Double the IPO price per share is low?

There are too many to list so here's just the main ones off the top of my head.

- Guaranteed price 25% less than the competition at time of shipping, which was later changed to match competition prices, then was completely thrown out the window because they couldn't afford to increase compensate due to their use of "premium quality parts".

- Completely lied in January about being on track for February delivery when they haven't even taped-out yet.

- Offered refunds but changed their mind and are now shipping hardware to those who requested them.

- Censoring negative posts on these and their own forums. Over 100 pages deleted on this forum alone. They even went as far as to make a moderating bot that automatically deletes certain users posts every 15 minutes. They are also claiming anyone with a negative opinion against BA is a paid shill from some competitor..

- Created a "naughtly list" like AMT so everyone critical of the company can receive special treatment. They even posted someones full name/address to "prove" they weren't a BA customer but in fact the person had purchased BA hardware from minersource (who gave BA the info).

- Apparently no money for refunds but enough money to make a scrypt asics as well as a 14nm bitcoin asic.

It's almost an exact repeat of BFL from a year ago.

Nice update.

Although saying BA has minor quality issues is a huge stretch.

As far as I know every single X3 shipped to date is at risk of catching on fire, X1's have a 50/50 chance of being dead and plenty of other issues with the hardware.

Also AMT and BA both deserve 1/10 in ethics for BFL'ing.

I don't think it needs explaining why they deserve BFL status but incase you haven't been following the shitstorms I'd be happy to explain.

I think you mean you hypothesize they are all practical. Until you can demonstrate that you can recover X watts with minimal loss, year round, and without needing 5 times as much hardware as normal I wouldn't consider anything proven.

But I do agree you are completely failing to properly explain your concept and hopefully will have much more to show by time the kickstarter campaign begins.

Your website needs to be completely redone no offense. I'd suggest taking a hint from these guys: http://www.allied-control.com/ . You should include calculations, diagrams, explanations, and cut out the BS.


Donating to solar roadways is pretty much admitting engineering is not your thing.

I think your concept is definitely possible and doesn't break any of the laws of physics, but I just cant see it being ever beneficial cost/energy wise.


It's quite simple, they are taking advantage of the gullible who want to save teh planet. How they received grant money is beyond me but clearly it wasn't thought out by a professional.

They raised $750,000 to build a 40 square meter solar parking lot. That is $18,000/m2. The same parking lot could have been entirely covered with asphalt for $80 total (~$15,000 if you wanted to cover it with a solar panel roof). I really doubt it costs that much as I'm sure most of the grant money went directly in to the inventors retirement fund, but it's not cheap by any means.

Most people think current solar technology is still far from being cost effective and to add a thick chuck of glass(not cheap), integrated circuits(not cheap), leds, heaters, etc, only makes it that much more expensive. And having solar panels parallel to the ground instead of perpendicular to the sun greatly reduces efficiency.

It's basically just spending ~$1000/m2 so you can combine a road ($2/m2) with a solar panel ($300/m2). It's all just a gimmick.

There are so many much bullshit claims it's impossible to get to all of them in a few paragraphs so I'll just leave you with some videos explaining it more: http://youtu.be/H901KdXgHs4 http://youtu.be/ocV-RnVQdcs

I really hope you guys won't be asking for a ludicrous amount of money so early in the experimental stage.

Have you really run out of experimenting funds in the theoretical stage?

Seems like a group of people with access to a national lab and fancy simulation software should have no problem buying an old used refrigerator and hooking it up to a water cooling loop to prove your theory.

I'd even be willing to bet you could have bought a used refrigerator or AC for less money than you wasted on those two hot water tanks.


You've demonstrated that you can keep hot water in an insulated tank and heat the water using a computer but literally nobody thought that was impossible or hard to do.

You've really proven nothing new, especially none of the key concepts you're suggesting are practical.

It's just like how solar roadways has "proven" you can recover electricity from solar panels on a road but in reality it makes absolutely no sense economically.


How can you possibly begin raising funds without a clear business model?

Or is fleecing kickstarter tards the plan?

Not sure if you can rent them yet but you could probably buy a container from allied control.

Hopefully datatank gets going soon and sticks to their hosting plan at $60/kw.

I don't know how air cooled/single phase IC datacenters will compete especially considering the efficiency bonus you get from 2-phase. (65C chips vs 105C chips.)

What is your estimated cooling infrastructure $/W for high density hardware like an SP30?

Your site says $1/w but I'm assuming that's not right because that's about twice as expensive as 2 phase immersion cooling.

AM tubes are about that price and to get bulk rates with them you only need to spend the equivalent of a single SP31.

Edit: Canary's GB is offering single units so 0.8btc is the most you would for bulk rates.

Can you ask dreamchip if they have already developed/produced/tested scrypt asics for MAT?

They claim to already have chips and working miners.

Care to share your calculations?

Only in a perfect world where weather conditions never change throughout the year and people always use the same amount of heating/AC/hot water/refrigeration, this might work well.


Where else would you publish it, the local newspaper? You guys came to this forum asking for feedback without giving us any idea of what your product does. We really shouldn't have to pry this info from you especially when you're weeks from launching a kickstarter.

What exactly is your business model? Will you be running a monetized distributed network? Selling the rube golberg machines by themselves? Selling hardware+rube golberg machine combos? Designing a chip? Installing/servicing entire home integrated systems?

Not sure how we're supposed to know/discuss your concept while you guys are providing as little information as possible.

So far here's what you've demonstrated:

- Using a computer creates heat which can then be sent through a watercooling loop to an insulated tank that can store the heat for a few hours and release it when heating is needed. (subtracted the rube golberg part)
- By spending several hundreds of dollars you can match the efficiency of a stock cpu fan+heatsink when it comes to heating your home using a computer.

Here's what you need to demonstrate:

- You can store 190F water in a tank for hours without significant heat loss.
- You can use 190F water from a computer to efficiently and cost effectively power a watertank/AC/refrigerator.
- You can efficiently power each of those appliances at the same time.
- You can do so while maintaining a constant/efficient computing rate throughout the day/year.
- You can prove the costs are not more than regular gas/electric heating.
- You can give people an incentive to run their computers 24/7/365 (it's not like people are naturally using 1.5KW 24/7. More like ~200W a few hours a day)

Until then you really have no business starting a crowdfunding campaign, but that's just my opinion.

Are you saying that currently only 55% of the heat stays in the loop when you want to use it for refrigeration/AC? 45% waste?


Correct, it will not be economic.

Here's a simplified comparison for 1MW worth of computing power:

A: Classic datacenter Capex: - hardware: $1,000,000 - Warehouse+infrastructure: $200,000 Opex(yearly): - Electricity: $570,000 (1.3MW at $0.05/kwh) - Employees:$100,000 5 Year total: $4,500,000

B: Distributed computing (using your method) Capex: - Hardware: $5,000,000* - Cooling recovery system: $5,000,000* (~$1/W at 5MW) - Distributing/shipping: $500,000 Opex: - Employees: $500,000** 5 year total: $13,000,000

<sup>*Assuming it would require 5 times the amount of hardware because it's being used 25% of the time due to none of your applications requiring 100% load 100% of the time and a 20% efficiency loss due to the hot chips. This is also assuming the system is 100% efficient at recovering the heat but your post suggest it might be closer to 50%.

**I've got no idea how many people it takes to properly run a distributed computing network but I'm sure it takes more than the 2 people needed top operate a large scale bitcoin mine. (guessing at least 10 employees)</sup>


So basically you will have ~$9.3M extra startup costs so you can save ~$170k/year.. In this scenario it would take more than 50 years to pay off.

Overall cool idea, just entirely unpractical like solar roadways.

Side note: Do you plan on having certified technicians around the country ready to fix peoples heater/AC/refrigeration systems when they stop working? Will you be reimbursing customers for all their spoiled food when the computer crashes for a few hours?

They don't use heated water do they? I'm assuming there would need to be some modifications to the house/heating elements.


That's the problem. 3-4 years is ~50-60 years in bitcoin time.


Thinking about it from a non-bitcoin mining point of view I can actually see some use for your idea.

With bitcoin mining you need giant a warehouse in the middle of nowhere with dirt cheap electricity and maximum cooling. It would take a massive refrigerator to reuse 10+MW worth of heat.



I meant 90% of the energy used for heating is used for space heating. The graphs on your website would suggest about 60% of the energy used for heating is used for space heating in 2009. I'm sure the efficiency of absorption cooling has improved in the past 5 years and will continue to improve but heating technology will not so I think we will eventually see 90% being used for heating.



No problem. Another question for you:

How will you be heating water up to ~90C while keeping the asics/cpus/gpus cool? Water cooling normally has a ~10C dT between the water and the chip so if you need 90C water you will have a 100C chip. They are capable of working at that temp but depending on the design it will have an efficiency loss of ~0.25-1%/C.

So if you need to heat the water an extra 40C you could be using 40%-10% more power meaning you will need more hardware. The production costs of the most advanced bitcoin asics (starting from wafers) are ~$0.4/w so the costs are not insignificant. (although the costs are guaranteed to go down as process nodes shrink)



How many of those companies building absorption refrigeration plants are using datacenters as a heat source?

I know the technology is not new but it's not removing the cooling element. You will still need fans+heatsinks (or cooling towers, etc) to cool the water as well as electricity for the two water pumps required.

Please do get into the thermodynamics. I'd love to know how you can cool something using nothing but heat. I'm sure there are also several multi-billion dollar companies wondering the same thing.

This is a scam in the same way solar roadways is a scam. It is a neat idea that doesn't make sense economically.


How much do you expect a modified refrigerator/air conditioner would cost/save? I really doubt you will recycle enough energy to justify the costs whatever they may be.

You might be able to save a few hundred dollars if you heated your water tank for a year using an asic, but your contraption cost would probably negate those savings. Not many people mine for more than a few months and those who do have very low electricity costs which makes recycling pointless.

The real savings would come from space heating but you don't need a rube goldberg machine for that.


Ignoring the fact that most modern datacenters use ~10-30% for cooling and that converting all their air cooled hardware to water cooled would cost an obscene amount of money, how do you plan on moving several hundred KW worth of heat from a datacenter to a place that needs it?

I don't doubt it can be done but I really doubt it can be done cost effectively.


The question is what portion? Have you done calculations on how much electricity you might be able to recycle? I'd love to see a cost/savings breakdown.


But if 90% of that energy is spent on space heating, why not use a $25 heatsink+fan instead of a $300 rube goldberg machine and another ~$1000 for a modified AC+refrigerator?

Basically you can recycle ~$2700 without modifying your hardware by space heating, or you can spend an extra ~$300 to save $3000(~$300 extra) by incorporating water heating.

Wise of you to go with kickstarter. This is exactly the type of scam they eat up.


I'm not sure what concept you are proving or even what you are trying to say. Seems like you're just circumventing the question.

Watercooling is a widely proven technology. You've just added a water tank that stores the hot water and cools it later.

Why not just heat the air by computing when you need heating instead of when you don't? (via a $20 heatsink+fan combo)

Honestly what's the point?


Please do share. Preferably without the obfuscation.

For one, everything you and your website says is worded like a scam.

For two, this is the most absurd idea I've heard in my life.

This is a rube goldberg machine disguised as a futuristic innovative cooling/heating thingy.

Subtracting all the bullshit and obfuscation this is how I understand your contraption: A watercooling loop delivers heated water to an insulated tank which then goes through a radiator to heat the air when you need it.

What happens when the tank is full of hot water and the cpu needs cool water? Will it shut off the cpu? underclock? heat the room when it's is already heated?

Why would anyone buy this contraption for presumably hundreds of dollars when a $20 cpu+fan does essentially the same thing?

Has the prototype been tested with the "improved asics"?

Sacramento.

Price is firm for now.

You see absolutely nothing wrong with investing in and advertising a ponzi scheme?

You're preying on financially ignorant/naive idiots which makes you a borderline scammer for perpetuating such an obvious scam which should have never got off the ground to begin with.

Good luck with your scamming.

At least nobody here (other than you) is desperate enough to advertise the most obvious ponzi scheme in bitcoin history.

Do you have no shame?