You should probably put the 620 watt figure on your website so that people are clear about the amount of power the whole unit consumes.

Yifu, you really need to address the power consumption issue before Batch 2 pre-orders start.  When you said there was a "surprise" onboard, this is not what people were expecting and the fact that you didn't even inform people about it is a blow to your credibility -  I'm a bit taken aback given how honest you guys have generally been.

Jeff's machine got special shipping because it was intended to arrive on a specific day.  Avalon said towards the end of January that shipping the units was going to cost more than they thought so it may well be more than they charged for batch 1. This may be another reason why they're so keen on resellers entering the game.

Ouch.  That's massively over what was expected.  It's even worse that there was no warning from Yifu about it.

They were originally intending to charge $1999 for Batch 2.

Avalon made clear at the outset that they needed pre-orders for 300 units in order for the project to go ahead.  People were begging them to increase the amount of units available in Batch 1 and they refused, which is hardly the hallmark of a greedy company.  Batch 2 orders are only being opened now and those units will be available at $1499 rather than the $1999 which was originally planned for Batch 2.  They've openly stated that pre-order money will be used to build the units.

Tom was obviously dependent on pre-order money for the bASIC project, too - we know that he needed additional funds to complete it when things went wrong even though the project had some investors from the community.

BFL is the only company which has said it had sufficient funds to develop its ASICs without pre-order money.

I seriously doubt that any of the Bitcoin vendors are going to show any meaningful profit from their first runs.

Batch 2 is scheduled for delivery in early March.  You can't order "right now".  Batch 2 orders open later today.  Not sure yet when Batch 3 orders will open.

That won't be the case once BFL catches up on their pre-orders.  They'll be looking at a turnaround time of a couple of days from order to shipping then - faster than Dell can build me and ship me a computer and certainly faster than the two months or so I have to wait for built to order furniture that I've paid for.

ASIC pre-order customers have taken substantial risks - there's no doubt about that - but the option of waiting until BFL pre-orders were cleared has always been there.  Those who pre-ordered wanted to be the first to get ASICs because they realise that every ASIC which hits the market diminishes the profitability of all other ASICs.  Most were hoping to have their ASICs in hand before the block reward halved and thought that they'd have a significant head start on ASIC mining before a large number of ASICs were delivered by different vendors.  They viewed the potential reward as being worth the risk.  

The big thing to remember is that this product has one purpose - to generate income in the form of Bitcoins.  That people will take huge risks in pursuit of Bitcoins has been demonstrated time and time again.

BFL has already stated that they won't lie on customs paperwork and I doubt that any of the other vendors will either.  It's way too easy to lose your right to ship to a country if you start playing games with customs.

I would hope that customers had enough brains to find out about any duty/tax they'll have to pay on their units long ago so we don't see whiny threads from people who don't have the money to get their units out of customs when they land.

Do you build to order in your job?  It's actually pretty common to pay upfront and not be able to get a refund on built to order goods.  Bitcoins ASICs have had a long timeline from order to delivery on their first batches and you're right that customers were bearing a large risk.  I don't think you can say that they were bearing all the risk, though, because it's highly likely that first batch sales didn't cover development costs.

No-one's forcing anyone to pre-order.  Plenty of people have decided to wait until BFL is shipping on a normal retail basis rather than pre-order from anyone.

You're apparently also overlooking the fact that Avalon didn't intend to ship rigs initially so they weren't set up for that.  They've been open about the fact that pre-order funds for Batch 2 will be used to build the units.

They're also not naming which "huge corporation" they're a division of - despite saying that they want people to "get to know them".  No huge corporation would have let that verbal vomit be posted.  The announcement that they had bought bASIC would have been carefully crafted by someone who can write English.  Comments about Tom, Dave and BFL wouldn't have been approved for posting on the website.  References to bASIC would have been removed if they're re-branding.  A "huge corporation" would have made sure that the announcement included the names and contact numbers of the division staff.

It will work fine and then suddenly I'll get 502 errors for 5 minutes straight.

Not sure if it's relevant but I'm using mobile broadband and I'm pretty sure my ISP uses an open proxy.

There's always more, and it's always worse.

Still getting a LOT of 502 errors here.

Not to mention the fact that "huge corporate manufacturers" have whole PR teams who can actually spell and whose sole job is to promote their company as often and as loudly as possible.  There's not a snowflake's chance in hell that a representative of a "huge corporation" wouldn't be splashing the name of that corporation around all over the place, giving their real name and their contact details to everyone.

Anyone who claims to work for a "large corporation" and doesn't tell you at which office they can be located on which phone number they can be contacted is full of shit.  No exceptions.

Stop spamming the same post in every Avalon thread.  If you weren't so busy spamming you'd know that Bitcoin Foundation has posted a video of their Avalon unit in action.


This might change now.  It looks like the delivery of the first two units was intended to coincide with Yifu's 23rd birthday (Jeff already posted that he wasn't meant to get his yesterday) and the announcement that Batch 2 units will have room for 6 boards. 

Happy 23rd birthday Yifu!  Now we know why the first deliveries were meant to happen today and not yesterday.

Regardless of who dominates the ASIC market in the future, I hope you guys will always treasure this moment and use it as inspiration for the future.


Bitcoin Foundation have also received their ASIC and they've posted videos.  At what point are you going to accept the reviews as being legitimate?

Or they both consider it logical to make a customisable/upgradeable product and it's a commonsense choice rather than anyone "copying" someone else.

I honestly wonder if the level of fanboi-ism would be so great had the products been delivered last year.  It seems to me like people have become irrationally emotionally attached to ASIC products and I wonder if there's going to be a lot of disappointment in them once Avalon, BFL, ASICMiner and Goliath have all thrown significant new hashing power at the network.


I suspect that any ASIC vendor who isn't already thinking about the design of their next generation products is going to be left behind.  We're going to hit the situation where it's not profitable to buy single units very quickly and the number of people who can just keep buying more units to maintain a constant proportion of total hashing power will be limited.  For everyone else, the level of diminishing returns is going to happen sooner rather than later.

These are first generation products.  It's reasonable to expect that both Avalon and BFL's first units will encounter some problems in real-world conditions.  Maybe those issues can be easily addressed and maybe they can't but it's a risk which every early adopter of a new technology takes.

I think one problem the ASIC vendors are going to encounter is unrealistic customer expectations.  The delays is getting these units produced and shipped means that people have had a long time to build up expectations which might not be reasonable and might not be happy with receiving the same product now which they would have been thrilled to receive in October.