Steamboat, since you now have board orders in hand, could you give us a clue as to which order numbers are going to be affected by the parts delay? Or are you saying that somebody with chips from eg. Zefir's group, which have started arriving, could order NOW and get their cards done before any of your own group buy chips arrive thus depleting your parts supply? I'm slightly confused and worried...

As most of you probably know, Zefir's European group buy received the first batch of chips yesterday. The order was placed on April 16th. So, if Avalon are shipping at the same rate that orders came in, Steamboat's first batch of chips should arrive in a little less than two weeks! :-)

Here's Zefir's post with a picture of the first chip batch received:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=177827.msg2790248#msg2790248

Seems to have worked as expected for me. Have not visited the site while buggy. Chrome/Win7. Was able to complete purchase of 2 bitburner XX boards (I hope) Paypal and order receipt received :-)

Steamboat, you wrote that the pcb design will be finished in the next 24 hours.. From following BkkCoins and terrahash, the Klondike design does not seem ready to me. Terrahash have a 16 chip board hashing with around 10% hardware error rate, bkk is down to less than 1% on his raspberry pi but having trouble with USB noise, and only this morning another tester reports no nonces from his chips 7 and 8... I think a few more days of testing before ordering production would be prudent.

NVC, apart from having problems, does not fit into a pool-hopping scheme with its 520 confirmations. It may be "profitable" to mine at the moment the pool switches to NVC, but a lot may happen in the DAYS it takes before payout. The trades for NVC on BTC-e have fallen from 0.043 to 0.038, around 12%, in the past 24 hours, while confirmation takes a lot longer than that. This illustrates how meaningless it is to have such a slow coin as part of a hopping scheme. You chould  consider removing NVC from multiport, and leave it for the dedicated miners.

Order in the late 800's, Day 2.

Steamboat;
I am planning to use your hosting service. Which assembly and testing option is appropriate for boards going to hosting? "Assembly only" or "Full assembly" - i'm a bit confused about the difference.

Great news! :-) Each time I see a Bkk post, I get really excited - it's like reading a thriller in daily installments

Thanks for the updates, Bkk.  Excited to hear your first results!

Regarding the order slow down: A few weeks ago, when this group buy started, there really weren't that many options. However, just in the last few days, a few other alternatives have cropped up, and several seem relatively realistic. I guess those with money to spend are weighing their options between the likes of Steamboat, Terrahash, KnCminer, Bitfury and maybe more projects I'm not aware of. Also, reports suggest at least ONE of BFLs 60hg/s boxes have shipped (out of how many thousands ordered?), so there is movement in that camp, too. COuld be part of the explanation.

Zefir, I like your distribution proposal. Regarding sending some chips from you and some from SebastianJu, I am a firm believer in redundancy.. Please send some chips each, so that at least on package arrives!

Finally, I am relatively certain I read a quote from Yifu in another thread regarding the 30 sample chips that only one set per payment address was a mistake, and that there really will be 30 per 10k batch. Don't remember WHERE i saw it (some thread on this forum, I think related to one of the first people to receive sample chips), but I hope Avalan will keep to the announced deal here.

Bitfury?

The downtime was not something you could control. Things like these can only be avoided with comlete redundancy - expensive.

However, it took me a little while to figure out what was wrong with the payouts through the night. I'm sure most people who wonder will find their way to this thread eventually, but I take the liberty of offering a few suggestions. Please do not take this as criticism - I think you are one of the top pool operators around, very quick to fix things and always dealing with things fairly. I really enjoy your pools, but I have a wish list of improvements. You may not agree that this is necessary, but here they are:

1) How about an "announcement" text on top of the web interface when something major happens. Many other pools do this
2) You should have a link on your pool front pages to the official forum thread for the pool, if this is where updates are published
3) Other pools using mmcfe front end have a lovely graph which shows hash rate over time (pool and miner) and earned coins as bar graphs for every day. This kind of display I find very informative; it gives me at-a-glance info of what my rigs have been up to and if the pool is performing as expected. Is it possible for you to graft a piece of the mmcfe code into your front end and provide similar graph info? :-)

Thank you again for excellent pool hosting!

Is it possible to do partial transactions (ie sell 300 or 400 pcx) or does this trading platform only allow full trades for the entire amount?

Close to one hour now, and no new blocks??

OK, thanks. Things seem to work as advertised now - I guess I was just a little impatient (and confused by the finder's fee being paid before the work) :-)

Two things:
1) How long should it take (in minutes, approx.) before I start getting paid for work? 20 confirmations looks like it should be 20-30 minutes, right? I am past that but no transactions yet..
Edit: seems i have the same problem as chondrite above - i only get the 0.2 block finder's fee, nothing paid for other work.. :/

2) I see the pool is now at more than 51% of the network - how can you be sure we are not building an invalid chain? This has happened before on other pools/currencies. Can you do something to limit new signups or something to avoid hashing invalid coins?

Thanks,
dj

It doesn't work that way. The seller does not define who the buyer is. If you are a non-professional, a consumer, buying an item for personal use, you are covered as such. If you buy as a registered business, ie. "KS coins Inc", you are not.

I like the fact that all the miners on your beta website are marked down to "free" :-) I'll take a few hundred K16s, then! 

From the KnC thread, too, people seem entirely unfamiliar with the concept of sales taxes.

The Swedish VAT is basically the same as sales tax. If the product is exported from Sweden, the VAT will not be applied, but the buyer is of course responsible for paying import duties/sales tax in his home country/state. These duties/taxes vary wildly, as the OP said. The VAT within the EU varies from 18 to 27 percent.
Unlike in the US, in the EU prices for goods are usually quoted with national VAT included. Since businesses within the EU with VAT registration can deduct the VAT, companies selling services and goods for "professionals" (business to business) sometimes give prices VAT exclusive, as is the case with KnC, as far as i can understand.
Since the majority of their customers are likely outside Sweden, giving a price inclusive of Swedish VAT would make little sense, since everyone exporting the miners (consumers and businesses) would be allowed to deduct Swedish VAT (and would then have to add local taxes anyway). KnC could perhaps have quoted a "Swedish consumer price" (VAT inclusive), and an "export price" (VAT exclusive) to make this a bit clearer?

As FCTaiChi said, it's the tax rules in the buyer's country that matter, so all prices quoted in the table should be sales tax/VAT exclusive.