You clearly dont get what im trying to do with this product. And its a bit disappointing coming from someone like you that has been in the space as long as you have. The product is not for people on this forum, its for new people coming into Bitcoin now that would never run a node and would never mine in the first place.

No one needs an a top end system to run a node, nor the latest ASICs to mine. The point is that we are getting more people involved in doing what they are supposed to be doing to decentralize the network.

Sure could I have gone with the latest asics? Yes, but it would have cost 3x more and then I would have the latest and greatest that prices out the people this is designed for.

HDD vs NVMe is not about network, its about sync time. We put a lot of time and effort to bring sync times from typical SBC hardware from a week + to under 48 hours with our system. Thats a huge leap and is comparable to the hardware you quoted for a fraction of the cost. Drive is also upgradable, we are not going to charge extra for a 1TB drive when people will be able to upgrade in 2 years to a 2 TB drive for the same price.

You should be happy with every node that comes on the network, and every miner that is not part of a centralized mine.

What outcome do you prefer? A Bitcoin network run by millions of devices like this "shitty" hardware as you describe it, or the current trajectory we are on where a few hundred people control a large % of the hashrate, and most of the nodes are run by centralized exchanges?


Funny thing is im working with a few pools to see who Im going to go with to solve the payout issue for small miners, and you were on my list to contact. Guess the 100PH worth of shitty miners I could bring to your pool and 10x your hashrate is not worth it then huh?

We work with an awesome fab house in california for fabs and PCBA. Final assembly and shipping is in house at our facilities in Cali and Brooklyn.

Sure its going to be on amazon, but cost 100 more to cover the fees and people buying it mining and returning after 30 days.

We actually have a total of 4 units in inventory, they are all currently running at 140% maximum wattage trying to kill them, but not one has died yet  

Not sure what you mean by trying to "locate" them. If you are talking about full nodes, they are running stock variant of bitcoin core with no flag set.

Expensive? Please point to a plug and play full node setup you can buy and a 3TH miner that can be run in your home that is under 600. Most node hardware companies are in the 300-800 range, even a DYI setup will cost you ~200 in components You should also check out eBay, our USB miners are selling second hand for 100+ and Apollos 600+ more than twice what I sold them for. You just trashed quite a big heap of cash (if you're not already trolling and probably already sold them for way more profit than i ever made on them).

Wifi was always an alpha feature on our original Apollo, and never hid that fact. The wifi controller was buggy and the chip maker never released a fix for it. Like you know there were simple fixes if you really wanted to get it to work. Either way that won't be an issue with the modern wifi controller on the Apollo BTC.

If you knew anything about how hard production is for low volume electronic devices like this (especially being made in the USA) you would know that 1) im barely making any profit off these 2) a pre-order is there to find out how many people are serious about ordering one 3) production takes time and component orders have to be placed ahead of time...im not ordering 100s of thousands worth of components to have a large % of orders cancel during ship time.

Even the chinese companies that have 10s of millions in their coffers do pre-orders for lead times twice as long as mine. Hopefully one day ill get to the point where I have enough to place an full order ahead of time, but im also not here to rip people off and charge 1k for a 300 dollar device.

I dont need to defend my reputation on here, I have built thousands of devices, multiple pre-orders and delivered everything as promised to every single person. I can also count all the returns I have had in 5 years on my two hands (not including the douchy amazon folks).

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For reasons you probably already know I cant confirm or deny 

Its off the shelf, but will probably need to do something custom if we ramp up volume. The PCIe NVMe M.2 slot is custom that attaches to it though. Thats where the real speed up is especially for full node syncing/operations.

No problem with editing your shipping address, just shoot and email if you need address change.

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Thank you to all the orders for everyone that has placed one so far. Turn out was amazing..at this rate all the centralized farms will be shutting down in a year  

Of course, BTC LTC and ETH, plus a bunch others coinbase commerce accepts. You won't see the crypto checkout option until after you select shipping.

You guys need to spread the word! We dont pay for advertising, as increaseing the price of the product 20-30% does not make much sense to me to push it to people that dont even want it. Nor will I pay the crooks at coindesk to write an "article". Sadly only price headlines and new coin launches sell, not the hardware and software the runs these systems.

If we dont sell out might launch a referral system, even though that is itself a bit gimmicky for me at least all the early adopters that use the product and understand it can make a bit on referrals.

Most of these details are on the site, but the processor is a 6 Core Cortex A72 ARM running at 2GHz. Yes OS is running kernel 5.9, and is an ubuntu flavor. Wifi is a dual band AC chip, so should work with any setup you have.

On the storage front we had to balance storage and price. 500gig is enough for ~2 years or BTC storage, and it is upgradable so figured its better to go on the low end now with lower price and users can upgrade at half the price in 2 years from now. Controller has USB 3 so fast SSD external storage can be used as well.


From what he has told me brexit caused a special deal with EU that makes it easier to ship to UK than even before. I think its some clause that its tax free under 1k Euro.

As most of you know by now we are finally launching our BTC version. Pre-order starts friday and thread has been started here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5314398

All the info is on our site as well at futurebit.io


To some of the comments from newer users on here that we abandoning LTC thats pure BS. I started off with the LTC community and you guys I think are the best group of people in all of crypto. We still have some cool updates scheduled for the Apollo LTC and will always support it, and have another product in dev for LTC as well.

As for the Apollo BTC that has always been a goal, and is a good thing. We have a great opportunity with an awesome ASIC partner that cares about our vision and is not charging us $10 and ASIC which is the current going rate (this product would be 1000USD + if we partnered with anyone else). We hope the larger BTC market will be able to drive even more sales so we can hire more devs to do the cool work we want to get done faster.

So yea were here to stay and always have. Im not here to chase the next coin for some profits (FutureBit has operated as a non-profit for the past 3 years and have made just enough to pay my rent and my team). Bitcoin has always been part of the plan, and Litecoin and Bitcoin have always had a symbiotic relationship (even if some Bitcoiners refuse to acknowledge that). Our success in the Bitcoin market will only drive even more innovation for LTC in the hardware space from Futurebit.

If you'd rather support some chinese company that does nothing but feed farms all day that dump BTC and LTC for USD be my guest.

Im not on here every day, we have email support and thats the best way to get quick responses. Shoot an email to hello at futurebit dot io and im sure well get you back up and running.

I think bitshopper already sent out an email, his listing will go live at the same time, so Midnight central Europe time (GMT +1)

There is already a unit only option for the standard hashboard, will be adding no PSU option on the Full Package with controller and SSD.

From what I understand it is now easier to ship between EU/UK for anything under 1k. Either way it should be way less cost to order directly through bitshopper than through our site. Shipping will be 40 USD + with fedex plus whatever you import charges are.

1) It has both an HDMI out, as well as a built in Web UI interface. You can just plug it into your router and configure it via web ui, or plug in a monitor keyboard and mouse and configure it that way as well.

2) ECO draws about 125 watts so you could get away with one connection, but its still not recommended.

3) The node and the node software you run is essential your "vote" in the protocols and code base that runs the decentralized Bitcoin ecosystem. You are also not trusting anyone other than yourself and your node for providing information on you or others transactions. For example you could easily install a block explorer that runs off your local node and use that instead of someone else's online service that *could* easily manipulate the transactions or confirmations it shows.

FYI thread is up here and should move discussion there: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5314398.0.

RESERVED

Hey guys, super excited to finally be entering the Bitcoin market. As most of you know the team and I have been building and refining our home mining system/platform over the years, and our number one request has been when we will release a Bitcoin product. I believe the Apollo has finally matured enough where our production capabilities and hardware has reached a point where it makes sense to release our Bitcoin version.

The FutureBit Apollo BTC has been in development for over a year now, and our focus from the beginning was to create a unified platform where anyone can run any aspect of the Bitcoin system in one easy to use, quiet, lower power device, and I think we have achieved that. Our platform essentially combines the 300-800 dollar node market, with a controller that is more capable, and a mining hashboard on top for "free."

This aspect is critical to why I founded Futurebit and its mission. Almost no new users to the Bitcoin space run nodes or mine, and both are important in maintaining Bitcoin's independence and decentralized nature. We wanted to create a device that combined both these features in a seamless zero-config way, and offered utility beyond just sitting there looking pretty running a node or mining. The powerful SBC with our custom designed NVMe drive bay can host a Full Bitcoin node and run almost any Bitcoin Application we can throw at it. We hope more Bitcoin devs join our Platform in the future and provide even more utility to the device.

On the mining side we wanted to build a low cost hashboard and cram as much hash power within the thermal and noise limits that make sense for a home setting. Those limits were 1) not exceed power that would have any significant impact on anyones electric bill (sub 200 watt), and 2) Run quiet in anyones home/apt. In ECO mode (~125 watts 2TH/S) our custom designed fan runs under 2k RPM and is almost inaudible. In Turbo mode (~200 watts 3TH/s) its no louder than a typical desktop system.

These design choices were made so we can start to tell Bitcoin users interested in the future of the ecosystem that there are solutions where everyone can be mining, and not worry about what the ROI or power costs are, and only care that the are accumulating Bitcoin in a cost effective way over the long term and securing the network.

I really hope we get to the future where the network is secured by 10's of millions of individual devices like mine and others, instead of the of the couple hundred centralized mines that secure > 50% of Bitcoin's hashrate today.

Im not going to post all the details of the device here as almost everything is covered in the below two links:

https://www.futurebit.io
https://shop.futurebit.io/products/pre-order-apollo-btc-a-bitcoin-asic-miner-and-desktop-class-computer-running-a-full-node-and-much-more-batch-1-ships-in-late-april-to-may?variant=33404796928099

Pre-Order starts this Friday at 6PM EST at the above link. Well be handling all NA orders there directly. Happy to also announce that Bitshopper.de will be participating in the Pre-Order, and will be handling all UK/Euro orders directly.

Also might have an Australia/NZ distributor up for pre-order but not sure yet.

For Rest of World we have really good Fedex rates and can almost ship anywhere. Obviously check with your local laws for import costs/fees etc.

Shipping will start at the end of April into May barring and major delays. Design is complete and we have running prototypes, and all major components including ASICs are on order. We have learned a bunch from our past launches and have built thousands of units so we dont anticipate any major setbacks. As always this is a pre-order so expect delays regardless.

Ill keep this thread up as the main community discussion/question thread for the time being, and open a support thread when we have our OS and support docs finalized in the coming weeks.

Even if this is not the device for you hope all you guys at least appreciate what we are trying to do and spread the word out to people that might be interested, especially newer users that would never consider mining or running a full node!

Thanks for all your support over the years...its been a wild ride and hope it gets even crazier in the future

Still taking feedback and seeing what most customers want. Seems like this is a pretty big request, so we might replace the middle option (Standard + PSU) for a Full Package without PSU.

Ill open up a thread soon in the main mining section.

Yes that was FutureBit 

Yea the full package was not really designed for most enthusiats on here, since almost everyone has a raspberry pi on these forums. We wanted to include a powerful controller that could run almost any Bitcoin App, and have room to grow in the Future for new users. There are some full node hardware makers that sell nodes more expensive than our hold unit, and you essentially get a miner for "free".

This is the basic logic that most people dont understand. The mining seasons is NOT now, it was two years ago at minimum diff when you could have mined way more ETH/LTC/BTC than you can now with overpriced hardware.

Mining is not about USD "profits" its about how much crypto you can mine and hold. Anyone who mined and held two years ago is 100x better than someone who starts mining now because of "crazy USD profits".

Do you still have the full node drive plugged in? Make sure you remove it to be sure thats not causing the issue. That loop also sounds like it cant detect the hashboard. Make sure the controller is properly seated in its socket on the backside.

Been an AMD guy since I started mining ETH back in 2015...finally picked up a 3060ti (ASUS Tuf) and pretty impressed. Setting up linux was a bitch...reminded me of the early days with all the X server crap needed to run nvidia-settings...AMD drivers are way ahead of Nvidia on linux, but these cards are amazing out of the box...hitting 62.5 stable on this @130 watts. Definitely better than 5700s with ~58MH @140 watts and a shit tone of BIOS tweaking to get them there and not as stable.

Now need to figure out how to undervolt these on linux