One problem with pre-orders, is that the customers that order first, get their devices several days or weeks earlier than others, thus extract significantly more value from them.

Option 1

I believe that pre-orders should be priced on a sliding scale in batches based on estimated shipping day.  For example, if the company estimates that they can ship 200 orders per day, then the pricing would be broken down into blocks of 200 units.  The first batch would be full price, then each following batch would be reduced in price based on the estimated BTC mined per day.  For example, batch 2 would be $100 cheaper than batch 1, and batch 3 would be $100 cheaper than batch 2, etc.

For example, with the recent KnC orders, all customers paid $7000 for a Jupiter, but some got them on Oct 5th while others still haven't been shipped.  In that time frame, there have been 2 difficulty resets which means that the early miners could have made at least 6-10 BTC more than later orders.

Option 2

Customers should pay a fee to get a place in line, such as 10 BTC.  When it gets close to shipping time, customers would pay the remaining balance based on the date of their device shipping.  The later it ships, the lower the price.  The final price would be determined by the difficulty and expected difficulty increases at the time of shipping rather than at the time of setting up the pre-order.

The advantage here is that the pricing would better reflect the worth of the device when it ships since it is very difficult to estimate hashing rates 3 months out.

This reminds me of when Avalon was supposed to deliver, then didn't for two more months.  I have 3 devices on pre-order so I'm just as anxious as the rest of you, but I don't think a single ASIC company has delivered when they said they would, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

(They better not take too long or I won't make any money.  if they delay they better start shipping more horse power to make up for it)

What are you talking about?

I had just noticed this as well.  Over the last 3 days the estimated hash rate has gone from 550 TH/s to 800 TH/s according to Blockchain.info.

For those that have pre-ordered gear due in two months, this is not a promising development.

If I was turning on a huge mining platform... wouldn't it be best to do it right at a difficulty reset to get the maximum length of time at a given difficulty?  By starting it up in the middle of a difficulty, it'll cause the next reset to go a lot higher.

I have 3 Avalons delivered at the beginning of July.  My total BTC income just hit 200 BTC.  My total expenses were about 56 BTC per device, so 168 BTC.  That gives me a total operating income of 32 BTC.  My electricity is about $200 per month, so it looks like I'm up about 28-29 BTC.

I have reinvested the vast major of that 200 BTC into KnC and Hashfast gear.  I was saving up for Cointerra gear but i was disappointed with the pricing.  I'm now saving up BTC for Gen 2 gear that should be coming out Q1 2014.

For the power supplies, if I have a Jupiter and a Saturn, I could use a bigger power supply and run the extra PCI-E cords and power both devices with the same PSU, right?  That'd save a little bit of cash on the startup costs.

The point is just that the longer that they take to ship, the longer for the ROI.  If it ships quick, ROI could be weeks or a month, if it ships just a month later, it could take 3-4 months for ROI, so a short delay equals an exponentially longer ROI, or negative ROI.

Don't worry about it. It's been mentioned before and said it has something to do with the changes in the timing code in the new firmware.  Mine are the same way and are mining a bit faster than with the 0703 firmware.

Good point. I am in the US and I'm used to getting shipments in 2-3 days.  I guess I get spoiled by Amazon Prime.

I received 1 Avalon on July 1 and 2 more on July 7.  I've reach break-even (in BTC), but give me some time to collect all the numbers for a more detailed analysis.

I don't see any reason to buy a PSU until they've announced that they are shipping.  You never know if they'll come back with specific PSU recommendations that are tested and known to work instead of just guessing.

That Enermax only has 2 PCI-E connectors according to the cables tab on the website.  Jupiter requires 4.  I'm not sure which PSUs supply 4 PCI-E connectors, unless we'd have to use adapters.

PCI-E plugs are either 6 or 8 pin plugs. You can tell which they are because the wires are yellow and black only.

Are you saying that the chip is socketed so it can be removed and replaced with a different chip?

I don't think mining solo with Avalon's is a good idea right now, especially if you only have a few or one.  In the last two months, my 3 Avalons have only mined 1 block, amazingly enough.  My total pool revenue is around 160 BTC, so I should have found 6.5 blocks during this time.  A pool is good because the faster the pool is, the more frequently the pool will find a block and even though you only get a small part of that block, it is much more consistent than solo mining.

With the difficulty the way it is, you will be better off with pool mining.

In the beginning of ASICs, I can understand the need for pre-orders to get the funds to actually create the devices and there was little competition.  The difficulty rate wouldn't change dramatically over a few months.

However, now with the difficulty rate skyrocketing, it's very difficult to know what the rate will be in 3 months when a pre-order to due to be shipped, making it hard to make a good judgment on the ROI.

The rapidly changing difficulty rate means that ASIC vendors will need to start taking orders within a month of the order date so that pricing can be adjusted appropriately for the difficultly level.

I would caution consumers though that our pre-orders are funding large ASIC companies who will eventually have enough money to just built chips and mine for themselves with no incentive to sell the actual devices.  I predict that within the next 2 years that nearly all of the bitcoin hashrate will be provided by large farms from a few ASIC manufacturers rather than individual miners.

I just upgraded last night and my "--avalon-auto" clocks are up at least 5mhz.  My pool is reporting my workers running at 260GH/s versus 242GH/s before the upgrade.

This is disappointing, I have been holding out specifically for CoinTerra.

I ran an ROI calculator, and if you assume that they deliver late in December, and that difficult continues to rise exponentially through December, the device will never coup its cost.  It's amazing that a 2TH/s device at $16 won't be worth it.  A few months ago that would have been an amazing device.

If you just look at how many bitcoins it'll be able to produce, it looks like it'll be able to generate about 110 BTC in the first 8 months.  At current exchange rates the device will cost 145 BTC.  The only way I can see this making any money is if the exchange rate for BTC doubles over the next 6 months.

Add 1 Saturn to my order:

46xx 26 July 0 1 0 USA

I wired a 20amp 240v breaker for my ASIC boxes.  Switching PSUs can handle 120-240v, so I have all my PSUs and a network switch all running off 240v, which allows me to pull twice the watts on a 20amp breaker.