate the full refund and I'm sure everyone else will.  Thank you for the communication and professionalism.

Same from me.

Also thanks to the Metabank team for being understanding and allowing a refund.

(note that I still plan full Metabank device support for BFGMiner, though)

I was looking forward to having people post details of their own results with these.

Here is what a 2 system in 1 gets you compared with other hardware on the market today.

Site A
https://i.imgur.com/liFsxwZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/BCU2qKf.jpg

Site B
https://i.imgur.com/s7M4xv3.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/J8qO4li.jpg

Luis and team,

Thanks for keeping us in touch throughout the process. You've obviously done everything in your power to fulfill your commitments, and like the others appreciate the offer of a full refund. However, you should really consider firing your legal team as their lack of due diligence cost you quite a lot in refunds and I sincerely feel sorry for you guys.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=223656.msg2368383#msg2368383


Thanks,
sabd

Already done :)

I got my full refund a short time ago. Thanks, BitCentury, for handling this situation with outstanding class and integrity.

Good to hear.  :) .  Out of curiosity, what was your order # as it appears they are going in sequence.  I'm Batch 1 order 17 and 20. 

Batch #1, order #4.

Ah.. One of the first orders  ;)  I have a great amount of respect for Bitcentury and their transparency.  Truly a rarity in the ASIC business. 

Really appreciate your work, and if you leave a donation address, I'd donate some btc to offset some of your operating costs.

it is good to read refunds are going out.  I ordered a 3btc piece of one machine from theswede75 's group buy.  I am share number 8. I am not sure how far down the list theswede75's purchase was    but hopefully you can be able to let me know and the other share holders know when he gets  his refunds and hopefully he will then in turn refund the shareholders of this buy.  thank you.  feel free to pm me if you choose. philipma1957


https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=223746.0





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[Group Buy] 1 Metabank Bitfury with hosting in the US [ORDERING CLOSED]
June 02, 2013, 07:47:26 PM
  #1
SHARES REMAINING 0/10 @ 11.33 AM CENTRAL TIME, MONDAY 6/3/2013

This group buy is intended to let less Bitcoin fortunate forum members take part in the opportunity to purchase cheap hash-rate through the recently launched Metabank Bitfury. The bitfury (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=223656.0) is available with US shipping through this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=223656.0 (from several reputable forum members located in Moscow, offering purchase and shipping to the US).

I have structured the purchase so that members wanting to get access to the exceptionally cheap hash rate/GH that the bitfury offers can take secure has rate from one of the machines without spending the full BTC30 for a purchase.

Offering:

- 10 shares of BTC3 are available.
- Each share entitles the owner to 1/12th of the BTC proceeds from a Bitfury mining 24/7 for 24 months, payment will be made to the address of the share-holder weekly, bi-weekly or monthly (I am flexible here)
- The 2 outstanding shares will be owned by OP as payment for power/maintenance of the miner and peripheral hardware needed (UPS, possible router etc).
- After 24 months the miner will be considered 'spent' and become the property of OP (this is for reason of simplicity mostly, since I believe BTC difficulty in 2 years will essentially render the miner a warm paper weight). IF hash rate increases VERY quickly and I feel that the share holders can make more money selling the ASIC before the 24 months are up I reserve the right to take a vote among share holders (majority rules) on doing so.

IN CASE OF NON DELIVERY: I take no responsibility for the possibility that Metabank does not deliver the miner. I have done what I consider a thorough due diligence but as we all know, you can never 100% guarantee anything when it comes to pre-orders.

If I have forgotten anything or you require more info etc. Please feel free to ask/post in this thread. I will only be doing this ONE group buy as I do not wish to run multiple miners as chances are I would not have time to look after them properly.

EDIT: In the interest of time I have removed the Escrow part of this group purchase and will be making the purchase directly through my own address. I have done many deals in the past without negative feedback and BTC30 certainly not a sum I think anyone would assume that I would trade a scammer tag for.


If you are interested in buying one or more shares here is what you need to do:

1. Send payment to the following address:   19eHNL7pJmRwqPGQSXukxAAivEJdiWNyNw
2. Send me a PM stating your sending address and BTC amount sent. One share = BTC3
3. Post your share purchase here to make it easier for visitors to see when a share is claimed. I will also update this post with remaining shares every 20 minutes or so.

After payment has been received for all 10 shares I will do the following:

1. Contact Bitcentury (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=223656.0) and make payment for the miner.
2. Contact all share buyers with confirmation of purchase, a copy of receipt/confirmation from BitCentury for the purchase and a screenshot of the transaction.
3. I will also supply buyers with my physical address and a possibly slightly redacted scan of my passport if requested. I will ask share holders to keep this information confidential.

EDIT: IF all shares are sold but the Bitfury miner sells out before we have time to place a first batch order I will refund any share holders their bitcoin - 5% for transaction fees and oranization of the group buy. I hope this seems like a fair solution should this happen.

Edit; I am going to bed. Any orders placed in the next 8 hours will be confirmed at approx 9 am Central time. Please post in thread when ordering so that possible new orders do not pay for shares that are not available. If this still happens I will refund BTC to sending addresses within 24 hours.

Edit; I have 1 share that I am 'holding' for a buyer for up to 2 more hours. If this share is not payed for I will re-open the sale. I am also negotiating with Bitcentury reg. the price of the Miner. They stated BTC30 last night but have since raised the price to BTC2 no doubt due to the drop in BTC price. I have confidence we can still order the miner at the original BTC30 and should they not honor the original price I will personally cover the BTC2 additional and take a vote among share holders on how to solve this. No need to worry though, I can assure you I am easy to work with and want to see this miner delivered on schedule and start mining.

I will post a new update in roughly 2 hours, at which time I also hope to be able to send final verification of everyone's shares and order the miner.


Edit; I have decided to pick up the last share of the auction for myself at this point to be able to place the order asap. I am now only waiting for email verification of the price of the miner and I will place the order.


Edit; Order has been placed! More info coming shortly via PM.

Edit; Ok, I have gotten email confirmation on our order from BitCentury. They will send out contracts 'in a few hours' and I will distribute copies + other 'proof' of our ownership. Heading to late lunch!

Edit;

Here is the full list of Share holders and transactions. From now on, if you wish to change your payout address for BTC mined or anything else I will require requests as signed messages using your verified address. This is for your protection:

Shares and sending addresses:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=114343      Share 1:          15y8u5pRU2QagwjkPnHb7yu9WmLS7efXgW  3BTC - Verified
(http://blockchain.info/tx/af73ca3d1d00e55dad375361dd0f70a45f4a475536a9994b4f7874cc6254c82b)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=120991      Share 2-3:       17G1TyGSf8FFZWoSQtGtffECPyqDxfbdih 6BTC - Verified
(http://blockchain.info/tx/5efab8ed608ea461a21a72c893c0de35a6f5d1651690ac4b476209ef58f3f822)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=88638        Share 4:        1JZVLM6dwDHhwZr4DnFMTudZPMeMP9EZCv 3BTC -
(http://blockchain.info/tx/cb5b1f072866b3479c3e593d3e64433af2ce2d53d12bf3162878d65204f508d0)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=121677      Share 5:         1EmQYzLgrpXiMWqsBZKe9d8RFr2bKJyaMM 3BTC - Verified
(http://blockchain.info/tx/000ec5acf2ea0c59473c7f4df96c75ff2259b60567f205ac0117b363ae206bf1)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=19627        Share 6-7:        15xGnu9mqDuU6JXv5zfcDTTnKdLD8sdmvZ and 1mJ4uQy6ZTpgeChENuR1zqkNnLG7LCWL4 - 6 BTC Verified
(http://blockchain.info/tx/5b99795f82cae0e325599711cbfa0481c3cb7d1d41ae0c8c7bf56377982d4904)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=64507        Share 8:           1AyWHY6kCMi4F221J7aPheiYdAvkDbcdPp  - 3 BTC Verified
(http://blockchain.info/tx/b3d06ae32ca1584fa8bdb6920100530b21906dc318dfdf9d39eab74166cbd703)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=35822        Share 9:           1Gqy5JeUU9RWCnnYXeCjCaEuFts9wKyQem - 3 BTC Verified
(http://blockchain.info/tx/83a384e95e7e92cd1632a991cfb8a20a8754a8344f1134dd4b0f50185c458b04)


Shares 10, 11, and 12 are owned by OP (TheSwede75)
Report to moderator  

Are you the only one with a refund here?

I placed my order on june 7th, no refund yet.

spiccioli

I got my refund yesterday. Order #1.

Received a refund for both units just now.  Thanks Team!

-JC

I got an email from Tom Sensel yesterday reg. the refund and today sent a signed message (as per instructions) to get the refund processed. As soon as I receive the refund I will contact group buy members and send them the refund. I am assuming within 24 hours as people seem to be getting refunds fairly quickly.

Check your email. There are several people I have not heard back from yet.

Got very fast refund. I also would like to have a donation address.

cheers

Just received my refund for 4 devices. Thank you BitCentury. Aside from not being able to receive the miners due to customs, this has been a great experience. I wish more businesses would follow in your footsteps in regards to communication and integrity.

senseless,

my refund address is in your copy of the contract that we signed back in june, so why do you need a signed message?

spiccioli

It is assumed that some people want refunds to addresses that are not the addresses they sent from. So I'm asking for signed messages from everyone just to verify they are who they say they are and the refund address in question. It also serves to confirm the refund request and that the refund has indeed been sent.

It takes seconds and your refund will be right out to you.

Regards

I have not received an email, I am batch 1 #21.

There are still a few emails that need to be sent. They should go out today/tomorrow.

Hi senseless,

I got my refund right after sending signed message.

Thanks a lot!

spiccioli

Refund received. 

Just wanted to publicly commend the team for the full refund and say thank you for all the effort put in over the last few months.  Other businesses on here could learn a great deal from you guys when it comes to professionalism, communication and integrity.

Christ, I sound like one of those sock puppets.  Back to lurking for me...