Bitcoin Forum

Hi Everyone,

LargeCoin is pleased to announce that we are now taking deposits against pre-orders of our first dedicated, ASIC-based mining appliance, the LC C200 Integrated Mining Unit (IMU). Deposits will be held in third party escrow until final product delivery, which is expected in July 2012, and will be refunded if the product cannot be delivered on time. And yes, you can pay with Bitcoins if you prefer. Additional product details, along with terms and conditions, are found toward the end of this message.

If you would like to be contacted about making a pre-order, please use the following Google form to let us know:

http://bit.ly/A53ShJ

PRICING AND DEPOSIT DETAILS

The C200 IMU is priced at USD $30,000. We are selling 25 units initially, with more to come later in 2012. To secure your place in the line, you must make a $4,500 deposit, which will be held in escrow by a third party until product delivery. You and LargeCoin will sign an escrow agreement to this effect before any money is transferred. The deposit will be returned to you if product delivery does not take place by July 31, 2012.

==============================================

PRODUCT DESCRIPTION

The LargeCoin C200 is the world's first purpose-built Bitcoin mining appliance. Designed to fit within a standard 1U of rack space, the C200 connects to the network using Ethernet, and starts mining as soon as it's plugged in to the wall. Mining is controlled via an online control panel hosted by LargeCoin, which allows you to direct mining shares to the pool of your choice and manage your entire LargeCoin cluster in one convenient place. Each C200 mines at 20GHash/s, consuming a mere 100W. Designed for high density operation, the C200 provides efficient movement of air and is suitable for operating in a fully loaded 42U rack (up to 40 units per rack).

Despite the incredible power efficiency and spatial density of the C200, it's priced competitively with GPU mining. When compared with GPU mining, the C200 consumes 100 times less electricity and 14 times less rack space, meaning there's virtually no operating cost associated with this device.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

Your deposit guarantees that LargeCoin will ship you a C200 IMU by July 31, 2012, that the specifications of the final product will not deviate materially from the specifications shown here, and that the device will function properly when it is plugged in. When you receive the unit and connect it to the network, you will be granted a temporary mining license enabling the system to mine for a period of 30 days. When we receive the balance of your payment, a permanent mining license will be issued to you. C200 IMUs may be transferred and re-sold -- just let us know before you make the sale so that we can transfer ownership of your license key.

SHIPPING

LargeCoin ships to North American destinations for free. Shipping costs for other destinations will be born by the customer and must be paid in advance. We will notify you when the shipping date approaches and provide a shipping quote for your review and final approval. International customers should be aware that air freight and insurance may cost $2,500 or more.

90-DAY LIMITED WARRANTY

LargeCoin warrants that the C200 will function materially consistent with the specifications for a period of 90 days following device activation, which occurs when you plug the unit in to a network with Internet connectivity for the first time. If the device fails, you may return it to us at LargeCoin's expense for a full refund, or replacement unit. Devices that are dead on arrival will be replaced or refunded.

NO GUARANTEE OF MINING REWARD OR FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE

Due to the random nature of Bitcoin mining, and the large uncertainties in the Bitcoin economy and network, LargeCoin cannot guarantee that the C200 will solve Bitcoin blocks at a particular rate, or that it will generate a financial benefit of any kind. Mining profitability depends on a number of factors, including the selection of a mining pool, which may or may not charge fees that reduce the mining reward; changes in the Bitcoin mining reward calculation including but not limited to scheduled reductions in the mining reward; and fluctuations in difficulty factor. LargeCoin's warranties and guarantees extend only so far as the hashing rate provided by the appliance, and its level of average power consumption.

200 Mhash per watt? If you can deliver the hardware at that spec, you will obliterate the competition.

We wouldn't advertise it if it wasn't possible. These are the numbers that come back from simulations with the chip manufacturer, because we don't have any real chips to play with yet - the real numbers will vary a bit, of course, but we'll commit to not deviating materially from these specs.

Don't forget that you are paying $1500/Ghash. Also, ttul why are the units "tied" to your hosting?

Anyway, it's great to see something like this coming up. Congratulations and thanks for all the hard work.

Sure, but how many people have 30 grand to throw around....

Cool stuff anyway. 

Price is $30 000 not 300 000.

They are only paying $150 for a GH/s performance.

Blows everything out of the water if real IMHO.

Mathematics.com , its $1500 per GH ie. $1500 x 20 = 20GH or $30 000 :P

WTH, I swear I read it as 200 GHash/s performance ??? Only 20 ghash/s from ASIC ( $1500/GHash ) seems low as hell when BFL supposedly does 50 ghash/s at same price using FPGA technology which is worse than a fully custom ASIC that LargeCoin claims to be using.

So the Rig Box would own this POS !?

The Rig Box does 2.5 times more hashes, but at 10 times the electricity per hash. It comes down to what you value more, hash/$ performance or hash/watt performance.

You can get 1MH/s out of ASIC, thats not the problem. The price is the problem, it would probably be the better option for some rich startup bitcoin miner who lives in a country that atleast cost 50x more for power than the average country pricerange, this country doesnt exist :/

Lets be honest, neither of these exist on the market and until there is an actual unit available for either of them we are all just throwing numbers around ;)

Exactly.

They mentioned all the data is based upon simulations ...

We all remember BFL claiming 1 ghash/s at 20 W and it turns out to be 800 mhash/s at 80 W

Simulations are not worth jack.

Chip manufacturer simulation: 100% granted...
http://api.ning.com/files/YYMu6ELsTpCKL83sJn97cutbLC85w3zPsdwendiaROhm3PtY8Y834b7Kp6v9AXJrV0u0yy7n9z73ikWlProWXfgxTS75huqr/LMAO.gif

Only a 90 day warranty on a $30k piece of equipment?  And tied to your host site?  Yeesh - you could fake mining at 20 GH/s for 90 days and then cut it off (claiming that the unit must be broken) and still come out way ahead.  Too many red flags here..

Power consumption.  

That being said I take any simulation with a grain of salt but getting 8x the performance per watt is pretty impressive.  Also BFL last product ended up be 400% of claimed wattage and 66% of claimed hashing power at 20% higher price.   If Rig box follows that same trend it is ~30GH/s @ 10 KW and ~$35K.  :)

Still two paper dragons that only exist in simulation form ...

They are at least offering an escrow and promising the specs within reason or they will refund. As soon as I get the escrow agreement I'll post it here. I do wonder about the hosting requirement. I would much rather run the unit independently.

This is great feedback. By "hosting" we're not meaning that the devices need to be plugged in or online 24x7 to access a site hosted by LargeCoin. We issue you a token, and the token permits a certain number of blocks to be mined. For out-right purchases, the token will permit unlimited mining, whether the device is plugged in or not. And yes, the token is tied to crypto on the processor. As I mentioned earlier, the purpose of this mechanism is to support a leasing model.

Hell no.  DRMed mining rigs.  I mean you got to be fucking kidding me.  What happens when it turns out the token you sold me expires or requires some "upgrade fee" to continue to work past 2015 or you decide to stop supporting the version of the token I bought.  Even more mundane things like your company gets shutdown for tax evasion and my rig can't "phone home" and thus becomes a $30K doorstop.

I wouldn't do that for a $30 video game much less 30K rig.  Your high MH/$ price already makes it less competitive than existing solutions.  Throwing asinine DRM on top of it is just a killer.  

Beyond stupid.    I mean DRM WTF are you guys thinking?  I thought I had seen it all.

Do you have more details about the leasing model? I don't see any mention of it in this thread.

I can only suspect after 90days they will force you to keep paying them or they switch of your token.

Thats all that makes sense, they wont tell you up front before the 90day period ends however.

Good luck pushing your scamrig to the masses, I bet some obscure rich retard would fall for this.

Interesting solution you advertise here.

I'm asking like another poster did, why will the equipment be tied to your platform ? The whole idea of bitcoin is that it shall be decentralized. If you produce a lot of this equipment, and you sit with a central control (as I understand all clients can control it from the online web-page on your server), then the decentralization goes out the window.

Although I'm very sure you're working extremely hard with this, but a lot of us are freedom loving individuals that would like to be able to govern our own equipment. Why not make it possible for the users to administrate the system from his own computer, or though any interface. If you want it to be administered through a web-interface, then this could be integrated in the unit and need not have a remote central for it to be administered?

What guarantees are there except your words that once enough units are deployed that there will be a 51% attack on the network, either by you or somebody attacking the central platform (talk about juicy target).

I sincerely hope this does not come forward as too negative, but these are questions that we really need to ask. I wish you best of luck in the continued business endeavors.

I was about to post this, but you wrote a much better text ;) Mining with hardware that is tied to a central platform defeats the whole purpose of mining.

Thanks, but I see that while I wrote my lengthy post, and I had a break do deal with some issues in meat space, this thread exploded with posts, and I see the OP stated that there would not be a centralized control server, but rather a token that would allow mining for a certain number of blocks.

That's too a really bad idea if you ask me. If the company can deliver what it promises, then just sell it as it is, with no restrictions.

Sir here is your token for the $30k investment, remember you are limited with this license to mine only 1 block.

$30k for 20 ghash/s. The breakeven is ~15 months assuming difficulty doesn't increase AND mining rewards doesn't halve at the end of the year. And plus you won't get this until July. Realistic breakeven is closer to 5 years. Add hosted/DRM mining and 90 days warranty to this. Thanks, but I'll pass.

I have no details of the leasing model, and there won't be a leasing model until after shipment of the initial production of 25 devices. We're not Cisco, folks, we're just a group of engineers, some startup capital, and a dream to build an ASIC mining appliance. Take it for what it is.

Regarding the fears of DRM, I'd like to clear up how the system will work, so that you know the box won't be mysteriously turning itself off and demanding a ransom. When you receive the machine and turn it on, it will register itself with LargeCoin by sending a token through the Internet. When we receive final payment for delivery of the appliance, we will send you a token (electronically if the device is connected), which provides an unlimited mining license. You are free to sell the device to someone else, and so long as that token is entered, the device will mine happily until the last Bitcoin block is solved.

By all means, if you trust a startup enough to send it $30,000 before receiving the product, we'll send you the license token before it ships.

No ongoing communication is required after you have configured the license token; and, if you prefer, you don't have to connect your device to the Internet at all. There will be a way to enter the license token without having it connected to the Internet.

Does this clear up everyone's concerns about DRM?


We don't want to spin multiple versions of the chip. To enable a future leasing model, we need to have control within the hardware over the capability of the appliance to mine a certain number of blocks. That means literally burning a crypto key into each chip, and then enabling verification of license keys within the chip itself.


This appliance isn't targeted at the hobby-level miner. If you have a few machines in your basement, keep on GPU mining. Chances are, you don't care about data center costs or power costs. But if you want to mine as a business, the ASIC model can't be beat in terms of profitability.

Ok, let's assume data center costs and power costs are $0. Mining this at 20ghash/s nets you about $2000 a month. Let's assume both bitcoin price and difficulty either don't increase or cancel each other out. So you get 5 months at $2000 a month, and when the mining rewards halves in December of this year, you start making only $1000/month. It will take 25 months to make back your initial investment.

You guys really need to rethink your strategy. Maybe leasing makes sense. But purchasing your device doesn't make any sense if it doesn't break even for 2 years (which doesn't even include the data center and power costs!)

For comparison, The BitForce Single takes 8.8 months to break even and the BitForce Rig takes 6.5 months to break even. And these 2 numbers assumes power costs $0.30 per kwh.

Understood. Thank you


You also assume that the reward halving has no impact in price.

Anyway, this is a choice I don't need to worry about because I don't have the money to buy it.

If you are going to assume that price doubles due to reward halving or if your calculations assume that btc price goes up a lot to reduce the break even time, then it makes more sense for you to buy BTC today and wait for the price to go up. You will make more money that way. So as far as I'm concerned, I need to assume btc price stays constant or that it only increases enough to cancel out the increase in difficulty.

Just my 0.02 bitcents, the keying/licensing requirement is absurd. According to the release announcement, the rig can be controlled via a web interface hosted on their servers, which means that they have complete control over it, just as much as the buyer does.

I certainly see value in the rack formfactor and the low power usage. Apparently up to 40 can be fit in per 42U rack, which means 4KW or a little less than 40 amps at 120VAC - almost all datacenters allow that much power for the basic rack price. For me locally, 42U with 40 amps and 1 mbps of ethernet would be $600/month

I hate to keep pulling out the Rig Box as a comparison, but let's assume for the moment that they are retaining their non-rackmountable design and pulling 2500 watts each - guessing from the picture, you could probably fit 2 side-by-side on a rack shelf, and perhaps within 4U each. So that means 20 Rig Boxes per 42U rack, for a total power usage of 50KW. This is lower power density than a set of blade servers, but far more than many datacenters can handle, so yes you may have issues putting them anywhere for a reasonable price. (400 amps per rack anyone?)

To gain acceptance from the hardcore miners, you must remove the idiotic keying/licensing model, and remove the requirement for the web interface to be hosted by you. The more ideal way to do this is as follows: Since you can apparently fit 40 in a rack, allow customers to also run their own control head server (1 more U) preferably based on an open-source platform. The final U remaining would be used by a network router with 42 ports.

It appears that the keying requirement is only to support the distribution of units without payment in full, but escrow removes this need completely. I echo the question earlier - what if something happens to make it quit working? That means unnecessary mining downtime for a stupid DRM equivalent, and we have seen in the past how DRM can break spectacularly when implemented poorly.

Any one want to wager on whether this comes true or not? ;D

I was just adding to your assumptions because it may be relevant for some people. In the bitcoin world, anything measured in years is a gamble...


See the post on this page explaining the DRM thing.


Feel free to open a thread in the off-topic section to discuss and bet on that.

That doesn't answer the question of what if it breaks, or otherwise causes any kind of disruption for any reason. It should not be designed into the system - potential reliability concerns.

Million bitcoin question: Who will be the escrow?

Subscribing.


Just for reference, the rig box is guaranteed to be 50.4Gh @ 2.5Kw. This guarantee is in the form of partial refund.

Well the single was "guaranteed" to be 1.05 GH @ 20W.  Doesn't say much.  Reminds me of the movie Tommy Boy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8jIIPocqUU

"This guarantee is in the form of partial refund."

BFL to me, "The performance specification of 50.4 gh/s @ 2,500w is guaranteed.  Should the delivered performance vary from these figures in a negative way, a pro rated refund is the agreed remedy."

I think this product would need to be in the $10,000-$15,000 range to garner any real interest.

Any follow up on how it will be pro-rated.  A 1% reduction in price for a 1% miss in performance = solid.  A 1% reduction in price for every 20% missed in performance = not so solid.

Since there are two specs how is the pro-rated refund work for a miss on both.

If power is 20% higher and performance is 20% lower is it a 20% refund, 0.8*0.8 = 36% refund, or 0.2 + 0.2 = 40% refund or none of the above?

Without knowing that and spelled on in contract BFL guarantee is no better than Tommy Boy example.  They already released one guaranteed product.

Guaranteed 50 MH/W -nope (and laughable they got this one so wrong)
Guaranteed in 4 to 6 weeks - nope (not even close)
Guaranteed 1.05 GH/s - nope.

sonny@butterflylabs.com

FYPFY.

"Pro-rated" without any contract or at least terms of the pro-rate is utterly worthless.  Just because you are too stupid to realize that doesn't mean others are.

As an example:
http://www.goodyear.com/en-US/services/tire-warranty

Now this is for tires as cheap at $60 for fucks sake.  $60 tires have a full paragraph to protect both parties interest in the event the pro-rated refund needs to be used.  Yet for a $30K piece of custom hardware something as vague as "will be pro-rated" is sufficient?  Really?  

Email him and find out then!     Jesus christ, any excuse for a whinge.

I love it when the really important questions are left unanswered...

2nd try:

Leave it unanswered and the scammer accusations will start to flow, and it won't be because of specs!

I am still hung up on the 90 day warranty. How can you drop 30k knowing it may not function in 91 days? Can/will they repair it and at what cost?

+1. Even BFL has stated a 6 month warranty. Most computer manufacturers guarantee their products for at least a year or more.

If they sold them in Portugal they would need to give a 24 months warranty, wether they liked it or not.
Also, BFL said something about shipping from Germany, so I have good news. If they do that(and they said they would to avoid customs) they must follow European rules, and guess what: 2 years warranty

Thread about it in a gamers forum:
http://www.avforums.com/forums/xbox-360-hardware/475729-2-year-warranty-standard-eu-law.html (http://www.avforums.com/forums/xbox-360-hardware/475729-2-year-warranty-standard-eu-law.html)

The actual law
http://ec.europa.eu/publications/booklets/move/64/index_en.htm (http://ec.europa.eu/publications/booklets/move/64/index_en.htm) Download the document and it's on page 7(pdf page 9)
More info http://ec.europa.eu/consumers/cons_int/safe_shop/guarantees/index_en.htm

Be aware that some countries may not follow the EU directive yet as they have 7(?) years to make it into law, so Germany could have only 1 year mandatory. At least that was the case in The Netherlands not many years ago.

Would you buy one if it was $15K?

That would reduce the break even to 7 months and would make it more competitive. If I have the money, I would buy one. Of course that also depends on how the DRM mining is implemented. It is crucial that once I bought the miner, the miner needs to function even if LargeCoin goes out of business for any reason. In other words, the interface to configure the pools must be on the device itself and not an external website. And if there is a token to unlock the hardware, the unlock must be complete. It shouldn't have to phone home and LargeCoin should not be able to remotely configure or brick the device.

Is this how LargeCoin is supposed to work?

Is there a remote kill switch or phone home system?

Thanks,
gigavps

No, there's no remote kill, and the phone home function is optional and for your convenience only. Our ASICs have a crypto mechanism that checks a license file that you must supply to the system. The license file specifies how much mining the system will do, in accordance with whatever license you've purchased. For the C200 units we are taking orders for currently, the license will be unlimited.

Without the license mechanism, our only option would be to take payment in full prior to shipping, which is probably less desirable than allowing the customer to receive the unit, run it for a few weeks, and validate everything is working well before submitting payment in full to receive the full-bore license key.

Our goal here is to deal with the well deserved suspicion that any Bitcoin hardware project - particularly one promising an ASIC - is a total scam, as several have been over the past year.

Yes, the hosted solution is quite ridiculous. Who's to know if the miner is actually the one producing the hashes? I'm not trying to accuse you of anything, but for all I know, the miner is pretending to do something and using up 100w and you have a GPU farm sending my pool hashes. And you only have to do that for 90 days.

THIS.

Any crypto or hardware lock which has to phone home ever (even once) is non-viable.  Period.  No exceptions.  To easy to become a casualty of another business failure.

Do I have to provide the license file each time the miner boots up or is it unlock once and the miner is plug and play from then on?

To clear things up, the warranty provides for a full refund if the appliance stops working during the warranty period. If there is substantial demand for a longer warranty, we will consider offering one at a reasonable up-front cost. I can understand anyone's concern that a device might stop working before it has earned back its purchase cost.


Not sure if you're replying to my post, but if you're contributing your hosted mining resources to a pool, there are great mechanisms in place already that ensure the pool submissions are not bullshit.


You won't have to supply the file on every boot. Each system has a microcontroller and some nonvolatile storage so that configuration settings persist through reboots.

That sounds a lot different than:


So which is it?

At first glance the idea of locked hardware rubbed me the wrong way but I see the advantages.  One could pay a deposit, get a rig w/ a time locked license file and after testing decide either to pay full price up front for unlocked rig or pay monthly lease getting new license file periodically.

Still locked or unlocked I would want the rig completely outside the control of LargeCoin.

Why not simply have a license file issued and used locally which has encryption key for either limit the number of blocks/hours/hashes or unlimited mining depending on the encryption key provided.  The whole calling home to a remote server which manages the rigs and "directs" them to a pool of user's choice is a deal killer.

+1

Like I said in an earlier post, this functionality could be useful if the user retained control over the actual control/head server sitting at the top of the rack, instead of having it hosted. Anyone spending $30,000 per unit for 40 units can damn well spend another $500 on a cheapo rack mount server to run them.

Both - most customers (we imagine) will prefer to control the system through a nice hosted UI. Others will configure their appliances to connect to a pool and contribute mining shares without any interaction with our control panel service. There will be a way to run the appliance completely independently - we hear you, and will make sure this option is available.


As I've written in various posts, after you receive the appliance, you can either connect it to the Internet, in which case it will self-register and obtain a license automatically when you pay the balance; or, you can leave it disconnected and install the license file manually. I think most customers will take the auto-registration route for convenience. After you have paid us and obtained the full license key, there is no need for the system to contact LargeCoin central again, and you will be able to stop this from happening without having any effect on mining.

ttyl, thanks for clearing this up. If you reduce the price to $15k, you will find demand for your product. But at $30k, it's way too expensive.

$15k would be my upper limit, sans the DRM...

a no DRM pre-production price of $12,500 or less I might bite.

DRM really bothers me. even if you had confirmed working units (right now) I doubt I would would pay more than 8k for it.
if you had working units (right now) no DRM I would probably be ordering a few units NOW at $12.5 any future sales would probably depend on what the delivered BFL Rigbox specs out at.

Good point and would be an awesome feature.

15k is much more reasonable; also license file non time liked with out remote drm. I like the escrow in fact it's essential; why not 5k up front and then 1k per month with each payment you send a license file until 15k is paid. You could also come up with a formulae on price by incorporating the difficulty ratio at the time.

As others have mentioned with delivery in late July and block rewarding halving in Jan it does not leave much room for a decent payback period if btw does not substantially appreciate in early 2013

I know there is probably endless speculation regarding what will happen to the BTC exchange rate when the block reward is cut in half, but my own opinion is that the halving of the block reward will reduce supply therefore increasing the price - probably by enough to recoup the lost "revenue" from the cut in mining reward. Another consideration is that if the exchange rate fails to increase to recoup the halving of the mining reward, people mining inefficiently will leave the market, and those operating FPGA and ASIC based systems will reap a larger share of the mining rewards -- halved as they may be.

You mentioned leasing earlier in the thread. Can you give us an idea of how that would work?

At this point we have no firm plan to lease these units. It's an idea we have thought about, and the platform is designed to support it (hence the provision of license keys).

What would the community's interest in leasing be?

If you have good credit, we can (as can any business) arrange an equipment lease. But keep in mind this will bind you to a 12 to 48 month lease contract.

How much for a 12 month lease?

I agree I was excited until I looked at the numbers and thought about the agreement.  

1. $4500 is enough to build a fake and run off with the pre-orders.
2. No one knows for sure you can accomplish this.
3. You have no reputation, or testimonials of your past accomplishments.
4. I want to see your face, and more of web presence with an address and phone number
5. You can't start small by selling low cost systems as part of building your rep between now and July?

Well, I hope you are not a fraud as I would love to buy a system.

The problem is that once you start doing contracts for leasing, the cost starts to approach the purchase price, and it may no longer makes sense to lease. The only reason to lease then is so that if the equipment breaks after 6 months, you can break the lease or get new equipment. But then if you do month to month leases, it makes less sense for LargeCoin to lease you the equipment when they can make more money just mining themselves with it.

This is highly dependent on your credit score. What monthly payment would make sense for 20 GHash/s?

You're partly correct - leasing is no free lunch and is quite different from "renting". Leases are mostly used for tax purposes and for cash flow management in a business that can prove to the financer that it has the ability to pay a series of lease payments over time.

$30,000 is a large chunk of money for many folks, but this appliance is not aimed at the hobbyist miner. We're selling to industrial operations who are concerned about rack density and power consumption. For these types of operations, a lease may be preferred because the lease can be written off against income, whereas the equipment must be depreciated over a longer time period (for tax purposes).

If you're a hobby miner, my suggestion - and we don't mind helping with this - is for groups to get together and buy a LargeCoin appliance, and then find a rack to host it in collectively. At the current difficulty rate, these appliances will generate close to $25,000 per year with negligible power consumption. I don't know how many other investments you can make where you get a near 100% ROI within one year. But this is probably less risky and more profitable than angel investing.

I would have to do a little math to determine what I would pay for a lease. The driver for me for leasing would be to address the 90 day warranty.

I will make some calculations on what I think a reasonable lease payment would be and get back with you.

WTF?

None of those are reasons why legit companies lease equipment (do you really think Google signs leases to get out of paying when equipment breaks ???).  Companies acquire assets by lease because it frees up capital.

I am not saying you can or should but hypothetically lets say you had two options:

A) Pay $30K for a single unit.  
That gives you (at current difficulty and price) ~$2K revenue.

OR

B) Pay $5K deposit ea on 6 units and lease them 48 months @ $600 per month with $1 buyout.
That gives you (at current difficulty and price) ~$12K gross revenue - $3600 lease payment = $8,400 revnue.

THAT is why companies lease equipment.  It provides better utilization of capital.  Now you may say I could just buy the 6 for $180K cash and pocket the full $12K.  Sure, but with 180K cash you could also lease (hypothetically) 36 units by putting $180K down and making $21K per month lease payment with gross revenue of $72K monthly.

None of this should be viewed as an endorsement it is simply illustrating how/why companies would use a lease for capital deployment.

Im confused why you keep mentioning that this is meant for "Industrial operations", do you honestly think any large scale operation wouldnt raise an eyebrow at the terrible ROI proposed by this solution?

Yes, they are. We've had orders for five at a time already. Everyone knows that power efficiency is important with mining, but there hasn't been much mention of spatial efficiency. With ASICs, we can crank 7x more Bitcoins for the same power investment as an FPGA, and yet use 1/10th of the space. Compared with GPU the ratios are at least ten times better again.

You won't know for sure until money starts changing hands. Do you think we'll ever see a 42u rack completely filled with c200s?

This is all just text, there is no evidence available to suggest anyone ordered this equipment from you.

ROI is the key to investing in something as volatile as bitcoins. If spatial efficiency and power usage is such a huge concern, then anyone would be a fool hosting this at a datacentre considering you keep saying it uses so little space you may aswell host it at a different location that is way more cost beneficial than a datacentre.

As many noted in this thread @ $30k a pop the ROI is terribly low and anyone investing in this would effectively be gambling for the next 24-36months hoping to get to breakeven and then start to profit.

That depends on whether anyone is willing to take such a sizeable wager on Bitcoin mining. A full rack costs $1.2M; but for that you'd get 800 GHash/s with still negligible power costs. Throw in $1,000/month for hosting the rack and you're still earning an operating profit of something like $80K/month at today's exchange rate and difficulty metric.

I don't agree. The operating margin will always be 7 - 100x better with an ASIC-based mining rig versus an FPGA or GPU based rig. If you're placing a bet on Bitcoin, buying ASICs ensures you will receive an operating profit regardless of what happens to the exchange rate. Late last year, GPU miners had to switch off in many power jurisdictions. ASICs would have been strongly profitable the entire time.

You fail to understand my logic, Im not doubting in ASIC, I am stating that your product and its price is not a good investment.

Of course cheaper ASIC solutions would be a far better choice than GPU/FPGA.

inb4 the license file can and will be cracked.

If you can afford a $30k unit, you can afford a cluster of GPU's to crack it.

This only applies to consumer products. Ie. business-to-consumer sales. It seems like this isn't what LargeCoin is targeting ("well, duh" one might add, when we're talking about a $30,000 device).

Also, if LargeCoin only sells to businesses the purchaser can get a VAT refund, at least, in Denmark (where I live), and I suspect also in most other EU countries. It seems almost like a waste of money to *not* purchase this as a business in the EU, where each member state is required to have a minimum VAT rate of 15%.

Many people doubted strongly that an ASIC would come along at all, due to supposedly HUGE startup costs.

If the claims about how prohibitive the initial research/development costs would be are valid, surely it would seem incongruous to have the first few units produced be dirt cheap. Quite the contrary, surely it is to be expected that the first production units would be sold to a select clientele at a premium price? If the price of these first few units were in the "reasonable" price ranges you folk would like to see them at doubtless that would have been taken as further proof it must be a scam, due to the evident failure to attempt to recoup some of the "prohibitive" development costs...

-MarkM-

I know that it doesn't prove anything, but during the past year ttul mentioned several (http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/103/whats-the-difference-between-an-asic-and-an-fpga-which-is-better-for-mining/782#782) times (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=14910.msg219049#msg219049) that they were working on an ASIC.

Well no.  If one has a fixed cost of $1M then to amortize that over 1000 chips will be +$1000 over build cost per chip.  If you ammortize that over 20,000 chips it is $50.  If you amortize it over 100,000 chips it will be it will be $10 per chip.

ztex (as an example) won't get much lower prices even if he builds 10,000 boards BUT an ASIC w/ huge upfront costs acheives significantly lower cost by scaling production.

Keeping prices high for a select few means less units moved and higher cost per unit.  Both company and customer lose.  There also is the risk with high prices of slow volume and someone comes along w/ cheaper/faster/cooler unit before you ammortize.  Then you are left holding the proverbial bag.

An example:
Hypothetically (excluding profit margin, risk, volume pricing on production runs, etc)
$1M NRE cost.
$100 wafer cost per chip (1 GH/s)

Sell 1000 chips = $100 ea + $1000 NRE share = $1100 per chip ($22,000 per 20GH/s box)
Sell 5,000 chips = $100 ea + $200 NRE share = $300 per chip ($6,000 per 20 GH/s box)
Sell 25,000 chips = $100 ea + $40 NRE = $140 per chip ($2,800 per 20 GH/s box)
etc...

So someone selling a few units at very high cost seems counterintuitive to the economics of ASICS.  With ASIC your non sunk cost will be very low.  It is in your best interest to undercut everyone else, be the clear choice and line up tens of millions of dollars in orders.

If you want to sell a few units at high premium get early access to 28nm chips.  No sense and pricing them low as your cost won't go down much when ramping up volume.

Best of luck with that.

These are all legitimate concerns, and I'd have many of the same concerns if I was considering putting $4,500 into escrow, let alone spending $30K on a box. Let me take each of your points in turn:

1. $4500 is enough to build a fake and run off with the pre-orders.

I'd suggest you could build a fake for even less than $4,500. But in this case, we can't run off with the $4,500 because it will be sitting in a trust account with a law firm. That money won't be released to us until the units are validated to be working consistent with the specifications in the escrow agreement with each customer. Having the money in escrow helps us to know there's demand for the units, but we're not drawing on those funds in any way until shipment happens.

2. No one knows for sure you can accomplish this.

I can't argue this point.

3. You have no reputation, or testimonials of your past accomplishments.

True. Here is my LinkedIn profile: http://linkd.in/zh5OFB, and that of the co-founder: http://linkd.in/ynNuuO. These are consistent with LargeCoin Inc.'s incorporation data, which is available from Industry Canada: http://bit.ly/AkqCwM

As you can see from our LinkedIn profiles, the founders have product management experience with semiconductor companies, investment experience, and years of experience building and running technology companies.

4. I want to see your face, and more of web presence with an address and phone number

Check the LinkedIn profile. Or, fill in the order form http://bit.ly/zliQFj and I'll call you so that we can chat live.

5. You can't start small by selling low cost systems as part of building your rep between now and July?

No, this is impractical. The major hurdle is producing the ASIC, which just takes time. And, as others have pointed out, costs money too.

Regarding the ESCROW funds, you state that it wont be released until you ship the product ?

That is the concern yet again, shipping a product is different from product arrive and works as advertised thus if you clear the funds upon shipment you could still run with $4500 before the product reach the customer?

This stuff needs to be in the first post, and should have been there to begin with.

yes

Why do that when you can get the Rig Box ???

Rig Box

30k 50 ghash/s reputation so MH/$ ratio is 1.6

LargeCon

15k 20 ghash/s no reputation so MH/$ ratio is 1.3

Maybe less power but it still does not amortize over the long run enough to matter so what is the point even at 15k ?

Do you just not take into account that the c200 is ten times more efficient than the rig box?

No because TBH 2500W vs 100W is not really relevant to me and probably lots of others with cheap electric rates.

All that matters is MH/$ and the ability to deliver the product.

All this DRM is just total BS. I don't want any backdoors from the gov. in my miners.

bulanula, since you have free power, 20x Rig boxes makes sense for you. However, my local datacenter would refuse to provide me with 400 amps of 120vac, so I need something lower power.

But $30 grand still isn't worth it to me for 20ghash. I'd rather buy just one Rig Box and dump the rest of my miners out the window.

I'll ask again and if I'm ignored I'll start yelling SCAM...

WHO'S THE ESCROW?

No, I won't PM you asking for an answer, I want a public answer and it's on your best interest to give it.
Or do you have something to hide?

The escrow will be with a Canadian law firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia; escrow funds will be held in a lawyer's trust account in accordance with stringent trust account rules of the BC Law Society. I will be happy to share the escrow agreement with the forum when it's ready for release.

What puzzles me is: why are they only selling 25 units? Does this mean that later on they will sell them cheaper?

We only have enough chips in our first run to build 25 units. We don't want to run more than this off the presses until we know that there's enough demand for these ASICs. Once the first batch is out, it will be relatively easy and quick to produce more. Yes, future prices will probably be lower, given Moore's law.

Thank you!

Just one more question: Why don't you use a well known escrow service, like escrow.com?
I'm guessing it will be because of the non-conventional payment methods(Bitcoin), but just want to be sure.

And yes, I may be interested in buying. I'm not asking just to rattle the cage. I know I usually do that, but that's not the case :)

I actually didn't know that escrow.com exists.

Yay, first unrestricted post.  

Of course, IMO.

LargeCoin's MH/W efficiency is impressive.  Though, even a vast reduction in W usage does not overpower LC's low MH/$ at current market conditions and low cost kWH areas.

Equating to ROI at 19 mo, quite optimistic figure considering volatile BTC, is passing a boundary that most mining investors are uncomfortable with.

Even still LargeCoin may be getting some pre-order interest.  Good for them.  Attempting to recoup their investment is important.

My feeling is that if LC's ROI is reduced by even 3-4 months that many more will jump on it.

If they offered them for $10K I bet LargeCoin would have 1000 orders by the end of this month. At that price point, they would be undercutting Butterflylabs, wipe out GPU mining thus providing 90%+ of the overall mining capacity by years end, all while recovering their initial investment^* and making a good profit.

*An uninformed assumption

The thing is: they will only produce 25 devices. After July we'll see what happens.

LOLOLOLLOLOLOLOLLLOOOOOLLOLOLOLOLOLOL.

I hope this isn't serious. If I drop 30g's on something with a 90 day warranty, I don't want to worry about having to have my "token"  stop working for whatever reason.  As promising as the rig --SOUNDS-- its something I would suggest staying way the hell away from.

Heres a video of what I think about this whole complete "leasing model"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaqC5FnvAEc

Have fun picking this POS apart everyone. Im out.

When I do these kind of calculations, I try not to take price into consideration by comparing this miner with buying bitcoins. With $30k now, I can buy 6000 bitcoins today at the $5/btc price right now. According to http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php at current difficulty (1496978.59503), 20 GHash/s earns you ฿408.51. Let's also assume difficulty stays constant. So from July to December, you will earn ฿2043 (5 * ฿408.51), then mining reward halves and you only make ฿204.25 a month. So it will take an additional 19+ months (19 * ฿204.25) to make back the remaining ฿3957. So at least 24 months to breakeven.

If I had ฿6000 bitcoins today, would I use that to buy this miner? ROI is 24 months at the optimistic low end (where difficulty stays constant, 0% pool fees, and free electricity). If difficulty increases 1% a month, ROI increases to 30 months. At 2%, 39 months. At 3%, 64 months. At 4%, you would never make back your initial investment. The answer is an easy no. Warranty is only 90 days, yet you need at least 2 years to make back the money. If the hardware breaks down after a year, you are SOL.

Wow.

(Sorry for offtopic, but I really had to leave some ambiguous comment here)

That's what I don't understand. The vast majority of ASIC cost is in the design. Whether you produce 25 or 250 chips, the cost is nearly the same.

Yeah I don't get it either although I doubt they have a 20 GH/s chip.  More like 10? to 20? chips per "rig".  So 25 units might be 500 chips.  Still it doesn't seem to make any sense.    25 units @ $30K ea = $750K.   100 units @ $12K ea = $1.2 mil?  Since incremental cost is small why would they want to limit themselves to 25 units and thus have to price them so high as to be inferior to other offerings?

???

It may be a production run on a multi-chip wafer, i.e. they literally have only 250 ASICs.
All they could finance is a multi-chip wafer run.
The "deposit" will finance the PCBs, passives, power supplies and assembly.

I am surprised that as a legitimate offering, this would even be offered for sale.

If I were in a position where I thought I'd be able to have a head start on manufacturing ASICs that blew all other miners out of the water, I'd be highly motivated to just keep it all to myself as I pretty much dominated mining.  I'd score 7200 BTC a day (with it halving soon, of course).

Or perhaps I could have my cake and eat it too.  I could sell rigs for a healthy $30k, knowing that I alone had the upper hand in deciding how productive those rigs were going to be.  If for every 10 rigs I made I ran nine and sold one, I'd effectively guarantee that all my customers were competing for 720 (360) BTC and nothing more.  The customers I sold it to would have 10x the expectations - in the end, 9x of their expected yield I'd be keeping to myself with my supply of "unsold" rigs that I was running for, um, "extensive burn-in testing" before being sold.  (What, you think I'd let them sit idle on a shelf in a warehouse?)

If this product results in centralization of mining, I bet there will be cries for Bitcoin to switch to a CPU-based algorithm!

If the deposit is held in escrow, they will not be able to touch the money until the product is shipped and delivered.

Too costly, rack-space is not an argument, it is already very small with future BFL rigs.
People with 1.2m to invest for a full rack don't have any problems finding a place to store them. Hint : They can be stored anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

If I was to start a mining operation this size, (5 rack, 6m$) actively choosing the best location based on electricity cost , security and rent cost would be a rather trivial task.

I hope you can significantly lower your prices on the future batches or offer a compelling bulk discount.

/Following/

Maybe that is exactly what they are doing. I would assume an ASIC manufacturer would want to proliferate their chips to as wide an audience as possible, any other goal seems counterproductive to maximizing their profit. If they were looking to mine themselves, they would want the opposite. Just enough sales to pay the NRE costs, while still keeping the competition low to maximize mining profits.

Official explanation...


How much would it cost to produce 25 more units? Or 100?

This is based on some kind of sASIC chips, right?

May I ask, just out of curiosity, how many chips are built into one of those rigs, or the other way round, how many MH/s you managed to cram into a single chip?

Truly devious and very true.

...I like it. jk

A wildly unbalanced power of any kind goes against the p2p currency philosophy, doesn't it.  I would hope hard-liner p2p people would amass to shut this sort of imbalance down.

On the contrary, rack space is expensive and it is imperative that it be used efficiently. Consider that the expected power consumption is 100 watts - whereas a BFL single is close to 85-90. Sure you could pack several singles into a rack space and cool them with forced air, but there goes your 40 amp power budget, poof like that.

Now whether the LC device is actually 100 watts, that I doubt. I hope you LC guys have significantly oversized the power regulation chips on these things, because it would suck to have to redesign them when you found out that mining actually uses a lot of power by activating many gates simultaneously.

With an initial shared-wafer run it seems unlikely one would get enough units to be able to aim immediately at replacing everyone's household furnaces with ASIC bitcoin-miners or including a miner unit into every rack everywhere to help offset the high operating costs of secure, controlled-environment rack-hosting or just selling one units each to every bitcoin miner who can swing a lease or loan.

You lot maybe shouldn't be trying to discourage select clientele from snapping up premium-priced units but, rather, be urging them on while looking forward to the full wafer or multiple wafer runs the wonderful early adopter angels will be enabling by their magnanimous gesture of taking the initial run's produce so the world can move on to some real production scales that might maybe show us before too long just how cheap ASIC based appliances can be once they start pouring out at full production into a ready market able to absorb almost any number of them.

Of course if these are not the full blown type of ASIC but the structured ones or something hopefully there will also be R&D overhead for a full blown implementation also to take into account once the R&D that went into this one is accounted for.

So yes, buy these quick, be the first on your block to have the latest and greatest thing in bitcoin mining! Snap up this six month or less window during which you'll be among the few in operation and the block reward is still unhalved! Have months of amortisation already under your belt when everyone and their dog has one and GPU mining becomes just a toy for the litecoin folk to play with!

-MarkM-

ttul, has your company considered delivering chips to OEMs in order to maximize your profits? Since the initial costs to develop ASICs is rather high, to me it makes sense if you were to sell the chips you produced to other companies that would then design a small board (like the FPGA boards that exist already (including Butterfly Labs' "Single")) into which they would integrate your chip. These companies would then either directly sell these devices to consumers, or let a retailer do this (to avoid the aforementioned obligatory 2 year warranty that's present in at least the EU).

Does this make any sense for a company like yours to do? This assumes at least that:

1. The initial cost is your primary expense (ie. spitting out more chips would only marginally raise your costs).
2. You are able to release specifications to the OEM that doesn't reveal anything about your chip that might be taken advantage of by a competitor.

I completely disregarded the 25 as I don't see it as any meaningful limit, and my argument would apply to anyone doing ASIC mining, not just these guys in particular.  I assume that the only reason that they'd do 25 is for prototyping to keep the risk manageable in case there were any bugs to be worked out, and if everything works as planned, nothing's stopping them from making however many they want.

Right.... if they have 25, the hard part is done.  Now, it's just set up the machine and press go.

Well if the initial production run were done on a MOSIS process (partial wafer with other users), they would need to tape out again for a full wafer, unless they wanted to spin the same wafer over again. The tape out is what costs the most, but having a proven-working design certainly helps things along when you want to graduate up to full wafers.

I just read the whole 7 pages of this thread and sounds like a complete echo of the BFL thread at the start ( except we have BFL to compare to.)

If I had that kind of money to throw into bitcoin, I would buy the 6000 coins as stated a few messages above,  invest them in bitcoin ventures and have low risk ( accept maybe bitcoin price crashing....)

I'm assuming the prices quoted are ex VAT, thus there would be no refund. (25% VAT where I live)

However, the warranty needs to be sorted out if this is to be sold in Europe. In my country the manufacturer warranty period is three years, where the first 6 months all faults are considered to be from the manufacturing by default (after that the consumer has to show they're not due to wear or negligence).

Also, as far as I can see, the "DRM" issue is moot. Those still believing it to be a problem need to read ttul's posts in more detail (or if we could just get all that info merged into the top post)

My answer to the thread poll would unfortunately be "no". Not because of the price (it's likely not worse compared to keeping my money in the bank) but because of the warranty. Us europeans just shake our heads at the US "90 day warranty" madness.

Except BFL's initial price per performance target was outstanding and even with it's revised specs, it's still very good. LargeCoin's price per performance target is already not competitive. Who's to say they can even produce hardware up to these specs that their simulation showed.

MAYBE if someone really wanted to mine somewhere with very high elec costs they could have an advantage with this product , but that person would real have to want to mine there badly...

It would have to be absurdly high. See here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67507.msg788356#msg788356). It would take $.47 per kilowatt for five years before the C200 overtakes the Rig Box.

"by default" means that if no obvious fault can be found the blame is on the manufacturer during the first 6 months.

If you turn it that laptop the manufacturer will examine it and kindle refuse your warranty claim since you've operated it provable outside the specifications.

I assume that the company doing the multi client wafer would have a schedule and would be doing another one the next month or whatever period they run on.  Assuming their test worked, they could buy multiple slots on the next month's shared wafer and have 25*n chips, n being any number that suits their fancy.  And in that month while they waited for that production, they could put together all of those rigs, so by the time the chips themselves are ready, they can be dropped right into the rigs and fired up immediately.

We will need some very specific details in order to take you seriously.

• What is the ASIC chip set you are using?
  Where are you physically located and will you allow members of the Bitcoin community to visit your place of business?
  Who or what is this escrow service and if it is not someone or some business we are already familiar with - why should we trust them?

We (Bitcoin Miners) are generally in a frantic FPGA mode right now but anyone would be stupid to fork over even a $4k deposit before we have some real specifics

Wafer sharing is not the only method giving such low-quantity outputs.
It also may be a sASIC with some layers configured by ion-beam etching. Expensive, but literally single chip production is possible.

Any answer to this question?

Also, directed at pretty much everyone, why are we suddenly allowed to compare things to the BFL Rig Box as if it's real? Did we learn nothing from the "guarantees" of the Single? Compare this to products that exist now: BFL Single, the various Spartan-6 FPGA miners (see my sig for the best one!), GPUs.

Comparison to X6500s:

That's based on the bulk price of $515 each for the X6500.

Let's say the X6500s require 900 W more. That difference is less than 8 kWh per year. At $0.20/kWh, that's $1600. Plus, no DRM messiness. I'd still buy X6500s, thank you very much. ;D

Still, in the long run, that power efficiency is amazing. Any proof that it's physically possible? Did you use a 28 nm process?

I'm quite sure I've read that info in this thread already.

Something was missing from your table:
Based on $464 per one Icarus unit (for batches of 30x, without separate PSUs. Next revision may be considerably cheaper).

They have already once adjusted the specs downward from 54.4 Ghash/s to 50.4 Ghash/s, and from 800 watts to 2500 watts. Although this is still vaporware, I'm pretty sure they learned from the Singles mistake and the current numbers are more accurate.

This is quite true. The cost of fabrication is extensive, and much of that cost is for very very experienced engineers to validate the design before it is manufactured. Silicon wafers, and the literal fabrication process are only part of the cost. It's easy to understate the complexity of putting together an integrated circuit. We're talking about tens of millions of transistors, complex timing circuits, and little tiny wires that all have to fit together perfectly to result in a working product.

FPGAs are a great because they provide power efficiency within an order of magnitude of the ASIC, but without having to worry whether your simulation of the metal layout might not work just right with the lithography process. Unfortunately, FPGAs carry with them a couple of serious drawbacks versus ASICs:

1. FPGAs use a lot more logic to implement the same amount of logic. That logic eats up power.

2. FPGAs themselves are very complicated chips with high fabrication costs. That keeps the unit cost high even at high production volumes.

In our exploration last year of various options for increasing the efficiency of Bitcoin mining, we thoroughly evaluated the FPGA options, because of course using FPGAs instead of ASICs would have greatly sped things up and reduced our risk. But, what we discovered was that the power, space, and unit cost efficiencies of ASICs will always win out over FPGAs in the long run.

So, if you believe that Bitcoin is going to be around for many years to come, as we do, then you'll want to make a long term bet on ASICs rather than loading up on FPGAs that will be left in the dust as the difficulty factor is pushed higher by ASICs. Short term calculations based on today's difficulty factor and exchange rate are just not relevant. If your goal is short term profit and you fear the future of Bitcoin, then stick with FPGAs.

I am very pleased that there are others like Butterfly Labs who seem to also be working with ASICs. This is great news for Bitcoin - the more custom logic that gets pushed out there, the lower the risk that Bitcoin will be co-opted by botnets operated by nefarious groups. Because, last time I checked, your mom's PC didn't have a Bitcoin ASIC in it.

Same is true with GPUs. Never seen a botnet of 5870s. Whoever is geeky enough to buy a 5870 knows how to be secure usually.

Quit the marketing and BS talking. You are not using custom ASIC as that requires millions to produce and nobody would take that risk.

Probably using sASIC in the best case ...

Also, this rig box and box that makes 50 ghash/s or 20 ghash/s will only centralize BTC to the few that can afford paying over your threshold amount of 10k+ which I doubt many "casual" miners are willing to pay. Stop trying to sound like you are making BTC more secure because this simply is not it.

ASIC will be devastating to BTC and make it 51% easily in the early true custom ASIC times until everybody gets same HW and drops GPUs.

ArtForz mined about 60k BTC in the days everybody was CPU mining with a single 4870 AFAIK. Someone with secret ASIC could do the same and 51% this easily taking all our coins.

As I read the ttul post  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67505.msg789513#msg789513)it pretty much says that the current offering is based on sASIC.

Pipe down over there and let the adults talk in a reasoned manner please. If you don't agree with some claims, please present your arguments and questions in a less offensive format. Thank you.

One day someone will build a standard cell based ASIC for Bitcoin mining, and that will cost $5-10M NRE and it will be a monster.

Wow the pricing is a non starter but 200MH/W on a sASIC?  I would have guessed a sASIC would be more like in the 60-80 MH/W range.   That likely means a custom ASIC could be in the 500 MH/W range.  28nm could maybe break the 1 GH/W barrier.  :The entire network using less power than giga farm is using right now. :) Yeah the NRE means it won't happen anytime soon but it is pretty nice to consider the future security of Bitcoin.

Higher capital cost and lower energy cost is better security for Bitcoin.  The simple version is the attacker doesn't attack long and defender must defend forever so higher the ratio of capital:operating costs the better for the defender (FPGA, sASIC, ASIC).  The lower the ratio of capital:operating costs the better it is for the attacker (CPU, GPU).

As I think I said earlier, your mom probably doesn't have a Bitcoin ASIC in her basement computer. This means botnets can't harvest nearly as much horsepower as will be available when ASIC computation is ubiquitous in the Bitcoin network. Just as FPGAs are rapidly growing in prevalence and replacing GPUs, ASICs will eventually replace FPGAs. LargeCoin's goal is stay on top of the ASIC trend and profit over the long run as Bitcoin comes into widespread use.

Bitcoin has been through more hard knocks than most well funded startups could possibly handle, and is still going strong. I don't see a reason why it won't be around in 10 years time, and by then many orders of magnitude larger and more interesting.

Shit, this is hot.

Still something is missing, the BFL Single (now that it's actually shipping):


With the initial investment at about $15k for the 24 BFLs, a LargCoin appliance @ $15,000 would be quite competitive.

And the rig box is not even out yet, so if the actual performance is the same ratio as  with the BFL single (1GH projected, 832MH delivered), the BFL will get you about 42 GH for $30k @ 2.5kW (or probably more kW).

Likely LargeCoin wouldn't even need to be dollar for dollar the same price.  @ $0.10 per kWh the Single costs ~$1700 more per year.  If using AC that is another 30% so $2200.  If the LC was $3,000 more it be better option after little over a year.   When you start to consider the advantages of density, noise, management, plus host cost (and load) is is still competitive at a slightly higher price.

If it is $15K vs $15K it is a no brainer.
If it is $18K vs $15K it is kinda a weigh your options type decision. 
If it is $20K vs $15K you need a good reason (like has to be in a datacenter, you have $0.20+ per kWh, etc). 
If it is $30K vs $15K there is nothing to weigh.

$30,000 is just a ridiculously high price, but reading through the whole thread it seems ttul is testing willingness of people to buy the box for $15k?    :)


@ DeathAndTaxes:

Yes, $18k seems acceptable, if the LC appliance really can deliver on the promised specs. But if the power requirement really turns out to be closer to 200W (or more) and the performance is say 20% less in the production unit this would be a slightly different picture; in case of the BFL Single it happened...

As VAT tax refunds work, in my country at least, you do pay the 25% VAT to start with, and then get a refund. So you do get a tax refund, but the original price is of course excluding VAT, so it won't cost you less than that (ie. you're just refunded the additional amount you paid).

Do you have a reference for the obligatory three year manufactur's warranty in your country? A reference that specifically mentions that this applies for business-to-business sales?
As I mentioned, it makes no sense to purchase this kind of unit as a private individual and increase ones cost by 25% (because of VAT). So laws governing consumer sales will not apply.

ttul, you have ignored my previous question (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67505.msg788496#msg788496) regarding selling your chips to OEMs who will then include them in smaller products targeted at the private individual. I have a feeling that the number of people willing to invest $500-$1000 in Bitcoin (through such a small device) can bring in a larger sum in total than the number individuals willing to invest $30,000. Can I get you to make a comment on this?

Okay, everyone. We've read the forums, and have carefully considered the ROI calculations that have been submitted by various of you. We have also talked to many of you by telephone. After much research and contemplation, we have decided to offer the first 25 customers who order a C200 unit by April 15 a 50% discount on our initial price of $30,000 per unit to ensure that we can establish trust with an initial group of customers. This means the deposit amount is reduced to $2,250 per unit, and the unit cost is reduced to just $15,000.

This is a fantastic offer, and since sending out an announcement to our list less than an hour ago, we have received

If you wish to make an order, please visit our order form: http://bit.ly/A53ShJ

Q&A

1. What will happen if my order is #26? Will I still get a discount?

No, we are only offering this discount on first first 25 orders received by April 15, 2012. If your order is not in the first 25, or if we receive it after April 15, then you will be placed on a waiting list, which we will fill if someone from the first 25 orders fails to provide their deposit in a timely manner.

2. Will the price be reduced after April 15?

Probably not. We still believe that $30,000 per unit represents good value when you consider the long term growth of Bitcoin and the potential of a difficulty increase to quickly erase any ROI difference with FPGA-based offerings.

3. Will you offer a smaller unit that costs less?

Not until at lease late 2012. For now, we need to focus on shipping to a small number of eager customers who can validate that our technology works, and help to evangelize LargeCoin to a larger audience of smaller customers in future.

4. Can I order more than one unit at this price?

Yes, you can order multiple units. We have placed an arbitrary cap of 5 units per customer; however, if you have a strong interest in ordering more than 5 units at this time, please contact us. We will consider larger orders on a case by case basis.

5. Who will the escrow agent be?

We are still working this out. When we have the escrow details ready, everyone who has filled in our order form will receive an email from us with a copy of the escrow agreement and full details of the escrow agent. Everyone will have plenty of time to do their own diligence on the escrow agent and the agreement before sending any deposit funds.

6. Why should I trust you guys?

You don't have to trust us. Your money will be escrowed, and we won't use any of it until the devices have been validated by an independent third party as ready for shipping. We won't even take your final payment until you have received the product. This is the reason behind our DRM mechanism, which allows you to try the device for 30 days after receiving it, without giving us any money.

PM me or make a post if you have any additional questions not answered here.

Can you finish your sentence?

OK then, another Q&A item:

Q: Will I get my $2250.- deposit refunded if I am not able to get the initial reduced offer price?

... we have received many orders. We're quickly eating up the first 25, so please fill in the order form soon if you don't want to miss out. In the spirit of openness, we are already at 31 orders and counting, but it's assumed that some people won't fill out the deposit so please do get your order in.

What is your expected delivery time frame?

And can I get my deposit back if you cannot meet your promised delivery time frame?

Read the first post.

Expected delivery is July 2012. If we miss our delivery deadline, then we will return deposits in full.

This sounds terrible.

No thanks.

Why? For the first 25 customers, it sounds like a deal to me. Shame it will still be so expensive for later customers.

To each his own.

where are you located?
are you licensed to business there?
are you incorporated, llc, self employed ?

Seriously? If you signed up for emails, it's right at the bottom. I believe it has been mentioned on the forums as well.

For everyone's convenience, I'll answer this again:

1. We're located in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

2. We're incorporated federally, and here's our incorporation information page:

https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/scr/cc/CorporationsCanada/fdrlCrpDtls.html?corpId=7952988&V_TOKEN=1331589171870&crpNm=largecoin&crpNmbr=&bsNmbr=

In Canada, there is only one kind of corporation - we don't have the concept of LLCs, C-corps, etc..

thank you for answering it again, ive been trying to follow this thread when I can but I must of missed it - and no I did not sign up for the email.

*cablepair hugs rjk*

I actually looked for this answer and could not find it

what methods of payment are you accepting?

^this

I've already seen it said that over 30 orders have been taken. If you are sure of being able to raise $15K but not sure of $30K - you'd be crazy to order.

It has nothing to do with "being able to raise" but it has all to do with
- having only $15K liquid, but $30K (or more) tied up in investments
- accepting the low, but non-zero risk of an anticipated 100% ROI, but not accepting the significant risk of an anticipated 50% annual ROI (i.e. at $30K it'll take about 2 years for the box to pay for itself)

I'm in for one at $15K but it'll be a freezing day in hell when I order one for $30K. Very simple.

This concern seems so bizarre to me that I'm concerned I may not understand it.

An order, or a deposit (submitted concurrent with or after execution of an escrow agreement) is for a unit at a specific price.  Who would be crazy enough to provide a deposit against an "order" at an unspecified price?

Exactly.
At some point, they will send you an invoice and ask you to wire the deposit into an escrow account.
If the invoice states "wire $4,500", I will simply not do that and thus there is no contract between me and them.
If the invoice states "wire $2,250", I will happily wire the $2,250 into their escrow account.

What I would like to see is a hardship clause in the contract, that in case of DOCUMENTED hardship situations such as serious illness, job loss, divorce, natural disaster the buyer has the right to get his deposit back instead of forfeiting it.
This would add a much-needed human warmth to this icy, windy world of Bitcoin mining.

Just to be complete at the risk of being boring, any document requesting a deposit would also have to state the price of the unit(s) being purchased as well as the deposit amount.

Here's an updated calculation based on the updated price. The unit is guaranteed to deliver by 7/31/12 and the cost is $15,000 or ฿3000. Assuming difficulty is 1,496,979 and doesn't change and mining rewards halves on 12/10/12. And lastly assume no power cost.

Month	Bitcoins Mined
08/12	฿410
09/12	฿410
10/12	฿410
11/12	฿410
12/12	฿273
01/13	฿205
02/13	฿205
03/13	฿205
04/13	฿205
05/13	฿205
06/13	฿205

So you will make back your ฿3000 by around June of next year. Breakeven is ~10.5 months assuming no power costs and difficulty stays constant.

It's not the concern of being able to raise the $30k vs. $15k.
ttul wrote, although there are already more than 25 requests he encourages people to sign up and get on a "waiting list" in case someone drops out.

So if I pay $2250.- to be on a waiting list and it turns out that I won't get the $15k deal then I want my deposit back. $30k are not economical; it takes already 10 months to break even with $15k.

And if ttul says anyone not getting into the $15k deal would automatically go into the $30k bracket, this is defacto like signing a contract for an unspecified price. As others have noted, this is 'bizarre', so I was compelled to ask this naive question.

But maybe I didn't understand something there...

Awesome.

GPU miner will be killed.

When you sign up using the form, you don't put down the deposit right away. When they get back to you with the escrow detail, then they will ask you to put down the deposit. I assume at that point, they will let you know whether or not you are one of the first 25 and you can decide then if you actually want to go through with the order.

Hmm, product announced for $30,000. After a few days you decide to give it away for $15,000 and therefore giving up $375,000 (25x$15k) because you listened to the people here on the forum and you want to build a trust base. Is this a joke?

I agree, that sounds really strange. I don't want to speculate on their intentions right now, but they do really crappy marketing and market analysis.

If you look at their website, there's just one page and a PDF article, that when reading it the first time, I thought many people here at the forum could have done a _much_ better job.

Then there's a product we have absolutely no information about, the 20GH/s @ 100W for a FPGA/ASIC system is something I did already come up in my daydreams under the shower or sitting on the pot. But that's about most we know about the product (ah yes, there's a license key, so they aspire confidence that the details have been worked on  ::) ).

And to my knowledge there's no info on the companies qualifications for that project.

I'm not saying they are out to scam us, no I actually believe they might be doing it in the best intentions.
However, just thinking about BFL, those guys were given a hard time eventhough they have much higher credentials to show, had a more believable target, more realistic specs, a better idea about the pricing, and a prototype.

But on the other hand, just thinking, if I created an ASIC that could perform with these specs, I might realize that I didn't have the cash to produce it on my own, keep it for myself and mine happily ever after. So I'd start a company for the sake of building that machine, have someone share costs and effort, and once that's covered stop selling (or sell it at a price that would also cover my mining profits) and focus on my own mining operation. So with that motivation, I wouldn't care about web page, marketing, or making a profit with selling the product. I would just be concerned with getting it off the ground, produce it and get mining.

That's a lot of if's wogaut ;)

If I don't understand it wrong, they are not taking the customers money up front, so the only thing it would help them is getting a loan from the banks maybe after showing 25 escrow customers. But then why stop at 25? And if this has been worked out with the bank or another investor, you don't just decide to drop the price by $15k. It would only show them one thing, that you are total clown and best is not doing business with you. Wouldn't you agree?

I actually found that PDF on their web site very interesting a few weeks ago.

Interesting is also their estimation of 250 GH/s per rack using 5kWh power consumption they made back in Sep 2011. Now it's 4x the GH/s at 20% less power consumption (1 standard rack = 42U). They have been hard at work.

Whatever that C200 is, this will be interesting to watch.

Yes, lot's of if's indeed  ;D

Didn't mean to bash them, as a business they just present themselves so strangely that thoughts like these crossed my mind.

Definitely interesting to watch though.

I like FPGA/ASIC approaches a lot, they cut the waste, being designed especially for the task. Worked with PGAs myself back in the early days...

If they were going to sell 0 units at the ridiculous price of $30K they really didn't give up anything (much less $375K).  Sure if they would have sold out anyways it would be stupid to lower the price.  Personally I don't think that was very likely.

I wonder when are we going to see more than 90 days warranty...

Absolutely agree.

And now we also know that the cost to design that thing (sASIC), including cases, power, software, DRM, etc has to be below $375,000. If they need an investor I am available via PM ;D

Here is an idea. Let somebody pay for the $375k development cost and give them 25 units. Keep 75 or more by yourself and mine happily ever after with a free sASIC that you didn't have to pay for and nobody else will get. Even more evil clever would be if you build the thing with DRM, so that the 25 units are artificially limited to 20GH/s while yours have double the GH/s. Wouldn't that be something?

You don't know that from the information presented here. It may very well be possible, but the first run doesn't necessarily have to break even or make a profit in order to proceed with more units.

ttul when can we see a live demo and specs of the hardware and at what temperature is running and all every other info?

It only exist on paper at the moment.

And price per BTC.

If this thing is real, price isn't going to stay put, a lot of GPU miners are going to switch, and the average miner willing to sell mined coin is going to decrease, at least temporarily. If demand for BTC remains the same, this means the price is going up.

Any info on the company?
Is the offer for $15k still valid?

They just sent me an email that SIGNIFICANTLY MORE than 25 people have ordered one at $15,000 each, and they will honor all these [legally probably non-binding] commitments. So, you can give it a shot and try to order one on their order website. If it still says $15,000, chances are, you'll be in.

If they can afford to do that, their profit margin must be well above 50% at the regular price...

Just think, it only takes 500 of these (or 200 rig boxes) to match the current network hashrate of 10thash/s. With all the BFL rigboxes and LC C200s coming online in a few months, difficulty is about to explode. My previous calculation of 1 year breakeven at this lower price will be way off if difficulty explodes.

500 of these babies at $15k would be like 15% of the total Bitcoins in existence (or $7.5 million dolla) spent on this. My bet is that at least a few would have to resell their GPU mining rigs to make that jump, but yes, this will probably drive difficulty (along with all the new upcoming products from the known FPGA developers like ngzhang, Ztex, BFL, X6500 etc).

The only sure and low-risk way of making money with all this seems to be making your own mining hardware, let others pay for development and production, and then sell it to us crazy miners ;) (see BFL or this thread). Just kidding of course.

This is a 50% attack in the making. (DRM, access via their web interface, the capabilities of a asic could be much higher than the devices are sold for)

Or it's a fraud.

Or both.

http://wiki.btcfpga.com


Largecoin - I welcome you to add your own page here ! Thanks! :)

But its a btcasic not a btcfpga... lol ;D

*/ quietly registers btcasic.com /*

even so we have gpus on their for comparison as well as BFL which might be an asic? half an asic? has that been determined yet?

RJK you rule this thread with an iron fist man - you order like 10 of these or something? ;)

lolwut no, I was kidding you :P

If I had the cash, I would have been in at half price, but didn't have any to spare. Shame, I have a nice rack they could live in.

go ahead I already own bitcoinasic.com :)

So...has anyone been contacted about paying the deposit yet?

Agreed - got very quiet this past week...  ???

No. I'm in Europe right now and would actually prefer to wire the deposit from Europe, and I told them that, but they replied by email that they need more time to set up everything.

As I was the first one to fill out the document they sent to everyone who expressed interest in buying a rig (the document was mostly about confirming name & address), they sent me a gift via Amazon.com (I think it is a Nerf gun - I'll give it to my son, whose 9th birthday is coming up).

I'm curious as to roughly what conditions would have to hold to break even in any reasonable timeframe. (even at the $15K price)

Looking at the pace of development of FPGAs, and with this ASIC based solution and possibly others in the wings, surely difficulty is set to crank right up in a few months - even if the price holds around current levels.

Taking an approximate cost of 3000BTC.. (likely a fair bit more depending on your tax/shipping issues)   it seems to me you'd be very lucky to earn 1500BTC between receipt of the machine in July and the reward halving.
By that time, with more FPGA farms humming away and continual sales of these ASIC devices at presumably similar if not lower costs, I'd guess you'd be extremely lucky to get the other 1500BTC of your initial investment over the entirety of 2013.

Is that what initial purchasers are going for?  Lock up all that money for the chance that at the beginning of 2014 they may have a now long-in-the-tooth piece of hardware to start earning profit with?

Am I way off? What's the possible win here?   What events would cause this purchase to be more obviously worthwhile?

julz, I can only answer for myself, but for me the potential for profit is nice, but it is not the only motivation for investing in 12 BFL singles, all of them undelivered, and one LargeCoin box, undelivered as well. An equally strong motivation for me is the prospect of a portable, anonymous and potentially even unaccountable and untraceable income stream. Consider, for instance, what would happen if a married couple with 3 kids, the guy a software engineer and the woman a housewife, were to divorce in the People's Republic of California. I tell you what would happen: The guy would be left with an income similar to what a single guy who flips burgers at McDonalds makes, and the ex-wife would be riding the gravy train at about 2.5 times that amount. The guy would be one medical issue, one car accident, one layoff away from living on the streets. Literally. A significant percentage of the homeless population in California are divorced guys who had their wages garnished and thus could not afford the rent anymore.

I am not sure under which laws you are married, but in many countries half of those 12 singles belong to your wife and half of your LargeCoin box too (in case of a divorce). And I am no divorce lawyer, but you don't need to have a very creative imagination to see your wife and her divorce lawyer taking away half of your income derived from those BFL and LC investments if the sh*t hits the fan.

ITT : only men make money and get hurt by divorce

I suspect you are joking.  Otherwise you have just given public evidence of your intent to hide income from the IRS, your wife and your son.  If you eventually do this then your stated intent will be incriminating.


You already have this risk even without the divorce.

I personally plan on using my LargeCoins to take over the world.  I anticipate the world being less expensive in 2014.

Sam

I also see that as desirable.. but I wonder if the 'stream' will be in the order of a few cents(ie those trashy 'fiat' cents) per month by the time the unit has paid for itself.

If I were to buy one of these - I'd actually be content if it paid itself off by the end of 2013 even if it was making negligible amounts after that.
The motivation in that case for me would simply be the satisfaction of supporting the security of the Bitcoin network with 20GH.

The counterpoint to that is that I also worry that before it's even recovered 50% of the cost price, it could be as obsolete for Bitcoin mining as CPUs are today.
I'm still tempted as a gamble.. but it's a pretty big gamble, with an obvious downside, and a not so obvious upside.

For this to actually be 'exciting' - wouldn't we need to see a massive and extended crash in network hash power (and also presumably price), followed by a recovery?

The last time this happened people warned about dropping $10-15k on mining farms but people did it anyway. Those of us that were smart just bought coin instead. It went from $.65 to $31 in less than four months. I remember the price was falling at the time, and people thought I was stupid spending money on coin, but I was looking at the difficulty increases and I knew there'd be people upset they spent several $K on mining equipment when they could have just bought coin.

I hate to say it, but investing US dollars in something like this, if true, is probably one of the stupidest things you could do right now. Your money may be better spent investing in coin. I guess it depends on if you think Bitcoin is going to get more popular or less popular. If less, and you still want to do it, then mine. If more, then you have to at least be considering the fact that the price might increase, in which case you'll want to consider buying now and purchasing miners maybe later.

Appreciate the other side of the equation.

Previosuly the invest decision was offset a bit by the fact that you were buying GPUs and there was a fairly high salvage value.  Now with these monster machines it is questionable if the salvage value is any more than pennies on the dollar (which scares me a tad).  :-\

PS - If I thought another 46,000% rise in price was possible I'd be buying coins now and not hardware.

While the profit from mining is nice, it's not the only reason to mine. Buying coins does nothing to increase the network security. Mining does. So rather than calling miners stupid, you should be thanking them for making the network stronger.

And with more people making big cash ($) investments for larger FPGA and ASIC mining equipment, I believe there will be more downwards pressure on the Bitcoin.

My thinking is that a lot of relative small scale miners that only spent a few hundreds or a thousand dollars for their equipment are perfectly happy to keep their income in Bitcoin. While the ones that spent up to $15k or even more, have an urgent need to put those Bitcoin back on an exchange in order to sell them for $$$ to pay the bills.

In other words, while more large scale miners won't mean more Bitcoin on the market, we will have more people that put their Bitcoin up for sale for $$$.

Or another way to look at it...

The 30 Gh/s farm that was GPU powered was paying almost $900 a month on electric.

Assuming 2.5 Mh/J (hard to get much better) = 12,000 Watts @ $.10/Kwh = $876/month

Now same miner can achieve similar for 1/10th (using BFL) or 1/20th (using other FPGA) the power.  Now, the question of paying off the hardware ASAP is another issue and varies by individual.

Assuming 12kWh, is this even possible on a domestic electricity circuit under normal circumstances? (is 100 Amps @ 110V about right??)

If not, then those 30 GH/s GPU farms are only fictional or very rare.

US mains are 240V (120V split phase).  Dropping in 240V outlets isn't that tough.  I made a DIY article a while back.   Also 2.5 MH/J is pretty crappy.  Optimized rigs can get closer to 3MH/J.  Still 12 KW on 240V mains is 50A but you would want to derate that 20% so you need about 60A of capacity.  A pair of NEMA L6-30R outlets will do the trick.

Still I would say non-botnet 30GH/s farms are pretty rare.  Antecdotally (and looking at pool stats) I would say even >10GH/s farms are relatively rare.

According to my household power monitor... our instantaneous water heater alone uses around 15kW.   
That thing is on a 3-phase 240V supply (Australia). 

I've seen household usage spike up to near 20kW - so I guess an electrician could put in circuits to supply a nice big GPU farm.

Not sure how well that would go *on top of* the already heavy usage of some households like this one though!

You can check your breaker panel.  If you have a "mains" breaker (some panels don't) it should be rated below the current limit for wiring from your panel to power grid.  In US most homes have at least 100A, sometimes 200A, even older homes that haven't been upgraded should be good for 60A or so.

Ours is 200A...

D&T - 3 Mh/J - seriously?  Mine are all above 2.5 and one at 2.7 - but barely.  That said, they all have 20-30W worth of 120x38mm Delta screamers on them...

It isn't easy but it is doable.  

Every little watt helps especially that last few tenths of a MH/J.
* 80Plus-Gold PSU
* 240V circuit (about 3% lower W than 120V)
* 4x5970s rig (high MH/S relative to host overhead)
* Underclocked and undervolted sempron
* Turn off what is not needed in BIOS
* Memclock down to 150
* Linux on USB key (no 100% CPU bug)
* Supplemental fans but not going to crazy (I dropped it back to 2x UltraKaze pulling instead of pushing)

Undervolting and underclocking the GPU you can get up to 4 MH/J but currently it is more profitable to run it at full voltage.  Still as those FPGA start to drive down price/difficulty it is nice to have the option to crank up the efficiency to squeeze that last little bit out of old old GPUs.


Still 2.5+ MH/J is solid.  I remember a thread some time back after the price crash when I got into arguments because some people thought getting >2.0 MH/J was just unrealistic.   Today 2.0 MH/J is just downright bad.

Yeah - agreed with that you can get down to some very good numbers but it doesn't make sense yet...

Seasonic PSU X-Gold PSUs  - Check
Underclocked Sempron - Check
Bios - Will review further
Memclock - 180-300 (some cards aren't happy with 180)
USB Key - Check (BAMT)

And back on topic -- sent an e-mail yesterday and no response as of yet  :'(

EDIT - Got an e-mail early this morning (29 March) that they are finalizing details on the escrow details and engineering work continues...

It might also increase the profitability of services that pay bills for bitcoin. I can pay my electricity bill in bitcoin, for example. If LargeCoin creates a large number of new farmboys out there they'll be keen to spend coin paying for things *without* using an exchange.

I don't think there is a difference between small investor and large investor cashing out to pay bills, mainly because a small investor will have GPUs which actually cost more to run, while mine less bitcoins, a larger investor has better power efficiency so he has less bills to pay and mines more bitcoins.

And TBH I don't think miners make up the major economy of Bitcoin.

The impact of all 25 20Ghash/s ASIC rigs would be both significant but still small. In addition, the cost is too high for all but the very-long term risk-takers.

The current difficulty indicates a network hashrate of 10799 GHash/s.
You would be adding 500 GHash/s to that when all these rigs turn on.

Each 20GHash rig will increase the difficulty by 2793.
The current difficulty is 1508590. Each rig is still a drop in the bucket...

It would take $1,800,000 worth of LargeCoin rigs (60 of them) to mine 10% of the Bitcoins (5040 BTC a week, currently valued at $25200), while consuming 50A @ 120V doing it. The difficulty going up just 11.1% from such a purchase won't completely destroy the existing mining economy... You would have to hope that many miners will quit when the reward goes down.

It would take 143 weeks (2.7 years) of 25BTC/block mining to break even on your investment with free electricity, if the hashrate of the rest of the network and the exchange rate stayed the same (you could also get rich, or the Bitcoin economy could completely collapse). This is a risky investment unless you think value is going up up up. If you do, $30,000 will buy you 6125 BTC off MtGox right now; your Largecoin miner would only make that much after 145+ weeks of mining if nobody else turns on a mining rig.

LC rigs were at $15K - just FYI

aha, just found: "Okay, everyone. We've read the forums, and have carefully considered the ROI calculations that have been submitted by various of you. We have also talked to many of you by telephone. After much research and contemplation, we have decided to offer the first 25 customers who order a C200 unit by April 15 a 50% discount on our initial price of $30,000 per unit to ensure that we can establish trust with an initial group of customers." (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67505.msg797876#msg797876). I'm sure the responses they got to revise pricing were similar to my post.

At $15,000, that puts the miners in the "definitely more reasonable" zone. The offer has expired though (and they apparently took more than 25 preorders at that price too).

My guess is they will never sell a single unit @ $30K.  As you point out the math doesn't make any sense.  By the time they are beyond pre-orders; BFL should be caught up on back orders, possibly have rigbox out, the new FPGA upstart releasing products, new Lancelot board out, possibly a price cut on the quad ztek, and all FPGA makers looking towards 28nm Artix based miners at end of the year.

If it doesn't make sense now @ $30K in makes even less sense in a more competitive environment near the end of the year.

odd indeed, i want PHOTOS

Interesting question posed here.   What are the thoughts on this?   I have been doing calculations and have some interesting scenarios worked out.


Dalkore

The "Long Con" is an art only the best scammers can pull off. I don't think this is a SCAM, but if it is, it's a good one.

Any updates ?

Hoping they did not run off with all the moneys ???

IIRC, all deposits were to be held in escrow, so there will be no "running off with all the moneys."

I think I found a listed address at one point, next time I'm in Vancouver maybe I should swing by.

If you search the thread, you'll find some users that claim to have discussed things with them on the phone. Maybe those users ought to give them a ring and see what's up.

20 GH/s for $30,000 (although some $15,000 pre-orders were taken ?)

Just thought I would BUMP this with BFL's new Press Release recently and compare...


Even @ $15,000, using BFL's pricing, that would essentially buy someone approx 440 GH/s (11 BFL $1300 Units)....a far cry from 20 GH/s.

Now, I don't know shit about ASICs, but it's clear that with the 2 companies in question above (Butterfly Labs and LargeCoin) 1 of 2 possibilities MUST be correct:

1) Someone is COMPLTELY FULL OF SHIT in regards to performance/pricing (BFL).
2) Someone got a little TOO GREEDY and will end up missing the boat....(LC)

Which is true ? (or both true to a certain extent?)

Thoughts ?



JESUS H CHRIST !

31 Orders = 31 PISSED OFF PEOPLE if BFL can actually come through before 2014......

Wouldn't it be possible to say that LargeCoin's tech is just not near as advanced?  Also, if LargeCoin keeps their promise to have it in user hands by the end of July that would make them market leader for a while.  There is no way BFL is actually going to have their stuff out anytime soon.

Yeah this. If they would have sold them when they made the announcement, they would be free and clear. Since they waited, they've probably blown the NRE and produced a bunch of outdated chips.

You all assume ttul really had 31 orders and there is no way to verify that its not just his own marketing hype he tried to create.

My absolute best guess is that if someone did pre-order they have allready done a chargeback(hopefully they paid with some form of chargeback capable method)

Pre-ordering didn't involve transfer of funds.

Yeah it's a shame how people think that pre-ordering always requires payment up front. It's a byproduct of how BFL is treating the community.

???

Are you producing them in the US or China?

Just wondering if you could deliver them in China without custom hassles...

The preorder process simply involved giving name, address, and quantity. Then they would whip up an escrow agreement and a deposit would be held in escrow. That second part hasn't taken place, so nobody needs to do a chargeback.

So you and ttul together in this? You respond as if you are running this vapourware product. Again, he requested pre-order deposit to book a unit but Im pretty sure he got no takers on this piece of vapourware by-product since alot more people would have come here to post about their funds still held up in escrow or something.

I'm assuming Brian is one of the people who preordered. Naturally people who have preordered (including myself) will know a bit more about the process, such as the fact that a concrete request for a deposit hasn't come yet.

I think the quoted number of 31 preorders is very believable. As we said, nobody is complaining about funds held up in escrow because no funds were sent to escrow.

1. BFL has an incentive to exaggerate the announced specs, to discourage potential competitors and to encourage customers to buy current-gen hardware which can be traded-in. While BFL will certainly be capable of manufacturing the devices at the stated performance and marginal cost if and when they finish development (which could be in a long time), it will be a dubious business decision to offer at those prices. Sound pricing would be beating the competition decisively but no more than that.
2. LargeCoin has stated they're using sASIC which is the "least custom" ASIC. From BFL's words it seems they've put in more money and developing a more advanced type of ASIC. Also, their release time will be later in the future so the may be aiming for better process technologies.

Well this thread/product is no different from BFL approaches, he posted here actively for the first few pages and since then nothing from the OP. If this product was meant to be released surely he would want to keep it active regarding development and what not?

It's not like he hasn't been here looking at what people said ;)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=6982
Last Active:    June 18, 2012, 08:44:04 PM

Actually, it's hugely different. BFL took full payment upfront and delayed shipment for months. For largecoin, according to the OP, only 15% of the price is held in escrow. Better than that, you get to have the product for a full month before paying the remaining price.

Has anyone else gotten the most recent Largecoin announcement, the survey I mean?  It seems that BFL has partially succeeded in scaring its competitors.

Yeah. All BFL's competitors must be pissed off, unsure whether they should continue developing their own stuff or leave the ship before it sinks.

the competition will benefit everyone eventually...

i dont think BFL will be able to supply the demand so we should see some others coming up

Did LargeCoin start shipping yet ?

Who cares. What's the deal with all the competitors focusing on making the units more energy efficient, but doubling the cost? The only way competition is ever gonna gain any ground is when they offer better GH/s per $. Electricity cost is not that important when performance gets that high. The hardware will be obsolete by the time it does matter. I'll take a mini rig any day over this thing. You can't win when your focusing on saving pennies at the cost of dollars.

"Your deposit guarantees that LargeCoin will ship you a C200 IMU by July 31, 2012,"

So did no-one deposit, or what?

-MarkM-

Right, Largecoin never got to the stage of requesting deposits from preorderers.

Then how do I connect to the bitcoin protocol?

Largecoin is not a competitor of BFL.

However, do not worry (as always) there will be lots of competition to fill the cracks that BFL leaves.

I suspect everyone who pre-ordered is under an NDA - which is kind of annoying, as it leaves no public statement (that I'm aware of) as to whether the project is proceeding or not.

Cute thread. Whatever happened with this?

I signed an NDA so I can't share any of the details.  But I can make stuff up.  I bought 12 of these for about $68,000 dollars, that's when bitcoins were worth $3.75 each so I got a good deal.  I've been mining with them for about 13 months now.  They actually produce electricity along with the bitcoins so I earn a little extra by selling power back to the utility.  Worked out really well.  In my head at least.

Sam

No more f*cking pre-order crap. If you don't have the money to build your sh*t before you try to sell it, then get a loan or find another business. This pre-order bullsh*t is unacceptable.

Pre-order money for this was never collected, and even had it been, it was to be held in escrow, not used for development.

And why are you getting upset about something that happened 9 months ago?

Edit: I agree.

Some NDAs treat the existence of the NDA as part of the information covered by the NDA.
If such an NDA happened to exist for LargeCoin - I wouldn't be able to disclose that fact, if I had signed it.

If such an NDA existed and I had seen it but not signed it - I would be able to and highly likely to disclose that it existed.

I'm not disclosing that such an NDA exists - and I'm not saying why I'm not disclosing that. It's possible that it's because it doesn't exist.

I generally dislike NDAs  - but have been known to sign some of them.


I was unable to purchase any equipment from LargeCoin - but I'm not disclosing the reason, nor am I disclosing why I'm not disclosing the reason. It's possible that it's because I signed an NDA - or not.

Now you're scaring me.

Anyway, I fail to see the logic of this, as the existence of an NDA is not one of the facts whose sharing was conditioned on signing it.

You don't have shit julz. Stop attention whoring.

Well, by 'existence of the NDA' in that sentence  - I don't quite mean just the document - but the resultant 'agreement' between parties.  That fits my reading of a recent NDA document I saw, but obviously IANAL.

So, I think it's perfectly fine to acknowledge that LargeCoin was sending out NDA documents for signing, but if you signed it and if it happened to have clauses like the one being discussed, you probably shouldn't disclose anything about what was in it, or that you signed it.

I don't understand the point of your post. You think that fits the pattern with how I post?

Well, you tried to appear intellectual in dragging this back into debate without any clue on the situation itself.
Pointless imo, but don't let me stop you. To be honest I didn't even thought I'd get a response since I assumed I'm on your ignore-list.

The thing has been debated to death already, come back when the BFL drama is over then it might rise from the dead again. (or not)

I support this statement  :D

And that is why i cancelled all my orders with everyone. The excuse train got a bit too long for my taste. I'm glad i cut that string.  :D

What boggles the mind is the fact that if you don't like pre-orders, why would you pre-order? It's pretty simple, if you disagree with it, don't do it.  It's not like you're forced to.

So your inability to deliver on your time lines by 3 months is not called pre-orders

 

Please stop posting and let this thread die a natural death.
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