I was gonna start this out with a bunch of links to this whole cypress situation, but there are far too many...

I figured if you just google:>  cypress bank account confiscation   <:you can go and look for yourself...


My question is, do you think this is the reason for the most recent spike? or is this just a symptom of the greater problem that is causing the prolonged rise in price?

this thread is interesting to me. I had the same feeling as the OP in around the same price range when I traded roughly 56 btc for an imaginary promise that I might at some time in the indeterminate future get a magical money-making device delivered to my door... (i.e. avalon batch 2.1)

I remember the price at that time was approaching the old *all-time high* and thought, "this is a pretty good deal! I can just buy back when the price dips back to sanity"

well, since then, I've been incrementally selling the rise, and waiting to buy the pull-back. (as a miner, I thought this was prudent, didn't want to be on the hook for the outlay - which is not extreme, but not negligible in my case_)

but where the heck is my pull-back? since then it's been straight up, other than 2 opportunities for me (was able to get back some coins at 38, 36, but never quite hit my 34 bid, both times  

at the time of this writing virtex (yes, I'm from canada) is at 64* with only marginal resistance on the up side, this makes me fearful that this run is the true opportunity and that if I ever receive any magical mining hardware it will be far to late to ever get those bitcoins back...

Either that, or this whole thing will collapse tomorrow... exciting times!  

* price actually hit 65.8 while I wasn't looking, can't help myself at these prices, gonna try new strategy though to keep me in check, just gonna sell half of what I earn each week, and try to stockpile the rest...

Thank you for the great pictures!

Ngzhang, you should feel very proud!


- originally, due to lack of high quality photos and some misunderstanding, I was under the impression that the fans were exhausting heat, blowing out. Now from your photos it *looks* like the fans are intake fans to blow cold air into the case (makes much better sense) can you confirm?

- also, I am assuming that I should have no problem replacing the PSU with a modular one? (I've got a silverstone 1200 gold that is sadly under-utilized atm) - should easily handle a fourth module when the time comes.

- I was also thinking of using some ducting in the extra space from the missing 4th module to force air through the fins. I'm now thinking this is unnecessary as the bottom module should be the coolest one anyways, and ducting may have no effect on increasing air flow through the upper 2 modules.

  After seeing some of Ngzhang's comments I'm thinking the only mods I'll be making are replacing the PSU and directing an AC unit blowing towards the intake. And of course adding 4th module when they come available 

I'd totally recommend you get a 7970. I've got several of these and I love them all (even the red-headed stepchild that will no longer go past 1000 MHz

not sure what they're going for these days. 5 btc probably won't get you a new one, but you might be able to find used for around that much (if not now, soon)

plus, once it becomes almost useless for bitcoin, you could switch to litecoin, or use it for video games, or sell it (it's a really good gaming card and should hold fairly good resale value)


-- just my suggestion

thanks Chris.

not happy with placement choice of the "little" single. why wouldn't you have them evenly spaced to better spread out the heat? (ideally at the corners)

happy that the single and the little single "seem" to have the same supporting hardware on the board (meaning, it doesn't look like the little single was neutered by limiting the power, which with proper cooling, should allow more overclocking headroom)

extremely happy if someone with better knowledge of these things could confirm or deny my suppositions, and provide the reasoning...

In light of the forked chain last night, would anyone be able to confirm that coinlab is using .7x client or earlier?

+2

this project certainly seems more reputable than the rest of the recent offerings. Helveticoin seems to actually have a clue and a business plan - stick to what you know, bring on partners with expertise, etc.

and please, the term "scamsics" is just dumb. I propose fakesics or fAkeSIC.

9 pages! really?

in post #7 I told you that this is simply a switch with some stickers to cover up the fact that it is a switch. I thought that would be the end of it, maybe some jokes and lulz to be had, but I could not believe that anyone would fall for this one. I should have known better.


Let me spell it out for you, (those of you that ordered)

There is never any picture of the back of the device, because you'd be able to see the network ports.

see? ->
_______________________________________________________________________________ ________________________

Also, there is never any picture of the front without the sticker because then you'd see the activity and port speed leds.

see? ->
_______________________________________________________________________________


compare this ->
_____________________________________________________________________________

and this ->



at least I have some admiration of the primeasic guys. They at least made an impressive effort to be believable; but if you fall for some teenage kid, throwing some stickers on a bloody five dollar switch and backing it up with some pics and vids that are very careful never to show the back of the device (or the front without the sticker covering) then go ahead and send your money in. I have absolutely no sympathy for you.

I mean, come on people, this isn't even a box of fans, it's a freakin' switch with stickers!

Canadian exchange (cavirtex) is lag free (obviously having miniscule volume by comparison) and has already rebounded to 39 at the time of this post...

could be a dead-cat bounce.. who knows?

That is the best picture of a "fake" ASIC that I've ever seen.

my take on the two outer heatsinks?

I would imagine those boards are similar to the Avalon ones, and they would have a bunch of qfn chips with the backside of the board doing the business end of the cooling. it would appear that they simply added a heatsink to the tops of the chips as well (every little bit helps I guess) and it even looks to me like the board on the right side is flipped around compared to the other three, presumably so that the hot heatsink would be in the direct airflow.

meaning the heatsinks stuck against the sides of the box are pretty much overkill and not needing much airflow at all...

really, this design makes a lot of sense to me. The only thing I don't see is a controller board, but maybe you don't need one? does the Avalon have a controller board simply to make it "stand-alone"?

Anyways, I must repeat, that is the best picture of a "fake" ASIC that I've ever seen!


Yes, ridiculously good!

I think everyone needs to lighten up a bit. He never asked for money, directed you to a website to make payment, nothing.

He simply wrote a little program that outputs a string every 1-2 seconds showing time, a counter var, and a random number from ?? 80,000 to 81,000 ??

Very nice little joke, he even provided hints like 800W power usage... look at the size of that box, you could use it to cook pancakes if it was using 800 Watts (though your pancakes would likely burn

If you created a wordpress account for the avalon store website you should be able to login and click the "My account" link and see the details of your order.

If you ordered with guest account, I'm guessing the only way you'll know for sure is that you should get an email notification when they're ready to ship...



@BitSyncom : just a suggestion, but a confirmation email about a week prior to shipping to let the customer verify the shipping details would be a very good idea.

My favorite is "Don't remove the sticker, the LED's are too bright."

More like, "Don't remove the sticker, cuz then you'll see that it's just a switch with a Lightning miner sticker on top to cover up the linksys logo."

 

http://bitcoinmagazine.com/coinlab-bringing-bitcoin-to-wall-street-with-mtgox-deal/

I'm curious how much time and effort was diverted from the HPC project to get this deal done?

Now that the deal is reportedly done, does this mean that work will resume on HPC? or is that idea now totally kicked to the curb?

Exactly. Just buy 3 extra fans, 1000W+ modular PSU, and an extra hashing module... and then you've got Avalon the way it should have been done.

(*and in Avalon's defense, it definitely looks like that was how it was originally planned - I'm very curious to see the 6 module beast they keep hinting at...*)

the more I look at the avalon case design, the more I do not like, I suspect if I ever get one, it will be ripped apart and running naked on the counter with probably 2 fans per module blowing directly into the heatsink...

what would I do different?

- fully populate the case, don't design a case for 4 boards and then only fill it with 3.

- fully populate the fans, and reverse them, 3 in, 2 out (plus whatever the psu is pushing out) should create positive air pressure inside the case, and you wouldn't have the exhaust from the psu polluting the intake

- use modular PSU - would clean that mess of cables up quite a bit.


I think that would be great improvement, and extremely easy to implement.

I'm running my old 5830 on a throw-away pentium 4 system that someone gave me, it couldn't do more than 10 kh/s....

then I bought some ram, (it had only 1 gig ram originally) and now it's getting 240 kh/s ---

system specs matter in litecoin, I would recommend having at least double the system ram compared to the card ram... (haven't tested yet, will try this weekend with 2 instead of 4 gigs ram and see if it affects hashrate)

I've never tried a multi-card system on litecoin so I have no idea how this affects things...

I get the feeling that there will indeed be a point where you will never get your investment back, like you might make half your investment back in the first two weeks, then half the remainder in the following two weeks, and so on.

just like if you take a step towards a wall, and your next step is half the distance between you and that wall, and your next step is half the remaining distance again, and repeat, you will never reach the wall (though you will get very close), and the changing price of the bitcoins themselves may help you recover the costs in terms of dollars, but you may never return those 56 (in my case) bitcoins that you spent in the first place...

personally, I'm hopeful that the decay rate will be less than half, and my gamble (note, I do not consider this an investment) will eventually pay off.

meh, I used to be a red-seal chef (I suppose I still am, I don't think my journeyman's certificate expires...) but now I don't cook, I live downtown, 3 or 4 blocks from, well, everything I do eat out a lot (realized I like eating more than cooking) or I'll just get the pre-made salads and sandwiches from the organic store across the street, and yes, of course, the odd pizza now and then 

and holy crap! 50 amps? how do you split that off? like, how can I use that power for various gpu/fpga/asic mining setups? without burning down the house hopefully...