And this is why I am testing them!  Just encountered the first dead on arrival ASIC after 36 erupters.  Luckily ASICMINER includes 2% extra on each order to cover DoAs.  May not be completely dead (it lights up, but seems to not be communicating with the PC or Hub, tried both).

At this time, sales are BTC ONLY, until I have had time to gauge demand and restock.  BTC is the easiest method to use since I can fully automate everything except the actual packaging.  I have absolutely no idea if I'm going to be stuck with 300 units after 2 weeks, or if I'm going to sell every unit on order before the weekend is over.


I'm sorry if things seem very restrictive so far (no reserves, international not immediately available, BTC only, etc.).  This was a very "spur of the moment" deal.  I had seen people buying the Erupters at 2 BTC even for novelty purposes, but everybody had secretly hoping for a ~1 BTC price point because it was much more likely to [eventually] pay off.  When the prices were cut, I went from "I might order a few for fun since I don't have any ASICs yet" to "I might order 100 and sell some to friends" to "Ill order 350 and sell them through the website" to "I'll order 1,000!" within about 48 hours.  I tend to go from "fun idea" to "business idea" to "mass production" mode when I get excited about something [example: BTC Guild].

If I had enough money to fund it...I would hang these up at christmas instead of blinking lights: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRYCkyn41OU

They give a cute little blink whenever they find a diff=1 share.



UPDATE:  First test run complete.  27 erupters for 1 hour.  BTC Guild dashboard speed was 8821 MH/s.  Assuming 100% acceptance and +/- 5% variance, the expected range is 8541 - 9440 MH/s, so no problems so far!  Will be trying out another set (23) using BFGMiner next.  Apparently BFG Miner skips one step in setting up, and just requires a few extra arguments when you run bfgminer instead.

I will look at USPS Registered Mail for Canada.  I have only limited experience with international sales in the past, so that might actually be the key to shipping to certain countries without going over $20 in shipping.

I'll be posting some pictures later just so people can see them in action .  I'm really frustrated with the Windows side...but apparently most of my headache is due to cgminer, not Windows.  Going to test the next batch using bfgminer and try to cut a step out.

Right now the testing plan is:  Plug them in, register all the drivers on Windows, reboot the computer.  Start up cgminer, wait an hour so the BTC Guild dashboard has a chance to get a full hour worth of shares, and compare the speed to the expected speed.  Ideally, each hub (9 units + 1 fan) should be producing ~2.9-3 GH/s.  Since my first test wasn't quite as organized (was excited just to get them working), right now I've got 3 hubs on one worker and I'm hoping to see 8.8-9.1 GH/s after an hour worth of hashing.

They will be mined on for more than 5 minutes.  I would *prefer* to give each unit a full day of mining, including a few power cycles, but given the volume of chips coming in and likely going out, that won't be possible outside the first batch since they don't ship out until Monday.  But as you said:  It's a lot better they get mined on now, instead of being dead on arrival.  ASICMINER's warranty is only 6 months, and shipping isn't free to send your broken unit back or to receive a new one.

Unfortunately, only the US will be able to place orders on Friday.  I'm working very hard at finalizing plans on international shipping.  While Canada is significantly cheaper to ship to when using First Class Mail...it seems to fall under normal international rates when using Priority Mail.  First Class mail does NOT offer tracking internationally, and the same with Small Flat Rate international.  Only Medium Flat Rate or larger includes tracking, but the price to ship a Medium box international is ~$59.  This makes it quite prohibitive on small orders if you want tracking of the package.

The above CAN change, but at this time, I do not want to get anybody's hopes up outside of the US.

The first 100 usb miners have arrived.  I'm unboxing and setting them up on Windows tonight so I can have a proper guide available by the time they begin shipping Monday morning.  Windows is apparently much more of a pain to get working than Linux from what I've been hearing.  I'll be testing chips on Linux later this weekend to have a guide ready for Ubuntu users as well.

So far, 18 tested, 18 working.  Each chip is producing the expected speed (331-336 MH/s).  No duds.

It was bumped forward to 6-7 PM PDT, so 9-10 on east coast.  Hopefully on the earlier side.  Finishing up the store tonight and going to give it a few test runs (myself, not real orders).

It's been announced for almost a week , 2 days ago on the Guild website.  However, it might not be faster.  There's really no way to accurately gauge demand.  I feel like I have enough on order that I should be able to fill any weekend orders within one week, but that could easily change if a few people order 20-30 of them each.  I'm working very hard behind the scenes to organize my shipping line and inventory management to make this as smooth and professional as possible.  Just received 500 bubble padded mailers, and I have 100 various sized flat rate boxes arriving tomorrow (plus about 30 already on hand).

There's nothing preventing you from buying one on BTC Guild.  It requires a registration which is quite painless.  Would love if you stuck around or at least used the USB ASIC on Guild, but no gun to your head .


Additional update

Since I've had a few people message me who were burned in the past by database leaks of their home address on other Bitcoin sites, I wanted to make my data retention policy clear.

All orders will be kept in the database until the package is shipped, plus two weeks so you can reference the full order.  After that time, the database will retain the order information/tracking number, but not the address information.  However, paper files will be kept for all shipped packages.

You can always switch .  With ASICMINER gone the 51% threat is -long- gone from BTC Guild.

The website news section has been updated with the estimated international shipping costs.  Those prices are not final, but are likely what the costs will be.  I do have a friend that may end up shipping EU based orders out from the UK to reduce the costs slightly on small orders, but that is not finalized and is not something you should plan on.

Orders are still expected to go live on Friday, June 28th for the US based orders.  Estimated time is between 6 and 7 PM (PDT).  The orders will go live even if the first batch is not arriving until Monday.  The checkout page will inform you of the current inventory status, including your place in line, and the ETA for units to arrive in stock to fulfill your order.

US Stratum appears to be under attack.  I'm working on routing DNS around it ASAP.

UPDATE:  Attack appears to not have been targeted specifically at BTC Guild's servers.  Everything is up and running normally from what I can see.  Let me know if you're having problems.  The new colocation project is still in process, which should provide higher quality connections and 100% uptime outside of targeted attacks, hopefully within the next month.

One of the three US based Stratum servers crashed recently.  It's currently being rebooted.  Hopefully most users ended up moving to another server when the first one stopped responding.  The IP for the offline server has been removed from the round robin DNS until it has recovered.

Wow, I did not expect this many responses from international orders.  A small update for those overseas:

International shipping is not cheap, and can be very slow when not using larger services that specialize in getting packages around the world quickly.  A large amount of the shipping cost is the same regardless of package size.  This means small orders are not worth doing internationally, at least when the origin is in the US.


If you're not in North America, and are only interested in a few units (1-10), I highly recommend looking through the forums for people shipping near your country.  My shipping system is almost exclusively United States Postal Service because I am able to purchase and print the postage rapidly thanks to a USB Scale and Thermal Label Printer that interface with Stamps.com.  USPS shipping is not cheap when looking at international orders that include tracking.


I will not be able to provide quotes on shipping prices to international orders until after I have received the units so I can clearly determine the weight and size of each unit to determine the proper box sizes needed for international shipping.

Shun the non believer!  Shun!  (Just had a shift end above PPS finally...last 3 days have been painful).

BTC Guild doesn't make users pay fees to receive payouts.  Any fees required to send the payout are paid by the pool.  For smaller payouts, Automatic Payouts are more likely to be confirmed quickly.

Luck hasn't been very good the last 48 hours.  PPLNS (like DGM, Slush, Proportional, and most SMPPS pools) suffers variance, so your rewards will go up/down depending on the pool's luck.  The pool is still positive since the difficulty change, but right now we're in a bad spell.  But as it states on the PPLNS Stats page at the bottom:  Past luck is not an indicator of future performance.  We could easily bounce back to 130-140% over the next 24 hours.

As os2sam said, this won't be a one-time thing, I may even make another order of units before I receive the first one due to the response I've received so far.  There will probably be a sellout on the first batch just because it's difficult to judge demand, and the first offering will always have the biggest feeding frenzy.  Luckily the lead time on orders is only about 4-5 business days, so after the first week I should be able to keep a reasonable number in stock and sellout periods will only be a few days at most.