So they've been generally incompetent/deficient on everything they've done, and you think they're suddenly going to nail binning?

It's not the voltage that kills you, it's the amps. Ever been hit by static electricity--that's extremely high voltage, tens of thousands of volts, but the amperage is miniscule.

I've done residential electrical work. Been electrocuted a few times Kinda sucks But when you're dealing with the main line, you don't take chances. And if someone's trying to install power for 5-6+ Jupiters, they're going to be putting in major circuitry.

Hopefully you have a 200amp main panel. From there you want to run a hefty, hefty wire, probably a 70amp(?) cable to where you'll be keeping the Jupiters and install a sub-panel nearby from which you can put each Jupiter on its own breaker. That's what you tell your electrician anyway 6,000 watts is no joke to install, and you have to account for cooling too. That's roughly 1-ton unit of cooling per 24-hr, which is another thousand watts by itself, iirc. 7,000 watts and you're talking a 9,000 watts capacity needed overall (80% load rule).

There's some reason to believe the Jupiter will run more at like 850 or 800, due to them telling us not to buy 1200 watt PSU, and applying the 80% wattage maximum rule. They're using "under-promise, over-deliver" rule again, it seems.

Thus, two to a circuit could work out ultimately. We'll see.

Yeah, I would've preferred that as well, but forget it, they didn't go for it.

Just buy a modern power supply. They don't ship with a power supply, you know.

With an expected ROI of something like 20-30 days, I'd be more than happy to mine profitably for four months only to trade up to a new gen device. That would still be a profit overall, even after paying for the new device, plus you still have the old one hashing all you like for another 8 months viably at least.

If you don't trade up as tech advances, you eventually get left behind anyway and will be forced to stop mining. Some will be happy with that, others, not so.

More exciting to me is that they offer 6 month lease. I think my local datacenter wanted a 36 month lease! That's clearly not bitcoin-mining friendly.

But that also implies something else. If KNC gets the Jupiter out the door on time they will have proved they possess a development pipeline that no one can match and they instantly become the market leader ASIC provider.

I expect that by the time the Jupiters actually ship, assuming they ship on time, Knc will have begun work on their gen-2 device in the terrahash range, to be announced shortly after their first Jupiters ship, perhaps a month after, with a release date in another 4-6 months.

That will likely crush the Avalons and BFL rigs of the world, possibly even put pressure on AsicMiner, since they aren't the most efficient miner out there cost-wise, no doubt. Bitfury's design would probably withstand a gen-2 assault somewhat well, being the market leader efficiency-wise currently, but I'd expect a gen-2 to beat the Bitfury chip handily on that metric too.

If Knc can produce a gen-2 device in another 4 months after shipping, all of us will be able to afford to upgrade, most likely. And then if they produce a gen-3 device in another 4 months, they will really have blown the competition out of the water.

One of the reasons I think Knc chose a large package size is that it's a lot easier, cheaper, quicker, to solder four large chips on a board and ship the device than do deal with multiple daughter-boards and PCBs, like an Avalon has. That leads to production and shipping delays.

In fact, it's probably more accurate to think of KNC's first device as a gen-2 device already, though it's their first product. Knc and Bitfury I'd put in the gen-2 category already, with Avalon and BFL being gen-1 (even if Bfl has hardly shipped).

Hard to say what the parameters of a gen2/3 device will look like, what it's specs will be. Personally I'd love to see blade-style devices designed for datacenter installment, ala AMiner. Knc may yet do that with these devices. We shall see.

Meh, the difficulty is just over ~24 million. It can change by a factor of 4 every 2 weeks. So it could go down to 6 million. Not really that bad at all. It's a risk, to be sure, but so is hosting at home or in a local data-center. It's all a risk. If returns were guaranteed this would be a loan or a bond, not an investment, and the return would be correspondingly low.

Doesn't it seem ridiculously overpriced with KNC's offering on the table?

:| you don't really know what a 'wafer' is in chip fabbing, do you? It's the large pizza-sized single-crystal of substrate (silicon) all the chips are lithographed onto before being cut into individual chips.

For one thing, they take up the same amount of space as a Jupiter but produce half the output, and datacenters are charging you by the cabinet. So...

Almost assuredly it includes electricity, and you might not even need to pay VAT if they don't ship it out? Dunno.

I priced out hosting at a major California data center, they wanted $330 a month (electricity included), and that was with me admining it, and twice that for the first month's setup.

As for KNC, they told me in an email that we would be able to switch from delivery to hosting, and that the cost we've paid upfront for delivery will be applied to the hosting cost initially. I assume this means the $130+ we paid will be used to buy the power supply. Then we'd be billed at the end of the month for the hosting cost with a choice of options, and likely a good $50 or so extra for the cost of the power supply.

Looking like an attractive option to me. Imagine if something broke down in your machine and you had to send it back? Weeks lost. Imagine too if they are overclocking it for you in their datacenter, and they're the pros on the machine!

I assume they'll be using something like Bitpay to let you pay them, naturally. What kind of asic seller wouldn't accept bitcoin on top of other options.

Yes, you can in fact get a full refund delivered to the address of your choice. They gave the link for refunds in a recent email. You have until the 14th (tomorrow) to ask, as they say they'll stop accepting refunds when they begin shipping on Monday. Which is also slant confirmation that shipping begins on the 15th.

The numbers just don't make sense to me anymore. 2 months ago would've been okay, but today it's real thin. And that's not even counting the diff increase that batch-3 will result in, which won't be insignificant.

From looking at the numbers, if you had the machine today and diff increases at only its historical average, it's ~4.4 months to break even in terms of BTC.

Knc might ship in as little as two months! And I personally think they will ship, and that will be a far higher diff increase than we've seen so far this year from anyone except AsicMiner. AM will increase their hashing to match Knc's output and just about everyone else will be left in the dust. Avalons will still be net profitable to mine per day, they're still efficient enough, but they won't have had enough lead time to achieve ROI and if Knc ships, they may never achieve ROI. Which is a damn shame. No one's fault, just how the dice rolled.

Both Avalon and Knc are going to be working on 2nd gen ASIC devices, that's where I'll be looking next. Something in the high single or multiple terrahash range for about 50+ btc. Something like a fully custom ASIC such as Bitfury has produced which is the most efficient chip out there now on a hash/watt basis, but in a large die size like KNC produced, and with the modern process size, sub-28nm.

There's something quite beautiful about a free-market drive for ultra-efficient processing And this is only the beginning. If a random company were building payment processing, I doubt they'd build full-on ASICs to take care of it. I'll bet Visa just has giant server farms all over based on stock equipment.

I suppose it won't be long before ASIC-chasers like us exhaust modern tech and begin pushing into exotics. I don't think anyone has more incentive to use ultra-efficient designs than bitcoin miners. How long until we see designs using carbon transistors and the like, stuff that is still in labs today. Gonna be exciting to watch

Now that we know when they would have been shipped roughly, the appropriate price for a batch-3 four-unit should've been roughly 40-45 bitcoin, not 99 (for a 30-day to ROI). Which would've been ~$3200 back when these sold with the price of btc at ~$80.

I bet if that had been the price, few would be asking for a refund right now. Alternately, if Bitsyncom had offered 59 btc refunds back to that price level that would've been perhaps better than giving full refunds.

But again, I laud Bitsyncom for doing the honorable thing and offering full refunds in BTC. Once again they make BFL look bad by comparison, and I'd be happy to shake Guo's hand any day. Whereas, I doubt Inaba can show his face anywhere bitcoin-related without watching his back

You deal with assholes in a free society via access control and performance bonds.

In a statist society such as we have now, most of the society is public access due to the government owning streets.

In a free society, you're always on private property, either your own or someone else's, and thus access control is far, far easier.

Most roads and commercial space will be for-profit ventures and allow people on quite readily, but will ask you to abide by certain common-sense rules and laws--a usage agreement of sorts. You may also be asked to post a performance bond which is forfeit if you break those rules.

Thus, people who cannot control themselves will become bad performance-bond risks, and bond-issuers will not take a chance on them, relegating them to the company of people so like-minded.

Criminals, thieves, those whom like to fight, will find themselves excluded from polite society because they either can't rent performance bonds necessary to get into such places, or because they are refused entry at the door due to being blacklisted because of past behavior.

We live in a society that is culturally going downhill, that has been glorifying low-class behavior and mannerisms. I think in a free society this trend would reverse and people would once again aspire to truly fine behavior, manners, and beauty both in action, form, and thought; in short a cultural renaissance.

Thanks Dan, listening to your talk now; let's change the world! ^_^

Looks reeeally risky at this point. Had they shipped two months ago we'd all be sitting pretty. But now? With KNC potentially shipping in Sept? With Bitfury, and AMiner ramping up through the end of the year? And Avalon shipping how many hundred thousand chips?

You can either keep your batch three 85 gh/sec 4-unit or pull a refund and buy 600gh/sec from KNC (Jupiter and a Saturn) and get it like two months from now. The latter seems a better bet at this point.

I have to say it's mighty decent of Bitsyncom to offer full refunds, in bitcoin no less. What will they do with the leftover machines?