1. Do you think the market and community is ready for FPGA Litecoin?
Market, maybe. Community, YES! If you can pull better numbers per joule and come in cheaper on hardware cost vs gpu, people will eat em up!


2. Is there definite interest in FPGA Litecoin machines? Would you buy one if the price was reasonable? What is reasonable?
Yes!
Yes!
Free! That will depend on the output. What suckered me into pre-ordering a jala was the price point provide a LOT of hash for the money... If possible, make em scale. There are a ton of people who want to get in on crypto currency because of ideals or greed and typically it's easier to get your feet wet on any endevour if it does not require a second mortgage to do so.

3. Would you pre-order one to support first round funding for prototyping and first wave production?
Thats a hard one to call. I think that would tie in directly to price. Same with answer 2, it was easier to take a chance on a BFL pre-order because it was not a lot of money. Will I shell out $15k? Not on your life. Will I shell out $200 to be an early adopter? Probably.

Some thoughts: I LOVE the mere mention of escrow for funds on a pre-order on your site. If you just manage to do the opposite of everything BFL has done with their ASIC offerings, you will do very well for yourself.

I wish you luck

Let's try to think happy thoughts...

I would also add that I have turned off live trading right now due to everything on btc-e taking a dump!

And it does not help much that the volume on BTC-E has been in the dumps for the past few days...

Jude, run it in sim mode till you have an understanding of the configuration settings is the best advice you can get. Set it for something with some movement and you will begin to see how the bot 'thinks' and reacts to market conditions.

I love it!

One time I made a house call and I shit you not that was the problem... tower was not plugged into the wall! It does happen. lol

The difference between the three ASIC choices you list is BFL has not shipped to customers yet.

At least they actually received one unlike the rest of us poor sods!

hate to be a nay sayer, but what's in this for you? I would trust your service more if you charged a small fee.

Absolutely! The bot is already scraping the info from btc-e, you would just have to add a little more math to the bot.

You can say that again!

with enough whiskey, i can do anything!

Had a thought. How hard would it be to keep track of profits? Let's say when the bot starts, it uses the balance info and the converts all balances to btc and then prints a total. Then you could have the bot print profit (or loss) against this total in btc when it prints balances? I figured btc would be the easiest base since almost all the pairs on btc-e are based on btc.

Well I was thinking of setting up some VM's this weekend to toy around with fresh installs... the VM I am running your bot in is a bit messy to say the least. I will post if I find anything useful.

Oh and I should add that I would like to keep the graphing functional. My end goal would be a simple web based output screen for your bot that I can check up on and that would include the graph.

Nice! Thanks for this.

and things just got silly.

and not to go pissing on parades, but does any of this sound like a good idea? I can't trust them to ship an ASIC within a year, can I trust them to sub out hosting?

I ordered in September, it's now May, no product delivered. You do the math...

I was thinking more in the lines of dealing with the python dependencies. For example, if I type PyLab into my package manager I get a library named python-matplotlib that I might be able to use for charting in place of the HUGE install of Canopy. I don't know what your set up is, but my plan would be to load this onto one of my running pi's and the smaller install size would be ideal.

Otherwise, seems to be running nice and smooth. I've had it running for about 24 hours now in live mode with no crashes and the bot posting trades. I would have to say it seems to work pretty good with the little coin I am giving it to work with. I am looking forward to running this baby full throttle.

Well that is what I thought too BUT took down my remaining orders for ppc and low and behold it has been running for 3 hours now with no crash whereas before it was crashing after start up. I think there is a bug there and I am all over trying to figure it out (started looking at the code watch out! [insert puking smiley from skype here])

I have the luxury of toying with this remotely on my server from work so if I get some proper time in the next few days I am going to run some experiments to see what I can see.

On a side note, you say that there is no error logging / debugging built it, what would it take to make that happen? Is there some sort of app or environment I could run this in that would give debugging info?

[edit] also, i know that python is cross platform and all, but maybe for posterity, we should list what os's we are running this on in case the finished product requires independent install instructions?

I don't know how useful this will be to you folks, but my experiences with pi-b's makes me inclined to warn of sd card corruption. If you get this up and running, IMAGE THE SD CARD ASAP!! You wont regret it.

+1

shit, i would settle for just a percentage of customers. It's a good thing I am a practicing drunk or I might be upset about waiting seven @#&&*!^% months and counting for a coffee warmer...