you sound quite naive.  while your intentions may be honourable, you're living in some dream world where commercial and financial reality doesnt exist.

the goal of an asic company is not just to sell enough chips to pay for its NRE.  thats just one of the big up front costs of going into manufacture.  What about the salaries of the engineers who worked for 6+ months to design the chip, will be working x months to ensure it works and continue optimising the design, and presumably will also be working 6+ months on the next generation chip?  or are they all expected to work for free?   What about the sales staff and the support staff ?  the people who answer the phone to help people with orders, or help people with problems getting it running etc?  And what about the return on investment for the investors who put up the money to start the company in the first place?

also, in the timeframes youre talking about, to design a 400-600 GH chip that you havnt even started yet, would take you 6+ months to design it, then 3+ months to manufacture it, so you're already 9 months behind the competition.   In that amount of time, their chips (which have been dropping in line with the rise in difficulty) will already be the price that youre aiming at, obviating the need for you to do this exercise.

by way of an example look at Cointerra (simply because theyre the lowest cost asic (per GH) i know of at present).  they're selling their december systems (not just chips, actual full systems in a box with power supply, controller host, plug and play...) at $7/GH, and their January systems for $3/GH.  By the time we get to may, june.. when your chips might be ready, just imagine what price theyd be selling them for!?   And what about every other asic company thats also competing for the same business.  theyre not in a vacuum.  theyre competing not only with each other, which keeps them honest, but theyre also selling gigahashes at a price that people decide has an roi or they wouldnt sell any, so they have to keep dropping their price in line with network hash increases.   And all of these guys would prefer to be selling chips on their own instead of systems, and im sure the only reason they build systems is because of time to market issues, and if they left it to others to design their boxes, theyd be out in the marketplace later.

part of the problem that youre missing is that its iots the NRE's that are causing the biggest problem.   its the high cost of starting a new asic that creates the issue (and lots of asics compound the problem).  not the actual production cost.  the bitcoin world actually needs LESS new asics, because its the raisning of the cash for the nre that puts such a strain on the bitcoin economy (all the pre-orders, many of which are paid for in bitcoins, which are converted into fiat and then paid directly to the fab, to pay for the nre).   if we didnt have such high nre's, asic companies wouldnt need pre-orders, and the price of bitcoins wouldnt have such price pressure because of high sales of btc into fiat.

youre compounding the problem.  Why not instead, do a deal with knc, hashfast or cointerra to buy the rights to their old 28nm chip when theyve obsoleted it (in the timeframe that your one would be ready anyway) and theyve moved on to 20, 16 or 14nm for their next chips ?

-- Jez

Can you provide verification of the orders? PM me if you don't want it public.

The red board has 2 NOR gates wired as I described a few posts back up above.


The reason it's on a second board is that I had changed the parts so many times on the main board that the PCB traces lifted off. I tried at first to wire the 2nd NOR gate in dead bug style next to the first, but the legs on that tiny gate are too delicate for me and kept coming off. I think I wasted about 4 or 5 over the time I did all that. Once I dug out that board and soldered it down it was easy to connect wires and hook it to the sides of the pullup resistors on main board. The NOR gate on main board was removed because it's output pad had lifted and leg broke off.

I thought maybe people would like to see my Franken K...

80mm fan just connected to molex for now. See I caught the red led showing data xfer. The red GND lead off back is for scope probes (why isn't it black? just me being retarded.)

Heat sink not attched to fan, just sitting on top as I disconnect often to take it to the solder station.



Tell me about it. I have one planned but like the ceiling and floor it's on the waiting list. I'm sweating here most days but today was quite cool at 32C. We have 40C days here in March.

Since bitsyncom mentioned its possible i tried it yesterday too but without answer. Im pretty sure that yifu is reading each new ticket in hours because he answered fast to 2 of my tickets. Im not sure what it means to not get an answer on this. Maybe his statement that avalons are mass produced now means he will sit it out until the batch 3 are produced fast now?
But maybe he meant the production of avalon chips only.
Im wondering how it turns out. Will a refund be the full btc i paid or something like BFL-Style?

So... You want to place an order for 10,000 chips, an order Avalon has to forward to the fab and pay for it, but at the same time you want to keep the right to chicken out if the difficulty skyrockets before you receive them? This is what you want, right?

What do you believe, that they can get refunds for their fab? Keep dreaming, TSMC won't refund any customer that "chickens out".

Post your order # and let's see if Bitsyncom refunds you. After all this whining, I'm pretty sure he will. Let's see, give it a try of you want it so badly.

Very true, but as customers we can just take our money back and put it elsewhere. That's the only thing we have left.

OK, then you took your decision, time to move on.

He just said that chip orders are placed every week.
 

With respect, he doesn't need to answer these questions, all he needs to do is deliver chips.

You can say that legitimate businesses would have a refund policy, but not having a refund policy is not illegal (as long as the promised goods are delivered), and it is clear that the money is needed to actually manufacture the goods, so a refund policy would not be practical regardless of how legitimate the business is.