Sorry, the warnings will go away once I finish the orders I set aside for shipping today and start the next unit test batch.

I've added a warning to any accounts with an order of four or more units.  By default, any order of 4+ units will require signature confirmation for delivery.  If this does not work for you, please email me so I can make a note to exclude it when packing your order.

All bad orders from last night should be cleared up.  A few people had a couple missing bitcents, or a slight overpayment.  The current store payment processing logs any unmatched payments for manual correction.  I will update the store later this evening (trying to setup a better testing array and shipping station).  The update will include an extra category if you have a payment that doesn't currently match any order, so that you know a payment was received.

The order for additional units was placed last night with friedcat.  They should arrive on Friday, unless the 4th of July holiday adds *2* days instead of 1 to the delivery, or a random holdup occurs.  The new batch will cover all current backorders, and will hopefully cover all backordered units that are ordered up until Friday.  If the backorder queue starts getting "dangerously close" to the number of new units ordered, I will order even more to compensate.

My goal is to eventually have a reasonable (100-200 units) in on-hand inventory at any given time.  The only thing preventing that right now is it's hard to judge what the residual demand will be once the first feeding frenzy is over.

It is not trivial to ship internationally from the US.  It is SIGNIFICANTLY more expensive, takes more time, and requires extra forms/labels to print for customs.  I am not stocked/prepared to handle international orders at this time, which is why the news section, and posts in this forum, have stated that International Orders will likely not be available until at least July 5th.  I did not respond to every PM I received about international orders (though I did respond to MANY) about it because I have already stated it will not be ready/available for at least another week.

Happy to contribute to all your dividends.  As shareholders, you'll be happy to know that BTC Guild's initial stock (1,000 USB Block Erupters ordered, 800 available to public sales) sold out in under 40 minutes, and already has over 200 units on backorder.

Thank you kosmokramer for your vote of confidence.  I'm working hard to make sure BTC Guild keeps a solid reputation when it comes to handling ASIC delivery.  I just wish I had known that 800 units in stock would sell in under an hour.  Placing a new order for additional inventory now, while accepting additional orders through the BTC Guild store with adequate warning that any new orders are currently waiting for additional units to be delivered.

Not only 800 gone in 40 minutes...800 gone in 40 minutes with a rolling announcement (IRC -> Forum -> Website).  I spaced it out slightly in order to keep a close eye on the payment processing system since it had never been live tested.  Half the stock was gone in the first 10 minutes (IRC).

Well that was...crazy to say the least.  It took about 40 minutes to have all 800 in stock units sold *and* paid for.  A few orders that did not pay in time have entered backorder.  The Order Status page will be updated tonight to let you know if your order is backordered or not.  If it is, you can request a refund at any time.  You can also request a refund at any time up until your order is being shipped.

New inventory will be ordered tonight after I see how many backordered units appear.  International (including Canada) sales will be made available in the next week hopefully.

Thank you everybody for a successful launch.  After seeing how quickly many ASIC stores fell apart when the feeding frenzy hit their servers, I am glad to see that the BTC Guild store experience remained smooth .

The store has now gone live at https://www.btcguild.com/index.php?page=store  . It is also accessible from the navigation menu when you are logged in.

Orders will be live very soon, just working through a few error scenarios and waiting on the network to find a block for some test orders.  I will be giving access to the store to IRC users a few minutes early in order to give the store a brief test run where I can monitor transactions in case something was missed.

Sales should be up for US Customers within the next 4-5 hours.  Canadian customers sometime this weekend (hopefully), and other overseas customers in about a week (maybe more, maybe less).

It will not be hidden, if you go to the BTC Guild website once the store is launched, you won't be able to miss it .

There was a brief server restart earlier.  If your setup has issues detecting a downed stratum connection/reconnecting, or if they get stuck on backup servers, that may be the cause.

The only prices that will fluctuate based on exchange rate are shipping.  Since I pay for them in BTC, there is no reason to adjust prices based on BTC:USD exchange rates.


FYI, the next 30 are nearing the 1 hour mark.  Actual hash rate on them is 332-334 MH/s, meaning 3 units are just a hair under/over 1 GH/s.

No worries.  If units are backordered, the delay is only 4-5 business days [real time, not BFL time].

Yes, I've heard it is quite painless on Linux.  Right now I'm finishing up the store so it can launch and accept payment within the next 8 hours, then I can play with Linux mining on the other 50 units.

In other news, the additional units are virtually guaranteed to arrive on Monday, if not tonight (unlikely, but possible).  Depending on the time they arrive Monday, I will likely be able to include at least some of those in the orders that ship out, and the rest should ship out on Tuesday.

Just to clarify the difficulties I had:

The steps I found for cgminer on windows were:

Downloading the Silabs Driver (USB to UART Bridge VCP Drivers) - which has them show up on COM Ports
Downloading the "zadig" program, and changing the plugged in devices to WinUSB.
Download cgminer (I used 3.3.1)
Run cgminer and it autodetects without any arguments passed to it.


Step 1 was easy.  Step 2 only had two problems.

1: I accidentally hit an up arrow key at some point and it selected my USB Wireless Receiver for the keyboard before I hit replace driver.  Caused a lot of headaches getting it removed and trying again.
2: It doesn't apply to future devices.  Any time I plugged in new hubs+units, it required me to run zadig again, otherwise they wouldn't be using the WinUSB driver.


I'm not saying it's extremely difficutly, most my headache was the accidental screwup on my keyboard drivers, but I'm saying it was easier to skip the zadig/WinUSB step entirely and just run bfgminer with '-S all'.

No duds in the next 20, so current DoA rate is 2% (1 in 50), which is what ASICMINER ships extra with each order.  Hopefully the next 50 has 0, or at most 1.

This batch I'm using bfgminer, still in Windows.  bfgminer requires one less step to recognize the Block Erupters, and it's a step that can really screw you up if you decide to go with cgminer on Windows.  The extra step on cgminer can screw up your other USB devices if you're in a rush (I killed my wireless keyboard and spent about 25 minutes trying to get it working again).  Alternatively, cgminer is hotpluggable, while bfgminer requires command line arguments and must be restarted if you add a device.


UPDATE:  Done testing for the night.  The 20 units ran for an hour, and just like the previous 30, they were right within that +/- 5%, this time +1%.  At this point, I'm definitely going to say bfgminer wins if you're going to mine on Windows!  Tomorrow will be the day of Linux testing on the other 50 units.  I should have great guides for how to start mining with Erupters on BTC Guild over the weekend, so once your units arrive (Shipping starts Monday), you can quickly get them hashing.

For testing, I'm using Anker 10-port USB Hubs (http://www.amazon.com/computers-accessories/dp/B007ZWFKX8).  The ones I got were black, but the 10-port Apple Style is the same.  They're much more expensive than other hubs, but they're one of the only hubs that has adequate power for 10x powered USB devices.  However, I know a few others have ordered cheap $5-7 10-port hubs from China, and then attached a custom 5V power supply into them.  Generally the issue with powered hubs is not the hub itself, but the external power supply.

I'm not comfortable with rewiring this stuff, and I wanted a solid hub that I know had more than adequate power, rather than risk testing on shoddy hubs.

Word of warning:  These chips do get quite hot if you don't have any active cooling.  A 20 minute run did not produce any more hardware errors than what I saw when running with active cooling, but one was cool to the touch and the other was hot enough to cause a bit of pain if you rested a finger on it.  Running them 10 on a hub with 3 hubs next to each other surely doesn't help.

If you're looking at high density mining of USB Erupters, I highly recommend looking at some form of active cooling.  An Arctic Breezer USB Powered fan kept 9 cool.  Obviously if you're going to run a lot, a standard box fan/oscillating fan would probably do a pretty good job as well .