Any chance of updating the site to show prices in btc sometime before checkout?

Where are you shipping from?

And how flexible are you on prices?

Your prices, right now, are "not very good" - 10oz, opened, tarnished slightly, for $299 when spot is $20.38 and I can buy new 10oz bars from Amagi for $230?

I'm interested in the 10oz bars at 2.5BTC/ea shipped, and might be interested in the 25x rounds if you can get down to 0.24BTC/ea.

I may be interested in some of the coins.  Tagging the thread pending the final inventory on Monday.

New poster, selling an account instead of cashing it out?  Beware...

Picture doesn't exist.

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind people about how to ship metals (gold/silver/etc) properly, due to seeing some creative shipping lately, some successful, some less so.

First, I'd like to thank Amagi for doing it right.  You guys rock.  Your packages are incredibly frustrating to get into without something sharp and a lot of time, and there's absolutely no way for someone to open your packages without it being really obvious.

I've also seen some far less-good shipping, and thought I'd offer a few suggestions on shipping.  This is US based, but the general concepts apply other places as well.

First, if it's a single coin or a few coins, a padded mailer is probably OK.  You should secure the coins inside the envelope though, so they don't rattle.  I've seen this done a few ways, and stapling "pockets" over a piece of backing cardboard is one of my favorites - it holds them securely.  However, if you're shipping multiple coins, it is well worth boxing them - wrap them in some paper if they're loose, and then stuff the box with packing peanuts or packing paper.

Another option is to secure the coins or small bars to a sheet of cardboard with tape, then fold the cardboard over on itsself, and pack this into a mailer.  This keeps them separated and avoids noise.

For larger orders or bars, the best way to do it is a box.  USPS offers free flat rate boxes, and these are well worth the money.  Whatever you do with the metal, make sure it doesn't rattle or clank against other bars - there's a very distinctive ring to silver especially in large bars.  Packing things tightly in bubble wrap works well, but tape the bubble wrap closed so things don't shift.  If you're shipping a partially filled tube of coins, stuff the rest with something so they don't rattle around and make noise.  Once you've got the box packed tightly so it doesn't rattle at all, tape it heavily.  If you have the fiber stranded tape, it's worth using, otherwise just ensure that there's no way it can open by accident.

Basically, if you can shake the box and have a decent confidence of what's in it, you're doing it wrong.  It should be just a heavy box with nothing obvious in it.  This stands a very good chance of getting where it's going.

The attacks you're worried about in transit are twofold.  The first is just pure package failure.  Metal, getting rattled around, and going through somewhat abusive sorting machines, will find it's way out of flat rate envelopes and similar even without any help.  You want to ensure it can never gain the momentum to break out - it has to be firmly fixed in place.

The second attack is the contents being "helped along" on their escape.  The defense against this is to simply make the package look boring and well secured.  If someone can rip the corner of an envelope quickly, empty it, and then tape it up claiming it broke in transit, they get the contents.  If the metal is rattling around, this is much more likely.

Basically, the recipient should, on receipt of the package, be somewhat annoyed by how long it takes to get into it.  This means it's packed right.

Other comments on shipping are welcome.

Arrived as advertised.  Thanks!  Leaving feedback.

I'm not sure you realize that ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated Circuit - it's a cover term for any sort of circuitry (silicon based or otherwise) that performs a specific task or set of tasks.  GPUs and CPUs are both arguably ASICs - just performing a very generalized set of tasks.

There's more to ASICs than just bitcoin.  Bitcoin is a niche within a niche, in terms of global semiconductor manufacturing.


The OP is trying to do something resembling a professional OpenCL cluster for production work, which is very different from bitcoin mining.  I'm somewhat surprised how many people in this thread didn't even read his requests about having something in a case that was rack mountable.  Most data centers will laugh you away if you show up with milk crates for their racks.


FPGAs are certainly reprogrammable for different tasks.  The main problem is that writing the hardware description (in Verilog/VHDL) is much harder than the parallel coding for GPUs, and depending on the task, the insane memory bandwidth of GPUs may be of significant use.  For large data processing, the onboard memory and bandwidth of GPUs is incredibly useful, and generating FPGA boards with the same capacity would be significantly more expensive.

Glad it worked.

For anyone troubleshooting MMQs, the DC-DC converter in the center seems to go bad far more often than one would expect, and the symptom is that everything works in terms of identifying the board, but the board cannot see any FPGAs.  It will look like everything is working but not find any chips.  You can also verify this with a voltmeter, though I don't recall offhand the pins to test.

If anyone else has dead MMQs exhibiting the "cannot find FPGAs" symptoms, let me know and I'll swap them out as well.  I'm not in any way affiliated with cablepair/btcfgpa/etc, but I have my reasons.

"Backing all fiat with gold" is going about things the wrong way.  Just wait for the debt-backed fiat systems to collapse then start over with something clean.  I fully expect that to happen in my lifetime.

Explain this, please.  The amount of value gold represents is very flexible - if the amount of global wealth increases, then each unit of gold simply represents more wealth (so is worth more).

Just as the bitcoin network could run entirely on 1.0 bitcoin with all transactions being tiny fractions of a bitcoin, there's no reason we couldn't run the global economy on 1oz of gold, with transactions taking place in nanograms.  It would be hard to do this physically, but a gold backed currency can still be transacted digitally just as we do with dollars today.

Why do you claim that a fixed amount of gold could not represent the entire world's wealth?

What?  Printing money hasn't worked?  What if, and I know this is crazy, but what if we try printing more money?  </Politician>


It sounds to me like you're making a fundamental yet very common error.  You appear to be confusing "value" with "money" - and if this is done, it leads to all sorts of weirdness that looks a lot like your question.

Money is not value.  It only represents value.  And, as such, it's representation of value can (and should) be flexible.  To quote Francisco d’Anconia, "Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow."  Further, the amount of value each unit of currency represents is not fixed, and will vary with time.  We are currently (in most of the world) "used to" inflation, where the value of each unit decreases as more units are printed.  A century or so ago, a dollar was valued at 1/20 of an ounce of gold, so a $20 gold coin was 1oz.  The economy ran just fine on this.  Right now, gold is around $1200/oz, so a dollar is worth 1/60th the value.  The economy still manages to run just fine, but we spend more on things.

If, for some insane reason, the government decided to do a 10:1 split on the dollar (so for each dollar you have, you now have 10), there would be a bit of disruption in the short term, but things would eventually stabilize with prices exactly 10x what they are today.  No new real wealth would have been created, just a massive inflation (or devaluing - more accurate word, but less commonly used) of the currency.

The world ran just fine on the gold standard, and underwent some of the most radical expansions of technology and wealth in society (real wealth, not monetary wealth) with gold.  It even underwent sustained deflation, which was good for some people and bad for others (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation - even as the gold supply increased, the real material wealth increased more, causing deflation).

I don't see any real reason to believe that a gold standard would eliminate innovation and reduce the material wealth of society, because money (be it gold, silver, fiat, etc) is just a representation of that wealth.  The economy would look slightly different as there would be more incentive to save and invest over furiously spending everything you have and beyond, but it would function just fine.

The fundamental problem with fiat currency is that you have to trust the politicians to "pull the levers" properly.  It can be made to work, but it can also be made to seriously enrich the early recipients of the newly created money (usually politicians and their friends) at the cost of the later recipients and everyone else holding currency.  This is all that inflation does - it's a tax on everyone, granted to the recipients of the newly coined money.  And it's stealthy, subtle, and a lot less likely to cause riots than soldiers going around to claim taxes.

If I were put in charge, I would attempt to move to a gold standard or similar.  It is a much more stable economic system without the distortions of money printing making calculations difficult to impossible going forward, and it eliminates the ability of the government to print vast piles of money for their own purposes.  It would certainly be a rough transition, but dramatically shrinking the government is a feature of it, not a flaw, and it should end up as a much more sustainable system that can actually last for a thousand years, instead of the current system we have which will, eventually, end the same as all other debt backed fiat currencies have (in disaster of the hyperinflation variety).  Printing more money will not work forever.  Never has, and it never will.

I'm aware.  Believe me, if the silver/btc ratio tips in my favor, I'll be on it sooner.   I've just got a number of things in the purchase queue.

I assumed it was someone who had just heard that "ASIC is better than FPGA is better than GPU" and had no idea of the actual time and money costs of doing ASIC development.

Plus, for many problem sets, by the time you hang a few gigabytes of high bandwidth memory off your FPGA or ASIC, you're halfway to a GPU anyway, at only 20-30x the cost of a modern GPU.

Not everything is bitcoin.

I prefer the phrasing, "It takes money to make money."

Maybe we could try one of those other systems that has always failed?  Do it somehow differently, and see if we can avoid the problem of running out of other people's money?

Here's an early iteration:



This system went through several iterations, eventually ending up without fans on the GPUs because the case fans provided enough airflow to keep them cool, and the removal of the fan shrouds reduced flow resistance enough that they didn't need their fans.  It went down to fewer cards as well, because we needed space for the Infiniband controller (for our purposes, we found that while the bandwidth use of VCL isn't that much higher than gigabit can handle, the latency reduction is well worth the cost of the IB cards/switches).

We've since moved beyond that design to a quad 7990 design with better cooling (we don't have any full photos of it, so I'm linking a build photo).  This lets us fit the full 8 GPUs supported by the driver in, while still keeping space for the IB controller.  Also, cooling is better with the gaps between the cards, and we don't have to physically modify the cards.



Now, if your desired build cost is "hang cards off some scrap aluminum in a milk crate with a used mainboard you got off Craigslist," these aren't the systems for you.  They're not aimed at bitcoin mining, but I get the impression the OP isn't doing bitcoin mining.  For a professionally done VCL cluster, that works reliably and can be run in a data center, we've got a number of options.  We also have some systems with fewer GPUs that are a bit less expensive if you want to start smaller, and we also typically will quote a dedicated cluster controller for the systems - again, we have a lot of experience with VCL, and this is what we've found works best.

Thanks.  I will get back to you if I'm interested in a week or so.

I beg to differ.  We have a number of 8 GPU systems deployed right now, on air cooling, that work just fine.  They are designed for rack deployment, as they need rather more power than a 120v 15A circuit can provide, so we run them on 240v most of the time.

We've got a box with 6 7970s running fine (it had 8 previously, but we needed a few for some other testing and a slot for the infiniband controller), and we have a number of boxes with 4x 7990s running quite comfortably on air.

They're a bit higher price than "milk crate computers," but they're also supported with a warranty, you can put them in a data center (try racking up milk crate systems), and they're designed for 24/7/365 operation.

I sent you a PM with some info on solutions I have available with a friend.


I entirely disagree - a homebuilt water cooling system for production work is asking for trouble.  I have know many people who have tried water cooling for GPUs before in the password cracking realm, and all of them have gone back to air cooling due to reliability issues.  The 7970s are great cards with excellent coolers on them, provided they're in a chassis that can handle their airflow and power requirements.  It's hard to do this with standard builds, but we have a few options that fit this need perfectly (24/7/365 sustained high load).

In the gold rushes, the bulk of the value was sucked out by the suppliers - those selling the mining supplies, food, etc.  Why would anything be different this time around?