Update: Order Processing & Order Deadline

With the updated prices and shipping dates confirmed, I started sending out order processing details to those interested so far. Orders become binding by paying the down-payment of 16 BTC per lot ordered.

With the estimated shipping date given by punin, this offer is available until September 19th.

Shipping from Switzerland. As written in the OP, standard shipping is included, urgent will be charged 1 extra coin.

As for VAT: if you are within EU and do not need a commercial invoice, I can ship from Germany, which will be charged effective expenses for driving there (like 1.5 BTC today).


No, you need to organize GB yourselves, since maintaining this lot size is the only way to make it handleable.

This is not faster. If he gets them September 20th (end of W38), he can start distributing them W39. Where is he delaying here? It is nowhere written that October and September batches are delivered at the same time. Are you implying this?

As for the price: BitFury team has a very clear price policy: chips are sold for what they are worth. And they are worth what they could mine with them. So they are in a very comfortable position to set the price they see fit, and if nobody buys, just self-mine with them. That's what every other chip manufacturer does, no? If you developed your chip, already made back all your NRE, produce chips for $0.5 each, expect to mine $30 with each over the next 6 months - would you sell them for a profit of 400% or for 4000%? The answer is obvious. It also implies that buying chips from BitFury can only be profitable if their profitability calculations (they based the price point on) were too pessimistic.

While these are pure market forces, they leave almost no air to breath to the DIY scene. DIY can only compete by building cheaper boards than what is already available, which (as already pointed at in this thread) is really tough: bare chips at 22.5€/chip at one hand and a starter board with 16 chips for 390€ leaves a delta between chips and rig of 30€, which is hard to beat.


I never said this is a great offer or promoted this being better or worse than anything out there. I am only aware that most DIY folks won't be able to buy a whole reel and forwarding what is offered out there.

I know your disappointment is not directed at me but at BitFury directly, I just wanted to underline that I am neutral here and am in no way advocating anyone to buy unless he is well aware of the profitability aspects.


Thanks for the feedback.

Hm, I don't quite understand where you want to point me to. If it is the September / October chips declaration, pricing and dates are unfortunately not as congruent and predictable as I'd like to have it to offer some reliable delivery.

Fact is, I am talking exactly about those chips being shipped last week of September. In my hands W40, in buyers' hands W41.


Or do I miss something else?

Update: Chip Prices for October Delivery set

Bulk prices for October chips has been set to 67'500€ / reel of 3000 chips. With that, I adapted my price to 0.27BTC / chip, which at a nominal 2.7GHps / chips matches 0.1BTC/GHps.

The OP has been updated accordingly, including a clarification on the lead time guarantee and availability.

Right, I always told to pay S&H only after you have your boards / chips in hand, to prevent refunding them in cases we now had. Therefore, the 15% were in relation to what has been shipped out - not to the total amount of orders. But it became better meanwhile, number is already at 30%+

It looks like all remaining chips will be delivered next week. Then I'll provide a list of payments due and hope to close this chapter soon.


Prepare your mining environment, miners (hint: especially getting the efficient PSU of your choice in time sometimes turns out to be difficult).

Update: Remaining Batches ship within 12h

I was notified today that the remaining 3 batches will ship within 12h, which essentially means they left Avalon HQ and are in the hands of logistic services.

Since the refund queue only reached ~2500 chips by now, I was not able to request another batch refund - now it is not possible any more. Pending refunds can therefore not be served, please do not request for further refunds.

Not sure if you are happy or disappointed by this update, but nevertheless: please double check and ensure that you have entered and locked your shipping destination for the remaining orders. If you did not, your chips will be kept back and you waste precious time of maximum potential mining income.

See OP:



That's correct. Please pay S&H only for the orders already delivered.

Hi,

thanks, but no tips. Having a deal that turns out to be unprofitable was my business risk.

But S&H are expenses I made, and it would be fair if everyone who received chips would just pay what was agreed. I even offered to give that out as donation for those short on coins, one only needs to post here that he wishes to take S&H as donation. That's meant to distinguish those who really are currently having bad times from those who try to free-ride.

So far, no one asked for a donation. And 12/66 orders were with paid S&H.

No, it were 7k chips, not 70k.

And it were my chips reserved for the manufacturing contract with Bitmine to build 65 Avalon clones for my mining operation. Instead of taking the clones, Giorgio paid me the potential mining profit I could make with them (which at that time was around 2x original price) to be able to serve pending orders of other customers. The other day ASICMINER dropped rig prices to 0.35BTC/GHps and made Avalon chips almost worthless. So this attempt to make as many customers happy as possible turned out to be a very bad deal for Bitmine.

I am only a customer like anyone else here (with still 40+ clones in order) and therefore understand and share the disappointment most of you have. But Bitmine is not the correct target for your anger. I know first hand that they did whatever was doable to keep their part of the deal.

No, noone needs to dig through hundreds pages of post. Just look at the OP, I linked everything relevant from the news section.

Please check how many refunds I processed and how many pending orders are still left. And now assume everyone sends me refund requests via PM, email, Skype or irc, all with different formats (or just 'give me my refund') - how am I supposed to handle this?

Come on folks, I am working my ass off to please everyone and let everyone go without loosing a single Satoshi - is it really that hard to follow a simple and well defined process?

You missed this post (for B2 you need to scroll down), so yes, chips were shipped August 24th and according to tracking were all delivered.

BTW: from those list of 66 processed orders, only ~15% paid their S&H so far. It would be fair, if at least those who got their chips / boards reimburse me those expenses I had as described here.

Hm, difficult to interpret whether BitSyncom suggests everyone left with orders to ask for refunds.

Anyhow, our group-buy has three batches pending for delivery, and so far the refund request queue is somewhere at 2k chips. I can't just request refund for a batch at will unless enough users ask for it. Ball is at your side.

Um, no. By 'proportionally' I understand X% as being a factor, i.e. if difficulty increases by 100%, you get the chips for 50% of their price; if it increases by 30%, you get them for 1/1.3 of that.

But now that you are bringing the issue up, I am not sure if the proportional price reduction is the correct formula either. What I want to offer is a fair compensation for the missed lower-difficulty cycle, i.e. for missed income due to late delivery. Now this number is not only depending on the difficulty cycles you miss, but obviously on later difficulty updates, which at any time are speculative. If you assume a constant difficulty increase of 25%, during the first difficulty cycle you make 1/4th of the chip / rig's lifetime mining income, so a 25% price reduction for missing the first difficulty cycle would in fact be a fair compensation. Alas, with continuous 50% difficulty increases, the number is 2/5 or 40%.

You know, all these factors that make mining profitability difficult to predict

But thanks for the input, I sure need to reword / clarify the clause.

No news.

Current refund request queue:

Not sure if I can ask for a refund for a batch in 'Prepare-shipping' mode will be accepted, but if delivery takes longer than the queue needs to grow beyond 10k, I will at least try.

As soon as you make up your mind, please order following the process given in OP.

Hm, $300 for a 8-chip board is really a good offer - if it ships in October. KnC's Jupiters ordered today will cost even less ($12.5/GHps), but will ship in November. If today's difficulty increase rate remains, chips / rig loose 30% per two weeks, Drillbits boards delivered and operating end of October are a better deal than Jupiters operating mid November. If OTOH your rig is held back at customs for only 5 days, everything looks different - what a crazy business 

I am not offering boards, only distributing chips, which also includes sending them to the manufacturer of your choice.

Those I keep for myself I will build into those boards that I'll find economically most viable. I have bitmine.ch right around the corner and might go with them. burnin is also an option. Furthermore, BitFury told me that a design optimized for higher performance per chip compared to c-scape's will be open sourced soon. So quite some options to chose from.



Since 300 chips are somewhere between 800 and 900 GHps, you will need to stick with someone else to reach the lot size.

Yes, as the updated thread title indicates: 0.36 BTC per chip is the maximum price for delivery in week 41.

That's based on the anticipated competition with a price range of $10/GHps for November delivery. Consequently, $30 is what most potential buyers expect to see as new price. Alas, this will only be the case if at least one of the 28nm competitors has chips or rig to offer in volumes for immediate delivery. BitFury created a masterpiece 10x more energy efficient than anything else available and still as energy efficient as next-gen chips currently in design pipeline. Therefore, the price will be set to what chips are worth and not less - which is not set in stone to be as low as expected.

That's how my initial price point was set: $30 per chip at $100/BTC, plus 20% risk margin for late delivery.

In essence, the initial offer with the proposed addendum provides

• hedge against fiat/BTC fluctuations for those operating in BTC domain
• hedge against higher chip prices (if competition fails)
• hedge against lower chip prices (you bail out at no loss if you can get chips significantly cheaper elsewhere)

I personally think that this is the best offer you can get (I'm obviously biased ) - if you want to go with BitFury.

BTW: including you, so far I have 9 interested users for the total of 30 lots I have to offer.


Cheers

Update: Offer re-opened, unclear Pricing Policy

Discussed with BitFury team about pricing without satisfactory results. The whole sale and retail prices for chips will be fixed end of September, which makes in advance group-buys difficult or impossible.

Keeping the offer halted until those numbers are settled is one way to go, but this would leave interested buyers in uncertainty if and when you get your chips delivered. With what we learned from the Avalon DIY scene, this would not motivate many to jump in.

The other option is to offer a cut-off price clause as part of the contract like this:
If at shipping time the retail price for in-stock chips is significantly lower (that is: 20%+) than this offer, buyer can cancel the deal and get down-payment refunded in full.

The proposed 20% margin is to compensate for the lead time guarantee, i.e. I earn if I deliver first half of October and loose otherwise.


Those of you considering this offer: does this sound fair?

Update: Offer halted for Clarification

Thanks for your interest and orders placed so far. Due to the unclear current and future pricing of the tier-1 BitFury distributors, I decided to halt the offer until those are sorted out.

I set the price based on what I paid myself for the chips and on informal discussions on the future price structure for chip distributors. It is also based on the current pricing of 80€ per chip at BFSB, which I expect to be cut by 50% as soon as October chips will be available. This obviously does not match with the price for the 400GH full kit of 6500€, which prices ready-to-mine rig at today's rate with 0.25BTC / chip. It either means that kits are not really available at the given price, or they are and buying bare chips does not make sense at all. I am in contact with BitFury and team to clarify and will update as soon as I know more. As far as I can tell, there will be a price adjustment - but prices for in-stock items might not necessarily be dramatically lower than for pre-ordered ones.


Meanwhile, my offer is halted. That is, you are welcome to place orders, but I will accept them only after I know the future pricing policy and only if my order is not worse than what you can get from dave or punin directly.

As for quantities and group-buys: yes, the unit size is 300 chips. That is the only way to limit accounting overhead and provide shipping and handling at no additional costs. Users sticking together and forming a group-buy to reach the unit size are gladly welcome.

As for what to do with the chips: there are several developers already who announced designing of BitFury based mining boards (e.g. burnin or bitmine). If requested, I can send chips ordered (only full lots of 300) to the developer of your choice for board manufacturing.


Cheers