Monday now seems to be the target date for more info - that's going to be whether we are in the first batch of 20k chips or not; I don't think it's actually going to be a delivery estimate
Honestly a delivery estimate is completely and utterly premature right now - there's too many things that can and probably will change delivery targets (avalon delivering chips on time, board reworks needed as problems are identified, holdups in the firmware/driver development process)
I'd be perfectly happy with knowing what batch my order is in (first 10k, second 10k, the latest 20k order or beyond) and having them go back to work but supply us with regular and timely updates in a centralized location (either this board, email blasts, or their site) on how the development/testing process is going (say once or twice a week)

Well since the only orders that were allowed to sit without payment were wire transfer orders, which generally take a little time to go through (most banks from my understanding don't offer faster than a 1 day), if it sells today but hasn't been funded, there won't be enough time to get it funded before the order is cancelled.  So, honestly, I hope someone does bid on it and buy it, and the seller is forced to refund and back out of the transaction... teach them a lesson about putting in orders they have no intent of paying for themselves and then try to resell for profit.  If you intend to resell for profit, fine, but at least have the decency to float your own capital ffs.

Bkk has received sample chips, and TH has received sample chips.
Bkk has already identified a problem with the K16 board, the vcc power to the pic controller is not connected.  That will mean a board rework.  TH has already assembled a populated k16 board, so hopefully they can recover the sample chips off that board and reuse them on another updated board.  Or maybe they'll find a workaround.
The firmware and cgminer drivers are not yet fully developed, so software work is ongoing.

Delivery will hinge on when avalon delivers chips, when the board design is finalized and all issues ironed out, and the software is done.  The potential does exist for this to drag out for a long time, if they keep identifying issues in the board and have to do reworks (like has reportedly happened with bfl) and if the software work takes longer than expected.

From what I can see, BFLs mistake was largely hubris.  They grossly overestimated what they could deliver in a given timeframe, and made promises they could not keep.  At that point, pride joined the list of transgressions.  Instead of openly admitting that they overreached and made a huge mistake on how difficult the development was going to be and how long it would take them to work things out, they continued to give estimates based on what I believe were best case scenarios, and giving people unrealistic expectations.
I'm seeing a lot of statements from TH that indicate that they might be making some of the same mistakes.  The timeframes they're giving seem awfully tight, and the fact that they don't usually mention the possibilities that problems are found with board designs requiring rework, or possibility that software development holds things up; the only thing I usually see them mentioning is if avalon doesn't deliver the chips on time.  That could give people the expectation that as long as the chips are delivered on time as expected, everything will be great and they'll get their units quickly.  This has the potential to turn into another BFL situation all over again.  Will it?  I don't know, but the potential is there, particularly if people have their expectations set unreasonably high due to statements from TH that don't brutally set people's expectations firmly where they belong - we believe this will be a short process, but any of these X things could prove us wrong and hold this up.

That being said, I have ordered 2 units from TH, and I do hope that it all goes well and the way they seem to think it will.  I'm not here to naysay or scare people away, or say anything negative about TH; I'm just giving a brutally honest view of what I see and what I think

I don't know if avalon released their firmware or not but this isn't the avalon reference design, I do know that.  I'm sure it's based on it to some extent, but it definitely isn't a clone... so I doubt their firmware could just be dropped in without some changes, the extent of which is anyone's guess

No you're not *simply* requesting information and pointing out inconsistencies.  What you are doing is purposely kicking up sh*t and making accusations with absolutely no proof.
Yes, you can check whatever you want in ebay preferences.  Yes you can make your computer look like it's coming from anywhere.  And none of that in any way proves that it is Terrahash.  Yet you state that it doesn't exonerate him.  Last time I checked, it was supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until you prove yourself innocent just because one person decided to start throwing out wild accusations.


How many people are on ebay?  How many people have been selling preorders on ebay?  It could be any one of them.  There's nothing to suggest that it is Terrahash, other than *your* assumption and accusation that it is.
"This order will be placed (and paid for) on Tuesday June 18th, 9AM PST.  Ordering does not open to the public until 24 hours after this time, so this is a special place in line and will be one of the first orders shipped.  Your order will ship via Fedex Overnight, insured, with a tracking number."

This statement alone actually suggests that it is someone who intends to place a preorder and resell it for a profit.  Just like all the people who bought in on group buys of chips or the USB block erupter and resold them on eBay for profit.  BTC mining right now is rife with people who have no interest in mining themselves and are only buying hardware because they've seen how much people desperate for hardware will pay.  They've seen some of the miner auctions on ebay hit $30,000 and they're looking to make a quick buck.  Many more people are buying more hardware than they need and reselling the surplus for profit to make back their money and get their hardware effectively cheap or free.

Now, until you actually have something substatial that suggests the auction is terrahash, why don't you take your unfounded allegations and keep them to yourself.

no.  The chip is not a general purpose processor, nor is it programmable like an FPGA.  ASIC = Application Specific Integrated Circuit.  The physical chip is designed to do SHA256 and nothing but.

and so it begins.  ugh.

Actually I doubt the prices will be quite that bad.  They are fixing prices in USD, sure, but there's no reason to assume they're going to jack the prices too much.
for the K64 they were going 6.99BTC when BTC was ~125-130, so I'm gonna say around 950 for the K64, give or take.  That's increasing the price slightly from what the conversion would have been, to compensate for the increased risk of accepting paypal and possibly dealing with chargebacks

As for how many... I'm personally betting that the site goes down in flames and the server running it is discovered to have become a puddle of molten slag on the floor lol

Earlier in the thread Terrahash did state that all boards would come with heatsink.  That alone may or may not be enough though, so I'd plan on having something to supplement just in case.

@Terrahash: That hasn't changed has it?

I haven't entirely decided yet.  Maybe I'll just buy some standoffs and mount it to a piece of playwood, make sure I have some fans setup to help with cooling and go.  Or I might verify measurements and see about fabricating a mounting plate to put it in a rackmount enclosure or even a desktop or mini tower enclosure

They already said they're running pretty tight margins on boards, and are looking to make more profit on the cases, and especially on complete turnkey mining units ready to run with PSU, case, etc all together with the board.

For those of us who already have a PSU or want to get one of our own, maybe do our own case or fabricate some mounting hardware to mount in something like a rack mount case, this is perfect.
The case they're offering looks nice, and if I had gotten into bitcoin sooner and had a ton of BTC laying around I'd go for it.  But I don't really *need* a nice fancy case and psu and fans and all that.  I have tons of spare parts laying around so having the option to save money is nice

Did I say they should care?  But why is because if you bet that BTC is going to go upward (and a good chunk of people do) then you're going to win in the end if you leave it in BTC and let people do what they're going to do in the meantime

They were going to take BTC only and price their products in BTC
Now they're going to take paypal, but I'm assuming not only paypal.  I'm assuming they will still take BTC payment.  If that's the case, leave the price in BTC
If they're going to move to only taking USD payment through paypal then yes it would make more sense to price in USD.  However, I doubt that's what they're doing - they're still going to take BTC

Good grief people, it's called an opinion!  I didn't say they had to, or 'should' or anything else of the sort.  I said I was throwing out my vote (what I would like to see happen - my opinion) and I even acknowledged that my opinion doesn't matter in that decision.  I gave it solely so they can see what people think.  From there, it's up to them to decide whether to go with anyone's opinion or say 'screw that we're gonna do this'

They were going to do that anyways with BTC only payment - allowing paypal payment doesn't change the amount of risk they take on BTC price flux;  they just adjust the USD price for paying through paypal to equal the current price in BTC.  In the longer term it should balance out, if not gain them more money.  Yes it's a risk, but no more so than taking BTC only payment; you still risk that you take a bunch of orders at a set price and then BTC crashes low enough that you can't pay for parts and assembly and delivery either way

I vote (as if I get a vote but I'm gonna say it anyways) keep the pricing in BTC
If BTC goes up, people would have to pay more; but if BTC goes down or someone can catch it on a dip, they save a little

Well that would seem to work out rather perfectly then, as currently they seem rather reluctant to let anyone order anything...
I love it when the pieces fit together!

I think the thing about this that strikes me the most is...
Presuming that they're ordering each order of 10k from TSMC as they come in, aren't sample chips customarily provided by the foundries for customer validation per order?
What is Avalon doing with those sample chips if they're only delivering 1 batch of samples per shipping address, even if that shipping address has put in 5+ separate orders?

Plus, without sample chips from each batch to test, who's to say that 1 batch is fine but the rest of the batches are absolute crap with tons of failed chips?  I haven't seen anything indicating that Avalon is providing any type of guarantee at all about chips working.  Is there any recourse if a batch of 10k chips has a huge failure rate, like say 25% or higher?
Granted, 30 chips isn't exactly a large sample size to test, but if they provided those per batch, and the devs saw them all being duds, we'd at least have an indication that there might be a problem with the batch and be able to try to communicate with Avalon before the whole order was delivered, in order to see if anything could be done to resolve the situation

Then again, we don't know if the sample chips being provided are coming from Avalon themselves, or if they're part of the order from the foundry that the foundry is releasing to Avalon to validate and they're sending on to us.

Requesting whitelisting
I have been lurking here for several weeks before finally registering (watching the custom hardware threads, the Avalon chip group buys and the board development) as well as mining BTC, LTC, and TRC for a few weeks.  I'd really like to be able to participate in some of the discussions in the custom hardware forums.

Sweet - now we just need that on an android widget

Just a couple comments -
1. You should put somewhere easily accessible that when using Dwolla for deposits, you only accept Dwolla balance transfers, no ACH.  I couldn't find this anywhere on your site until I had gone through all the stuff to setup a quote and then got nailed with it at the end.  I suppose you have this limitation in place for some security or fraud prevention, but it really sucks since Dwolla is slow as **** and takes an entire week to deposit money into my account (despite the fact that it's cleared my bank 1 day after I initiate from Dwolla). 

2. For transfers going to Bitcoin address, I went through all the steps to get a quote and it doesn't show on there anywhere how much BTC I would receive, which leaves one wondering what exchange rate you're using and why you're not displaying that to users up front when providing a quote.  That really needs to be fixed, like yesterday.

Looks interesting, might have to check it out