As per the FAQ in the second post, we are not doing escrow; however, I will ask JohnK if he can verify my identity to the community, as in I am who I say I am. I trust that might help a bit, assuming he agrees to do this.
Cheers,
Luis

Yes, that is the TL;DR (summary) version. I would add that we also will be testing the units for a very brief time to ensure they are fully working and hopefully avoid any DOA's.

I believe we are offering the lowest price thus far, and yes, while shipping is a bit expensive, there's also other overhead costs: plane tickets to/from Russia, rent of a secure office space, hiring of employees to receive, test & re-ship units, our time to co-ordinate all of this.

Cheers,
Luis

Heh, it does now that you mention it, but I don't want to post a high res picture of myself. I'm not that pretty to look at, besides, if it was a cardboard cut-out, surely Yifu would have removed the towel off his shoulder before mass production of cardboard cut outs being distributed globally.  ;-)

Hi xristoskostouros,

I hear you, I personally missed out on an Avalon purchase for the exact same reason, as in some cases it can take days to transfer funds from a bank account to a bitcoin exchange, to then buy the equipment, and by that time all the equipment has been sold - which is very likely what will happen with this offer as well. We've explained further in FAQ Q#2 in our second post above.

Kind Regards,
Luis

Hi, please see Q#1 and 3 in our FAQ section (2nd post). I fully understand the nature of risk in what we are offering given we don't control the supply chain from end to end. Risking 30 BTC is not for everyone and these forums are littered with scams, but the best we can offer is to fully refund our profit margin in the event metabank/bitfury turn out to be a scam or a failed venture.

Kind regards,
Luis

Thanks for your question dogie. We've answered in our second post above in the FAQ section.
Cheers,
Luis

Greetings, I've been recording amateur videos of the conference as I go along. Professional videos should be out in a week or two by bitcoin foundation, but for those who couldn't make it, here's some shaky but watchable videos. I will keep uploading more over the next few days. Enjoy!
If you are feeling generous, please tip/thank me here:
185By4a1Lt2HnKLAKR5EmidZMYgp5D­DSaj

BITCOIN 2013 FUTURE OF PAYMENT VIDEOS: http://www.youtube.com/user/digitalmagus7/videos?flow=grid&view=0

Hi tacotime,

Finally, somebody working on a coin that substantially improves upon bitcoin, and is not just another copy/paste clone with a few changed parameters. I'm not a cryptologist or a programmer, but I'd like to provide some real world input where IMO bitcoin is failing and where improvement is seriously needed for mass adoption or longevity of the currency is to become a reality. Here's a few things to consider improving:

1) Transaction times - Starbucks, gas station and grocery lineups (something many of us deal with daily) are long enough as it is, can you imagine the patience of people in a lineup to wait for your 10 minute cryptocoin transaction to go through?! Or imagine on black Friday, you need to purchase that $1,000 flatscreen and BestBuy makes you wait for 6 confirmations (~1hour) before approving the transaction. We BADLY need transaction times to be 30 seconds or less, ideally on par or better than credit cards. This IMO is the #1 hurdle to mass adoption. Who the heck wants to wait around to pay for something? And which business owner wants less customers because they are too frustrated waiting around to buy something?

2) Network Security - Please don't make the same mistake as bitcoin and use a single TCP port that can be shut down on a firewall in less than 1 minute. Imagine the currency gets too popular and government somehow passes a law to shut it down under some false pretense (ZOMG its used by Al-queida and drugdealers!). Bitcoin can be shut down overnight by blocking TCP port 8333 at all Tier1 ISPs. The counter argument of the bitcoin developers is extremely poor, in that, there's other open source software such as TOR or i2p that bitcoin could function through... but that assumes that bitcoin would even survive the TCP port shutdown attack which is pretty much cost free to the government. Look at Mtgox.. it gets DDOS'ed for a few hours and bitcoin value crashes by 70%+. Now imagine a firewall rule that blocks bitcoin at the Tier1 ISP backbone level, and 95% of the users who don't have a clue about Tor or i2P (or 99.9999% of non-tech users), and you can bet the currency will crash to near ZERO and be finished. In other words, include proper network layer security from day 1 ! This is far more important that trying to figure out how to prevent complex 51% attacks. This costs ZERO money for the government and ISPs to do, every ISP already has firewalls as part of their core and edge infrastructure. And if you think the USA would never pass such a law to enact the crushing of a popular competing currency... well then think about the other 190+ countries on this planet that may pass such laws with far less hesitation.

3) ASIC security - Using 8 different sCrypt algorithms somewhat randomly is an improvement, but what's to prevent mining software from rejecting anything but type 1 Scrypt algo block and mining only those? This would result in at least 8 different types of ASICs needed, sure, but not ASIC proof, IMO. Alternatively, you could still create an ASIC that could direct mining to one of 8 segments of the ASIC and still be much faster than GPU mining. This would mean you have a much more complex ASIC design and 1/8th the potential crunching power, but still many orders of magnitude better than PC/GPUs/FPGAs. So my suggestion is please don't think like Bill Gates that 640K or.. 8 algos should be enough. Why not make it 4096+ of them and outright discourage any kind of ASIC... ever. My concern with ASICs isn't even somebody trying to make a lot of money faster than others, but rather government 3 letter agencies throwing 1 Billion printed dollars at the problem creating an ASIC farm, and killing the coin altogether. The NSA just built a 2 billion dollar data center in 2012. With a Homeland security budget in the Trillions, 1 billion is like petty cash, and you can bet that preventing the US dollar from collapse against popularity gaining crypto currencies  is a homeland security issue.

4) The 5th grader problem - Let's face it, Joe 6 pack can't do basic math, he is not smarter than a 5th grader, even less so in 3rd world countries where education is seriously lacking. DON'T fractionalize the coins into ridiculous numbers of decimal places, or make people use 8 different fractional acronyms mBTC, satoshi's etc. The major problem with bitcoin from gaining mass adoption is that it is seriously not adhering to the KISS (keep it simple stupid) principle. You think in 10 years, your average person is really going to understand or want to deal with .000004 bitcoins? Please consider the Brazilian solution. Brazil in the past few decades had  severe bouts of high inflation in their "Real" currency... after the inflation got too high, i.e. the number of ZEROs on the notes got too be too many they simply issued a new currency and said something like 1,000 of the old Real's are now worth 1 of the new issued Real's. This didn't solve the high inflation issues of course, but it's a simple solution that could solve trying to deal with .24056794 bitcoins to buy a loaf of bread.

5) Anonymity Improvements - I'm not sure why satoshi only went 1/2 way to make the bitcoin anonymous. Clearly he didn't go far enough in the eyes of many. There are now all kinds of academics studying the bitcoin blockchain and trying to figure out who has how many coins (including satoshi himself), and where they live. Look, blockchain.info can identify a user's aproximate location and map it: http://blockchain.info/tx/58d961336f14d3c8305dfe193c5e00ac00a3a9de21aa605ee701da714fb1657c
Please prevent identifying user's IP and thus geo location. I know IPs aren't in the blockchain, but they can and are apparently being collected by major nodes  - this could be mitigated by having bitcoin work within a TOR like system. Probably there are many other anonymity improvements that can be made, I am just mentioning the most glaring one for me.

6) Wishlist - I honestly don't understand 80% of the items on this bitcoin improvement wish list, but seriously consider implementing the best ones because from my understanding, once a coin gets too popular, the risk of making any major changes becomes ever bigger, and thus innovation will stall. In other words, get it right from the get go as much as possible, because hardforks are not popular. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hardfork_Wishlist

7) Hardforks - Why are hardforks so hard on the system? Chrome and IE now force automatic updates upon 100's of millions of users, with little seeming repercussions... why not do the same with your coin? If auto-updates are not somehow possible, then establish a coin-holiday, or several a year (say 1 major update opportunity per quarter), where all clients/miners must update to the new patch-level whose details of course would be pre-announced. Also, if you can, think of a way to establish an Emergency change system in case something goes horribly wrong by accident.

8 ) SatoshiDice blockchain pollution - Please figure out a way that the blockchain doesn't get polluted with 5 million .00001 transactions per day. Please discourage ridiculous micro transactions. Micro transactions are definitely wanted, but not millions of them by the same entity. What % of the blockchain now is satoshidice garbage ? Maybe have a transaction fee that is high enough to prevent excessive number of small transactions.

9) The Mega Blockchain problem - Is there any viable way to prevent the blockchain from growing into Terabytes of size? Can we not archive it every X years or every X gigabytes or something ? I mean, sure storage is cheap these days and bandwidths are getting higher, but think like a Chinese government in loooong timespans. In 200 years, how large might the blockchain be? 5 billion petabytes ? Hopefully we won't hit a technological wall of storage or bandwidth along the way resulting in the crash of the currency because no more transactions can be added to the blockchain, because every user would have to own their own private data center.

10) Democratic voting of interest rates - I'm not sure this is such a good idea, with humanity being what it is. The lowest common denominator would always win, and this is rarely the best decision that can be made.  This is readily evident in today's government formations. Nobody goes on a campaign trail announcing massive necessary spending cuts, increases in taxes or interest rates, because none of the constituents in their right mind want less money. Likewise, if people could vote on things like interest rates, they would always vote for whatever is best for them right now, not for the survival of the system in the long run. Thus, I think satoshi had it right in that the problem with fiat is that it is controlled by humans, and the advantage of bitcoin is that everyone can trust an intelligent algorithm. As the philosophers proclaim (paraphrase): Genius does not belong the majority, it is the inherent attribute of the rarest of human. .... fortunately for us, we can work hard at making a genius algorithm.

Thanks for your consideration and best of luck with your new coin! I'm keeping one eye on it :-)
DigitalMagus

I realize I'm replying here about 9 months after the last post... but I think I may have something to add. I was under the impression (since I last looked into the password cracking topic about 15 years ago), that back then the latest preferred method was to use "rainbow tables". As I recall, this is basically a huge file that contains confirmed hashes that correspond to specific passwords. With this table, the cracking software no longer needs to brute force each hash - the rainbow tables file is the output of huge brute force attempts. Thus, the cracking of passwords is now reduced to taking the hash of a password file, looking it up like a database search against the same hash already recorded in the rainbow tables file, and spitting out the clear text password in a split second, thus no brute forcing is involved at all - because that work was already done ONCE to create the rainbow-table file.

My point being, I don't think there's any point at all in creating an ASIC to brute force crack passwords, because rainbow tables already have all the brute force work reduced to one (or more) huge file(s).  I believe there are online projects where hacke....er... people are creating multi-terabyte sized rainbow table files that contain every possible hash variation of X length passwords. If anything, a custom ASIC could be used to create these rainbow tables much faster than normal PCs or GPUs; but to provide real-time password cracking services, probably doesn't make that much sense (I think). So with rainbow tables, I think the speed of finding the password in a hash becomes more about I/O - how fast can the hash/password finder application dig through multi-terabyte files to match the hash you are looking for? In theory, if the rainbow tables are like indexed databases, even multi-terabyte files should yield a password recovery in a few seconds.

Comments?

Wow, a very useful newbie post. Thanks!

Hi I'm digitalmagus. Have been reading about bitcoin for over 40 hours, but just realized I have to make 5 posts before I can actually ask questions/make posts in other forums. So enjoy this mostly pointless post #2.

I've been reading bitcoin forums for about a week, over 30 hours into this, I finally have a question, so I register an account, and LOL, I have to wait some undetermined time before I can post in the forum section I need to... which ironically is about ASIC units taking forever to ship and people waiting for them, not to mention it takes a lot of waiting to mine bitcoins. *sigh*