Copied from the R11 thread.

10/25 update. World's first pics of fully populated Black Arrow Bitfury Prosperos: http://ecointalk.net/gallery/image/61-img-9928/

Thanks bobsag3 and Black Arrow!

The first payouts would occur 2 weeks after the boards are running.

The boards are guaranteed to be shipping by Nov. 1 or our money/BTC will be refunded. It doesn't necessarily mean that they'll arrive by this date.

However....things are looking promising.

Here's the latest pictures taken today. Fully populated Black Arrow Bitfury Prosperos,

http://ecointalk.net/gallery/image/61-img-9928/

64 shares are available.

Thank you!

The co-op payouts are usually every 2 weeks, but -R- opted for the 1st and 15th since he's doing the payouts.

The hosting/management fees are the same percentage, its just that the payouts will be about 1/14th larger when this schedule is used.

Thank you Thomas.

The latest confirmed numbers are that 66 shares are available.

Hi Kasper,

Welcome Back!

Unfortunately, R2B is sold out.

However, as a R1 original share owner, you're allotted your upgrade share(s) in R1B for whatever shares you purchased, up until the upgrade parts ship which have already been ordered.

The cost is 0.35BTC (which is what R1B and R2B shares cost when we converted to BTC + 0.01BTC as a tip to the buyer being bumped) and will be sent to the person that's bought the share to move the R1B GB forward. You can send it to the payment address listed on the 2nd OP and send me a PM when you do.

I'll notify the person who you bumped and send them the BTC payment when you're ready.

You can click the "List of all our GBs" in my sig as a handy reference and quick links to all the various GBs this co-op has undertaken since then (we've had something like 13 more fundraising rounds, including 2 Baby Jet upgrade rounds since I might've last seen you).

Cheers!

PS: BTW, shoot me a PM if you're up for hosting miners in Europe or the Middle East.

I wouldn't want you to lose your shirt, and understand if the usual 2.75% hosting/management fees for our co-op are too low and would need to be adjusted.

Hi pandemic,

We have Bitmine Rig modules active in a Round 8 28nm ASIC GB. I think it's a pretty good deal. There's a Halloween sale going on at the moment: 15% off, which our co-op was first to publish this news (which was later corroborated by Giorgio from Bitmine in their CH thread). R8 was adjusted to be 15% cheaper than R7 shares due to this sale. The R8 modules will coexist with the R7 modules and Rig.

Round 8, Bitmine Rig modules: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=310217.0

Cheers!

Hi Phil,

Thanks! I do believe that you're a "repeat offender" so: Welcome Back! 

I know that there's more sales then this but for now, until we confirm any other orders:

98 shares available.

Nice!

Thanks! We should have a numbers update in a bit. I see 7 public orders but there could be more.

Welcome back unknown.usr.  

Cheers!

==

76 shares available.

Ah...well I try to give people the benefit of a doubt. I graduated as an Electronics Technician out of the University of Hawaii system with a CCNA cert. I earned my way to a Network Engineering position thru experience and OJT. I don't give my personal info out to strangers because I work as a DoD contractor (plus, too many weirdos on the interwebs). I *make* the time to make it work. I'm up till 10-11PM most nights, jump on before work, and check my phone for major issues.

We're *not* an incorporated business as it's a co-op that just grew. However, we've grown so much, we are looking at officially incorporating and upgrading our site to a pro site.

I'll just leave this here. You're not going to find these unclass DoD operational pictures posted by anyone else online:

My old job (this is me as user: KauaiDKer, trying to give away a good paying Sr. Tech job in Hawaii at a National Lab in the middle of a recession; you know: your usual scammer behavior)     :

http://forum.surfermag.com/forum/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=1373159
http://forum.surfermag.com/forum/showthreaded.php?Number=1373957&page=0

My photo gallery: http://s286.photobucket.com/user/SurfSkateKauai/library/?sort=3&page=3

I'm a John K. Escrow vetted IT engineer that helps offer the best at-cost and below-cost deals to the forum. John K. knows where I live if anyone gets scammed. I've never scammed anyone in my life and don't intend to start (you know how f'n stupid that would be to lose my job over $50-60K? Not worth it at all) Here's one wallet I use for GBs; it's done over 262 BTC worth of transactions without a single incident: https://blockchain.info/fb/1c5r7t

I attempt to be as transparent as possible with our Group Buy funds, so I use custom signed transactions.

I really don't need your money or BTC. If you want to join the GB, then that's fine. If you don't, that's fine too. I know that this may be hard to fathom since we have scammers left & right on these forums but I only started our co-op to try to give "little guy" miners access to scam-free Institutional Pricing. That's it.

I'm no greedy mofo or some guy starting a fake ASIC company like ASX Project or Phoenix Technologies. We've been successful with this model, which is the friendliest and cheapest GB deals you'll find. I spend 20 hours+ a week of my free time (for months for free) to try to give the community the best deals around and to keep things humming along. Unless you've been in our shoes: you have no idea how much work it takes to be  GB Coordinator on these forums. Lots and lots of thankless work (and distrust and accusations without proof (not necessarily you, but other people) ).

I don't make a direct profit off *any* of our at-cost or below-cost GB shares. The extra funds we build into the share price go right into our UPS/AC/Gas Generator/facility improvement funds. AFAIK: No other co-op can claim a better ASIC mining set up then our co-op. We have the lowest priced GB shares anywhere and it's priced that way on purpose. My eventual cut is 0.25-0.37% of the miners BTC earned as part of a commission from the world's lowest Hosting/management fees of 2.75%. In other words, in the near term: I'm not exactly going to get rich off of this percentage of mining output.  

No one hosts miners for free. It costs money to host miners. It's cheaper for me to have bobsag3 run our miners then for me to pay 8x his electricity rate to run them in Hawaii. The usual fee for this for GBs and miner hosting is 3% and above.

Here's the payment post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=315952.msg3384287#msg3384287

We're not taking PP or Square CC at the moment. PayPal requires us to float shares and ties up our funds for 1-2 weeks. Square officially considers Bitcoin to be High Risk.  [Yes, high risk to the CC cartel]

It was an option that's now unavailable.

Sorry, we're all full up on that as that puts a strain on the co-op leaders finances as we have to float PayPal shares for 1 to 2 weeks (and it was still costing us a few bucks per transaction).

Companies like Square and PayPal see the Bitcoin protocol as a threat. Instead of using this protocol to save money for customers, they'd rather be run over by the Bitcoin train while they stuff their fingers in their ears and close their eyes tightly, wishing it would all go away.

BTW: the prototype boards were finished on Fri./Sat. last week, which is when that pic was taken that I just added to the R11 OP (thanks jackrabbiit for reminding me; the BA pics were from R10)

The full assembly is already underway.

I also heard from bobsag3 that he shipped a free Black Arrow board to Kanos, so that he can work on getting cgminer to perform well directly with this BA design.

Hi Xialla,

This GB is a bit different then your usual preorder GB.

Black Arrow has a previous line of modestly successful BTC FPGAs. The Prospero is their new line but their own Minion chip won't be ready until February. Bobsag3, one of our co-op leaders, along with another custom hardware maker on the GB forum, paid Black Arrow to do a bullet run with a reel of Bitfury chips they bought.

It's a Bullet Run that has to be shipping by Nov. 1 or we all get our money back! Would BFL dare to offer this soft of satisfaction guarantee?  

How do I know that there will be funds available if we need a refund? It's simple: Thomas S. and I are holding funds for the BA Rounds 9 thru 11 GBs. Here's the wallet address for payments for this BA Bullet Run: http://blockchain.info/fb/14yuzgr

Bobsag3 and BA don't get a single satoshi until we're hashing away at Black Arrow's official US miner hosting facility, which happens to be the prime hosting site for the DZ MC. If there's a refund we *still* keep the hash rate and still get 1 month free hosting thanks to bobsag3. [If you know of *any* deal out there better then this, well...hook a brotha up so we can join in on the fun]

This business insured pro colo facility that's tailored for ASICs is run by bobsag3 as Miner Hosting LLC, and was designed with my input as a pro network engineer who has designed and installed multiple server rooms for multiple world class research labs. And I'm not bailing on y'all because I'd lose my security clearance & a sweet salary as an engineer (and about 12 co-op members out of about 70 know my real ID and research lab location).

Hi alh,

I'm sorry that your order hasn't been sorted out yet. Thomas is handling the order tracking but I do understand that he was having some difficulties with the site re-using wallet addresses of previous orders that weren't paid.

We'll get this figured out. I don't want anyone in our co-op to feel like they've been denied their fair purchase. Please be patient with us, as we're still evolving and growing. We've built this co-op on a shoestring so far, so sometimes our free tools can be a bit clunky. I know that Thomas hasn't had an easy time with some of our site's quirks, so please give him time to sort this out.

We're here to help the miner community, not frustrate it, which is why we work hours and hours for you guys putting together the best deals and dealing with co-op issues, to keep this co-op (relatively) humming.

Our site at the moment is still very much a beta site but we've become to see the limitations of WordPress and its associated plug-ins. Going forward, we're looking at setting up a pro site very shortly and better e-commerce tools so that these unfortunate situations don't happen. The DZ MC is likely going pro. 

I know that will please Thomas immensely to not have to worry about the site e-commerce tools. I don't have a timeline yet for the rollout of our new site but we hope to have some site samples soon from the same designer of this site: www.tellly.com

Hi ineededasername (LOL BTW),

bosag3 notified me about this. I can escrow any of your Sierra sales at-cost. I'm an official Escrow Affiliate at BTCrow.com

I usually charge 2% for this service but since he's a friend and a business partner I'll only charge 1%.

For anyone else interested, I can also extend my Escrow services at BTCrow at the same rate for these Sierra Buyouts. I've performed a HashFast Baby Jet Buyout before, in Round 2 of our co-op's activities. The semi-automated escrowed buyout was set up in such a way that the buyers and the seller were protected throughout.

The process is/was:

1) An escrowed transaction was set up at BTCrow (or use one's particular choice of escrow service)
2) I provided an email address to BTCrow for the invoice to be sent to for payment
3) I paid the buyout price and 1% escrow fee
4) The seller received notice that BTCrow received my payment
5) The seller notified HashFast of the buyout and my forum name
6) I contacted HashFast with the seller's permission to change the shipping address
7) Once HashFast confirmed the shipping address change to bobsag3's pro colo facility in Missouri, I manually released the funds.

It sounds difficult but it's not that hard. It goes something like this: http://s286.photobucket.com/user/SurfSkateKauai/media/HashFastDZGroupBuyBuyoutofHashFastOrder616at-cost.png.html?sort=3&o=18

Which resulted in this (shipping address changed to Missouri): http://s286.photobucket.com/user/SurfSkateKauai/media/a8295a7b-3c53-4bb6-98ab-f74a3276e00e.jpg.html?sort=3&o=17

http://s286.photobucket.com/user/SurfSkateKauai/media/HashFastOrder616Transferemailconfirmation.png.html?sort=3&o=14

========

Which led to a round of inexpensive GB upgrades for our Round 2B: http://s286.photobucket.com/user/SurfSkateKauai/media/DZMCR2BComplete-1.png.html?sort=3&o=9

==

To all: please send me a PM if you'd like me to coordinate an escrowed buyout of one or more of these Sierras. BTCrow holds all escrow funds and provides 3rd party dispute resolution for up to 120 days, post sale. The buyer has full control of when escrow funds are released to protect their BTC.

My response time for escrow transactions is 24-36 hours. I've vetted 9 or more GB Coordinators and/or miner hosts on the Group Buys forum, and run the most active Miners Cooperative on the GB forum with about 60-70 members on 4 continents and 2 island chains.

This Sale will be running until the end of the month.

Whatever shares we sell in Round 8 will go towards whatever number of upgrade modules we can afford by Halloween.

Currently we can purchase 1 upgrade module to be housed in the R7 Bitmine Rig, worth an extra 150-250 GH/s of hashrate.