[02/16/2014 - Update]

02/16/2014 - Update: Price has been lowered to just 0.196 btc/blade, with no rebate, for as many as you like (Up to 24 or so, since that's all I have left).  Shipping is still free in the US as well.

So far, all of orders have shipped in less then 12 hours. We also have a 24 hour shipping guarantee. if your order doesn't ship in 24 hours, I'll ship it express, and if it doesn't ship in 48 hours you can request a full refund, in btc.


Order today from https://starfire-x.com!

Here's an independent review from Kushedout

Posting a quick review of my experience with ASIC blades I purchased from starfire-x.com

Reference: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=412945.0

Seller: Ytterbium

Site: https://starfire-x.com

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Pros:
Purchase process was simple and secure.
Second day delivery.
Professional packaging.
Great communication and support from seller.
Setup was fast and easy, blades required no configuration.
Self explanatory, though instructions are available on the site.

Cons:
None.
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Waiting for PCB spacers to arrive from Amazon so I can have a nicer setup, but here are some pics of the current Frankenstein I built.

https://i.imgur.com/xYgxY7O.jpg?1
https://i.imgur.com/Q7suNu2.jpg?1
https://i.imgur.com/WQ0ggk3.jpg?1

And here's hephaist0s's post on getting his hardware:

Got my blade yesterday, and it's currently hashing at ~11GH/s. Setup was easy, essentially the same as an AM Blade (which is in the background in the pic.)



This shipped as soon as I ordered it. In-stock counts for a lot. Thanks!

01/14/2014 - Update: Starfire-x has sold and shipped it's first order!  Placed at 12:45 AM on January 13th, the order shipped at 11:56:39 AM the same day. That makes the average time between ordering and shipping so far just 11 hours and 11 minutes! (with n=1, obviously)



Anyway, since everything worked I guess I can say the test is over.  However, I think I'll keep the rebate going to keep prices more competitive and encourage people to post when they order.

If we're not able to ship within 24 hours, we'll upgrade your shipping for free, so the delivery date won't slip. If we're not able to ship in 48 hours we'll give you a full refund (in btc) if you ask for one.

If you'd like to order a from europe, you can still get free shipping if you order six or more.  Otherwise you'll have to pay extra for shipping.
Hi everyone.

I have some BTCGarden hardware I'm selling here in US through the website I setup, starfire-x.com, if anyone's interested in buying some. These are self-contained mining rigs and don't require a USB connection to a host, just an Ethernet port.  When I tested a single one on eligius.st I got about 8.5Gh/s on average.

Price is now a flat 0.196 btc/blade.

I'm still working on the website, but payment processing works and I'd like to do a small test of 10-20 customers on Monday, so I'm currently offering an "instant rebate" of 0.132BTC on a base price of 0.396BTC.  

So, basically if you order one the price is  ฿0.264 if you order one,   ฿0.528 if you order two, and then 0.396 for each additional order. My goal is to get a lot of small customers rather then one big one buying a bunch. Once I've sold 10-20 I'll turn off the rebate. That comes to about 0.031btc/Gh/s, compared to 0.044 right now on cex.io.

To get the rebate, just post in this thread with your txid or the address you paid, or you can PM me.



I did some tweaking to the firmware to make it easier to setup and use, mostly turning on the LEDs and using them to signal when the card isn't able to get work, as well as fixing some issues that could make it difficult to access the configuration panel if it wasn't already configured properly and able to get work.  I also wrote a pretty detailed setup guide for anyone interested.

One nice thing about these is that you can get them for a couple hundred bucks, so you don't need to invest thousands of dollars or multiple bitcoins.  And of course, these are in hand and should ship Monday, January 12th if you order before noon or so.

Here's an a more recent pic of my setup with some dramatic lighting:


An older pic. I actually have more cards setup at the moment.


And a closeup showing off the LEDs.  



Here's what the board itself looks like



Let me know what you guys think!  

[To get the rebate, just post how many you ordered along with either the address you sent the bitcoin too, or the transaction id, and of course the bitcoin address you want me to send your rebate too. (you can also PM me with those details if you want more privacy). I'll post when the rebate deal is over, but you can still get it so long as you place your before that point in time.]

Hi everyone!

I'm selling BTCGarden based ASIC miners here in the US.  

I'm planning to sell these through starfire-x.com, which I've been working on.  Everything is ready to go, and I'd like to do a "test run" of a few orders to see how everything goes, my plan is to sell 10-20 as a test run before the 'official' launch. (I have tested the payment system, I just need to test the actual process of printing out mailing labels and shipping them.)

Right now, you buy hashrate on cex.io at a rate of about 0.0455 BTC/Gh/s. Megabigpower.com does have miners for sale in stock as well, but, if you want to spend less then $1,600 the best deal you can get is a 25Gh/s USB miner for $140.  That comes out to about 0.066BTC/Gh/s, assuming about $850/bitcoin.  

(On the other hand, they apparently just lowered their prices *today* for their larger equipment, so if you want to spend thousands of dollars or multiple bitcoins, you can get a pretty good deal.)

While I think the price is pretty reasonable, may move it up and down depending on how demand is. But for the test run I want to get a few orders shipped on Monday, so, I'm offering a fairly big instant rebate – 0.132 bitcoins, or 33% off -- on up to two blades per customer.   That comes out to 0.03BTC/Gh/s. With the rebate the total cost for the blades is.  

To get the rebate, just post how many you ordered along with either the address you sent the bitcoin too, or the transaction id, and of course the bitcoin address you want me to send your rebate too. (you can also PM me with those details if you want more privacy).  I'll post when the rebate deal is over, but you can still get it so long as you place your before that point in time.

There are a couple of key points to keep in mind:

One, you don't need to connect them to a backplain or even to a host computer over USB.  All you need is a spare Ethernet port (although you do need to run a getwork proxy server at this point, as you would an ASICMiner blade. )

the 8.5Gh/s rate is what I actually measured connecting a single blade to eligius.st. The actual internal hashrate is up to 11-12Gh/s, but it's unfortunately slowed down by the getwork protocol.  Implementing a more efficient mining protocol on the firmware could potentially speed things up by up to 25%.

Additionally, I've done some modification of the firmware to make them easier to setup.  The configuration server is setup to listen on port 80 (so you just need to type the ip address into your browser to get to it), and the LED lights are used to indicate when it's working and when it's having network issues. I've also fixed a few bugs that could make it difficult to access the config page in some circumstances, making it much more reliable.

I have a detailed setup guide at here

I'm still working on the overall design of the website, but everything has been ready to go as far as actually taking orders for a few days, and not letting people order at this point is probably a bad idea

Some pics (these are blades that I have setup and mining right now - I tried to get some that showed the LEDs)

Let me know what you guys think.

So I thought this was interesting: https://ghash.io/ is a bitfury specific private pool, and it's up to 75Th/s.  Obviously not all bitfury users are going to be using it, but it certainly puts a lower bound on how much hashrate they've put out (Although I suppose if you had access, you could use other hardware on it in addition to your bitfury chips)

[UPDATE:]

Labcoin doesn't get too much discussion on this board, but their first prototype run chips should be arriving "within a week".

UPDATE:

Just talked to Sam and while exact dates are still to be received from foundry/fabrication here are the latest news:

- The first run of chips are expected to arrive within a week. This is a 2500 chip run and Labcoin expects at least 2000 chips to be of "production quality".
- From these chips some will be send to DYI projects and parties that have expressed interest in volume orders from the coming serial production run.

- PCB/Components for miners are expected to arrive shortly (a few days) after chips. To speed up miner production the PCB has not been tested prior to order but thorough simulations have been ran and Labcoin does not expect any issues with the PCB. SHOULD a problem arise Labcoin expects less than 1 week until new PCB can be produced, so even a worst case scenario has functioning PCB in-hand in about 2 weeks.

- The first run of chips will be built into miners immediately and Labcoin expects to be live and hashing @ around 6TH within the next 3-4 weeks.

- First serial production run will be ordered shortly after arrival of first-run chips and Labcoin expects serial production run of chips to arrive mid-late September (50TH+ for Labcoin mining operation and larger quantities of chips for DIY projects and mining operation customers).
- We will contact mining operations/DYI projects that have already gotten in touch with us shortly for addresses for sample chips. If you own a mining operation or similar company and wish to order chips from the first serial production run you can contact Labcoin at: sam.noi@labcoin.com - I will post bulk pricing and chip order run sizes as I get the information from Sam.

These are 130nm chips, but it will be interesting to see what their bulk pricing is like compared to KnC/HashFast/Cointerra/etc. 

If everything goes according to plan you'd actually be able to get chips/miners from them in September.

[EDIT: This was obviously a hoax. The WSJ has issued a correction (behind paywall here) and The Tavistock group has put out a press release disclaiming any association:]

EDIT: This was obviously a hoax.  The WSJ has issued a correction (behind paywall here) and The Tavistock group has put out a press release disclaiming any association:

"Unfortunately, many immature investments and investors would like the association of private investors like Joe Lewis. They bring instant credibility," said Douglas McMahon, senior managing director of Tavistock Group, a private investment organization founded by Lewis.

"'Our' Joe Lewis has nothing do with Bitcoin, Phoenix Funds or Andrew Laurus," said McMahon.

So the question is, who's behind the Hoax?  My guess is this "Andrew Laurus" person was probably spreading rumors about this "deal" as part of some sort of scheme. Both of the reporters who covered (at bitcoin examiner and the WSJ) follow him on twitter.

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Old version of text:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323997004578644491403250124.html

Joe Lewis, a billionaire foreign-exchange trader who teamed up with hedge-fund manager George Soros in 1992 to bet against the Bank of England, is the latest high-profile financier to throw his weight behind the virtual currency called bitcoin.

Mr. Lewis leads the Phoenix Fund, a Zurich-based private-equity fund that on Tuesday plans to invest $200 million in Avalon, a company that makes computer servers aimed at creating bitcoins, according to people familiar with the situation.

....

The Phoenix Fund was set up this year to invest in bitcoin mining-hardware companies. It looked at several of Avalon's rivals in the sector, including Butterfly Labs and KnCMiner but decided against investing, according to a person familiar with the private-equity firm's strategy.

....

The bitcoin deal was put together by Andrew Laurus, a former government-bonds salesman at Lehman Brothers who is also an investor in the fund. Avalon was set up by Yifu Guo, a pioneer in the bitcoin-mining industry. He was part of the team that developed the first ASIC bitcoin mining hardware. ASIC stands for application-specific integrated circuit, a type of custom-designed microchip. Mr. Guo couldn't be reached for comment.

So here's the question: Does this explain all of Josh's weird behavior lately? It's likely that Joe Lewis didn't tell the other people he was looking into investing with that he was also looking possibilities as well.

With Inaba's hubris, he probably assumed the deal was a definite go ahead.  That would explain why he was in here telling everyone that he was going to laugh at people who were predicting their failure, that he was going to "stick it up [our] asses" and that the bitcoin talk forum was a "minor player" in everything - clearly alluding to "major players" elsewhere, like Joe Lewis.

Anyway, obviously this guy decided BFL wasn't for him.  They have a chip design, but Avalon (and ASICMiner) have probably made enough to fund 20nm designs on their own.

Interestingly he also looked at KnC and wasn't interested.    

I've seen numbers like a few tens of thousands of dollars for an initial tapeout on lower-end processes (like 110, 130 or 180nm), at least if you know what you're doing. How realistic is that outside of China?

Basically what I'm wondering is: How much would the up-front R&D cost for various feature sizes? Beyond that - my impression is that it's easier to get chips fabricated at larger sizes as well (less competition for limited fab slots). 

There are companies like Uniquify (doing HashFast) and ORsoC (doing KnC) but I would imagine their services are pretty expensive, are there cheaper companies with a proven track record that could handle a 110nm design without much cost, and on a relatively short time-frame?

I realize that 110nm+ is kind of obsolete at this point, but my idea would be to design the chip and then simply charge a license fee. So, you could have multiple companies competing to sell these chips at low a cost as possible, or people could even do group buys directly from the fab, choosing whatever kind of packaging they want.

(I'm not an ASIC designer - if that's not obvious at this point, although I did take a class on digital circuit design in college, which used FPGAs. I have some ideas that I think are interesting that could boost performance and make the chips much easier for DIYers as well)