I snipped out the images to avoid it being a giant post.  I saw this at the console about 15 minutes after I flashed the 1.0 firmware. It suddenly started spamming the communications failure messages. I reset the miner to defaults and power cycled it (switched power supplies on and off), set my clocks back up to 500Mhz, and I have not gotten a repeat.

My experience so far with 1.0 has not been a performance improvement so much as lower variance in hash rate (so RMS hash rate is slightly higher at the pool - 3.55Th/s). I continue to run at 500Mhz on all cores without having to make voltage changes.  Hottest VRM hits about 96C, the room is around 22C.

I see The Avenger still has sand in his mangina.  What kind of a loser has this much time to troll forums?

Yeah, Avenger remains an absolutely self-involved BS artist who near as I can tell must not have an actual job for the time he spends trolling here. Can't say I've been unhappy to see other poeple calling him out on being a useless hole.

I received my Batch 0 in late June. for those keeping track I had a very high (highest I've seen posted) CA batch order number but I paid earlier than a lot of other order numbers I've seen so it definitely seems to be order of payment for shipping.  I'm running it on 3 EVGA 850 G2's.  I was able to dial all the clocks to 500Mhz from 475Mhz with no voltage changes, though I'm sure I'd have more stable cores if I tweaked voltages.  It's just too tedious to bother with for what is most likely statistical noise in terms of performance.  The 850 G2's are stable and haven't had any difficulties.  The cables get a bit warm but nothing to get excited about. I suspect that using the first plug on the dual-plug VGA cables helps with this, and they seem to have done a good job crimping the connectors.  If anything, Neptune has revealed which power supply vendors consistently crime their connectors properly. My 12 hour average on Eligius is slightly over 3.5Th/s, so I feel fine about getting more than I paid for in terms of performance.

It'll never ROI in BTC or USD but whatever, it's kind fun to run and in the next couple weeks I'll have it hosted where I don't pay for power... assuming I don't eBay the thing.  I can't blame KNC for my gamble or for the lack of clairvoyance in how much chicom stuff would ship.

I've tried the RC6 and RC9 firmware without seeing dramatic differences. I did notice that after the firmware update it is important to reset the machine to factory defaults through the web interface in order for it to correctly unass its voltage and clock settings.  It would be nice if the advanced page showed the number of active cores associated with each VRM and clock setting so you could see the impact of tweaks. One of the banner photos on the KNC website shows RC-11, but that isn't in their public github yet.

I'd prefer to have BFGminer on it and think it should've shipped with longer serial cables.

I'm somewhat tempted to try to swap my free second Neptune for a Titan just because it would be something slightly different.

Maybe because for anyone who isn't sucking down BS from Avenger and friends it looks like aside from doing a crappy job of boxing products before shipping and having a rather ruthless approach to replacing the damaged gear, KNC has pretty much done everything they said they would, which puts them in rather rare company when it comes to mining equipment.

They made it pretty clear early on that they were going to be building a cloud hashing facility, and that Neptune would probably be their last consumer-grade mining product. Despite the constant bitching in this thread there is exactly zero data to show that they violated their miner protection guarantee during the period in which it was supposed to be relevant. Avenger hammers on endlessly about pseudo-facts like this and then just in the past day has rather hilariously ignored that the pie chart showed KNC with 5% of network hash power prior to the spike as Neptunes were being powered on and shipped.  That was actually what prompted me to post.

If you pre-ordered a Neptune thinking there was not going to be a huge difficulty rise then you were delusional, since at the time that orders first opened it looked as if Cointerra and HashFast were starting to ship in volume.  That they both performed below expectations and the difficulty rise happened anyway thanks to cheaper chicom stuff and various dedicated mining operations (to include KNC's) instead doesn't change the fact that buying a Neptune was a bet that difficulty wouldn't rise too much by the time they shipped. You could argue the Q1/Q2 thing but when someone tells you they'll ship somewhere in a six month range you'd be an idiot to put all your chips on it being early in that range. If you chose not to refund then you made your bed and can now lie in it. I see exactly nothing untrustworthy about a situation in which people are unhappy with the outcome of a gamble they freely engaged.

The people who have complained about refunds seem to either be ephemeral trolls or to simply be unable to figure out how to provide the correct information for an international wire transfer. As this is a situation that could be resolved with a phone call or a short trip to their bank I don't see how this is a trust issue for KNC.

It sounds like they finally found someone who can box things up based on Elenelen's report that the Neptune modules were well packed.

Arguably with 3.3Th/s of performance they have exceeded their threshhold by 10%, and power consumption seems to have come in below the level they stated, so while it's more a motto than anything else, they did in fact over-deliver.

Mine shipped today BTW (I had a late CA order#), and my plan remains the same. Play with it for a while and then probably sell it on eBay if it looks like they're selling for enough. Same for the second one that will show up sometime later. I may well end up with net negative monopoly money but c'est la vie.  I was the one who rolled the dice, not KNC - and I didn't play with money that I could not afford to lose. While I have it, I'm hoping for a decent owners thread since this thread is a train wreck of useless posts by people who neither own anything nor have ever ordered anything from KNC.

Oh one last thing, I think the bitching about the IRS ruling is idiotic. I mean idiotic in the technical sense because it actually opens up some interesting options. If you have to pay capital gains on Bitcoin then the cost basis for the BTC would be the miner plus the electricity. If you mine less BTC than the USD equivalent of your cost basis you've taken a capital loss, which offsets any capital gains in other areas (such investments in more conventional equities such as stocks).  If you achieve positive ROI then you'd owe taxes at the capital gains rate which should be lower than your income tax rate. Or maybe you try another approach and deduct costs for your "hobby business", which under IRS rules means you can deduct costs up to the amount of revenue the hobby business generated, so you could probably deduct the cost of the miner as an unreimbursed business expense up to the USD-equivalent value of the bitcoins you mined.  Since you'd be getting a deduction against your bracket tax rate rather than the lower capital gains rate, this might work out, and the B2B terms of the sales contract from KNC actually reinforce this if questioned by the IRS - you clearly bought it under a B2B arrangement.  Alternately, it is reasonable to straight line depreciate mining hardware to 0 over a very short period, as they are essentially worthless within a year. One could think of this as an extremely expensive machine tool head that cannot be resharpened.

Or not, since they let people switch back who had signed up for the cloud hashing.  Deception requires intent, which you should be fully cognizant of as the prevaricating troll that you are.

Yes, someone is very likely to pay => $10.5k on eBay or the like to have a 3Th/s box shipped to them, so I'll at least recover my cost of purchasing the box.  I intend to mine with it for a while too, for how long will be determined by how much it is earning and how high the resale price gets. My guess is that the resale price will stay high up until the point where someone ships a machine as powerful or more powerful, so I'll have a decent margin of error for when I part with it.  I would prefer to have a large window because when I was running the Jupiter I took a certain child-like delight in having a magic box that converted electrons into play money in the house.

1. They did not promise to sell more, only indicated that they might.
2. This seems rather open to interpretation since that could easily be KNC selling earlier batch orders that were cancelled and refunded. Arguably that could be good for people who held onto their orders, as it means fewer Neptunes shipping in earlier batches and somewhat less difficulty rise.
3. Last time around I got considerably more hash power than I paid for, which was certainly adequate compensation for KNC being a couple weeks late, and then a steep discount on the next generation of hardware. Since they are not remotely late in shipping said next generation of hardware, so far, I've been taken care of.
4. We don't know that is KNC, or even if it is, if the mining is for their own profit or a client who asked for hosting. That could be a mining operation by a completely different company and for the benefit of the Winklevoss twins for all we know.
5. If they let a video crew in there, they weren't trying to keep it secret. Failing to put up a press release about it on their web page mostly indicates that KNC is doing a bad job of public relations.  I think we already knew that, but I don't recall their promise to be good at PR.
6. I don't think KNC ever promised to tell us about every business decision they make.
7. So they broke their promise to give us refunds on preorders by... giving us refunds on preorders in the same amount we paid?


I would agree if not for the fact that it is just the same few people endlessly banging on about it rather than a large number of different people with the same complaint.

Yes, it was monopoly money because it was earned with my Jupiter.  I bought the Jupiter with money I could afford to lose, made a solid profit reselling the hardware, and earned a decent amount of BTC with it before doing so.  The excess BTC is definitely monopoly money for me because it is essentially gambling winnings from my decision to figuratively roll the dice on a Jupiter. It might not be monopoly money for someone else, but as BTC is nowhere near being a stable means for storage or exchange of value, they ought to be careful if they are not treating it as such.


Actually as long as KNC didn't fold due to cancelled orders and still delivers a Neptune to me, the fewer Neptunes that people order the better for me, since my plan is to mine for a while and then resell the thing when they are still priced high for resale.  The fewer that appear for resale the better the sale price will be for me, as that will set the price floor high.

I don't know how I would know it was play money for the buyer unless they volunteered it, for the person who bought my Jupiter, it might be serious, but regardless, no, why would I? Whatever price they paid is <= what it was worth to them and => what it was worth to me.


I expect a reasonable measure of the prepayment for Neptunes to go to design, engineering, manufacturing, and after-sales support of them, and the rest is theirs to apply to whatever purpose they see fit. Nothing I am aware of when I bought my Jupiter prohibited them from building a cloud mining operation, though there was an implied limitation on the scale of such during the network protection period, that time has passed with Cointerra and Hashfast finally shipping. To whatever extent they've ended up in the black from mining, yes, it's theirs to do with as they see fit. They could completely change their core business and use it to go buy all of Saab's mothballed tooling to start cranking out parts for all I care, it's their money.

"The Old Dominion" is a nickname for my original home state before I moved to the west coast, that's it. I'm not really sure why you think what I wrote is something that Bitcoinorama would've wanted to get off his chest, since nothing in there is an attempt to justify KNC's less than optimal communications strategy, which was supposed to be his job near as I could ever tell. I haven't seen anything to change what I said though: this thread is still a lot of speculation being treated as fact, and not very much more.

I still think that as long as KNC ships out a box that produces around 3Th/s in performance, I will be able to run it for as long as I like and then sell it for enough that I'll make a net profit, so I don't have anything to complain about, and I have no idea why people feel compelled to keep banging on about whatever complaint they have based on promises KNC never made. Do they not have anything else to do?  I think the most annoying are the constant statements that "I won't buy anything from KNC again."  Ok, fair enough.  It sounds like you've made your decision, so please go clutter up some other thread so I don't have to wade through 3-5 pages of crap each day to see if there is anything of actual value in here. I ponied up ten grand and change, granted it was all monopoly money since it came from my Jupiter mining, but I do want to pay attention. If you didn't, or you decided to get a refund and bail out, it's time to let go and stop telling us about it here ad nauseam so I can have my 5 to 10 minutes a day of scrolling through meaningless posts.

I had some time and decided to come out of lurk mode and create an account.  Please insert speculation regarding my motives as a first time poster here:


Cool.  So I've found the thread particularly crazy the last few weeks and wanted to comment in a dryer and more neutral fashion to see if it is worth continuing to visit this forum at all because this thread is not very helpful and most of the other manufacturer ones are no better.  FWIW, I ordered a Jupiter in July of last year, paid via PayPal, received it in roughly mid-October, and hashed with it until about Mid-December, then sold it. It hashed about 480Gh when I received it, and that went up by about 50Gh more with the .98/.99 firmware. I mined about 20 coins on Eligius and Slush with it, then sold it on eBay when I saw how ridiculous the prices were.  All told, I went in for about of $7k and earned 20BTC, all but 3 of which I converted while BTC was near $1000, and sold the machine for about $25k.  So I got it slightly late, got quite a lot more hash power than I paid for, got lucky with the rise in BTC, very lucky that people were paying way too much for hardware, and have no real complaints.

Of that 20BTC, I spent about 11BTC on a customer appreciation order Neptune.  I figured it was a long shot in terms of mining back the BTC or USD equivalent because I probably wouldn't see it until late June, and because Hashfast and Cointerra would eventually start shipping their own 400+Gh machines, but that it was probably going to be the last generation of equipment that was at all reasonable to run in a home, and that I'd almost certainly make a net USD profit when I eventually sold the hardware.  I suspect that describing it as reasonable to run in a home will be generous here in the US, but I have an available 40A 220V circuit for it, so for me it's fine.

What finally prompted this post is my surprise at how a few short updates from KNC that spawned some speculation have now turned into facts after a couple weeks, with no additional information. I don't see any real justification for the complaints about their NPS, because they didn't ship more power during the declared NPS timeframe.  I've seen speculation that they were mining themselves the whole time, but exactly zero proof of it, so to me this is just noise.  The endless whining about their decision not to sell more add on modules after they suggested they might is also noise. They never promised to, and only said to keep some BTC available if you can, so I'm not sure what anyone hopes to gain by hammering on about it.

The data center/cloud mining thing to me is the most interesting subject because there is actually some data to parse.  They have made some statements that are a bit difficult to parse consistently.  It's not really clear whether say a customer appreciate batch Neptune order gets 3Th from the cloud until it ships, or you just have to pick one or the other.  The speculation here is that they're building enough hashing power with more 28nm hardware to provide the equivalent of all three batches of Neptune orders.  I guess that's possible but it could easily only be enough for one batch, with the cloud hashing power rolling over to batch 2 when batch 1 ships, etc.  Either way, the argument that this will be wildly destructive in profitability for the Neptune hardware seems a bit weird, just based on how preposterously expensive mining hardware is second hand on eBay and whatnot  

If they add 3.6Ph to cover one batch at a time, then at present that would increase network power by 1/7 - but it may well not come online until June, by which time it will almost certainly be a considerably smaller % of the network.  If they build this titanic 10.8Ph cloud, then right now they'd add about 50% to the network.  That would certainly cause one hell of a blip in difficulty now, but it's not coming online now. Realistically, between Hashfast and Cointerra finally shipping, and even BFL (which while already late seems like it will eventually ship the Monarch), there is a lot of hashing power coming online in the first half of this year, so by the time a 10.8Ph cloud came online in June towards the end of Q2, it would be a lot less than 50% of the network.  I cannot be the only one who assumed that difficulty was going to go way up with three other high power ASICs shipping in volume, and in context of that, 3.6-10.8Ph of power from KNC is unexpected, but really no different than what might've happen if, for example, Terrahash had actually shipped something. As for stuff switching off, I don't see it anytime soon, since at the moment even a block erupter is more than covering its electricity cost.

The pictures of the existing racks of miners is interesting.  Most of the content in the thread has assumed that this is some stealth effort, but I don't see anything that would lead us to that conclusion over, for example, the idea that they decided sticking all the hardware for their hosted customers from last fall in those aluminum boxes was pointless and are just running them on those shelves. They can easily screw them into a box and ship it to the owner when the hosting contract is done.  This ties in with the claims that the video that shows all of this is evidence that they've been mining the whole time with a giant farm, and that they've continued to build 28nm equipment.  We don't know what % of those, if any, are hosted customers vs KNC's own mining. We really only have three data points: their original statement that they would limit their own mining, the existence of the miners sitting on shelves in that video, and KNC's statement that they haven't been cranking out a lot more 28nm hardware. Every other statement about this is speculation, much of it contravening the few facts we have, and is just useless noise to wade through on the forum.

So there is a lack of information problem, but that has not stopped the perception from being that they've already been mining with giant amounts of power, or that we've all somehow been screwed as such even though whatever they have done, or are going to do is not a huge % delta in total network hashing power over all the other stuff that is shipping now from other manufacturer's, or is likely to. So am I missing something here, is there some signal in the noise of this forum that I missed?