"Avalon" ASIC, announcement & pre-order. pre-order over. project started.

[disclaimer201]

Would love to join the club, but even 1300 $ are a lot to send away in an irreversible currency with no guarantees and seeing no product for several months. It's not even about trust. I wouldn't do it with BFl, so why would I do it here?

[ngzhang]

Would love to join the club, but even 1300 $ are a lot to send away in an irreversible currency with no guarantees and seeing no product for several months. It's not even about trust. I wouldn't do it with BFl, so why would I do it here?

maybe some body should start a glbse funds project for a risk exploration?

[flynn]

Would love to join the club, but even 1300 $ are a lot to send away in an irreversible currency with no guarantees and seeing no product for several months. It's not even about trust. I wouldn't do it with BFl, so why would I do it here?

Well,

Because not only Ngzhang is a person to be trusted, but if the number given above is right, I mean if the hashpower of the market is at 75TH/s when you receive your Avalon, you'll have a ROI of 40 days. Fair trade to me. Could be even better if the other asic manufacturers are late or don't deliver.

BTW that's why I'll vote for speed against power consumption, because I don't care about the pennies it will mine 2 years from now, but I care about the next months of high mining profit.

So Ngzhang (and all investors around here) please hurry, each day passing is costing 3 BTC per missing Avalon device.

(25BTC * 6blk/h * 24hours * 60GH / 75TH)

[SolarSilver]

Because not only Ngzhang is a person to be trusted, but if the number given above is right, I mean if the hashpower of the market is at 75TH/s when you receive your Avalon, you'll have a ROI of 40 days. Fair trade to me. Could be even better if the other asic manufacturers are late or don't deliver.

But from the looks of it, BFL and BTCFPGA will deliver in 2012 and the Avalon is late to the party in 2013, so your 40 days will quickly dwindle to 80 or 160 days. Still not a bad investment though ;-)

Just too bad we can't all get November delivery

[flynn]

Because not only Ngzhang is a person to be trusted, but if the number given above is right, I mean if the hashpower of the market is at 75TH/s when you receive your Avalon, you'll have a ROI of 40 days. Fair trade to me. Could be even better if the other asic manufacturers are late or don't deliver.

But from the looks of it, BFL and BTCFPGA will deliver in 2012 and the Avalon is late to the party in 2013, so your 40 days will quickly dwindle to 80 or 160 days. Still not a bad investment though ;-)

Just too bad we can't all get November delivery

Or these companies will meet technical difficulties and will be late.

All in all, it's a win / even-more-win situation.

At worst, they all deliver on time, Ngzhang is late, and it's a blank deal. I take that bet.

[disclaimer201]

So, a few competitors out in the market now. Tycho offers 40Gh for 1299 USD. In comparison Avalon is a good choice.

But some of the voices concerning the "take our money upfront" business practices that are voiced over in that thread apply here too. Bfl has set an example, and I don't think it's a good one. How about an escrow service?

I have no illusions about everyone who's still mining Btc will do it with Asics next spring. A 60gh/s Asic will be the new 5970s. Nothing more and nothing less. The rat race is on again ;-) Perhaps I'll have no choice as to switch to Ltc mining permanently.

[Puppet]

I mean if the hashpower of the market is at 75TH/s when you receive your Avalon, you'll have a ROI of 40 days.

We are now approaching 25TH while the network is doubling every ~4 months. If current growth were to continue, so without any asic effect, we would already be around 75TH by the time Avalon might ship  (ok, Im  ignoring  effect of reward halving, but no one is going to shut down his FPGA let alone ASIC when rewards halve). 

We now know of  4 or 5 asic vendors that will build devices, logical consequence is a price war follow at the latest after the first wave of asics hit the market and difficulty goes in to 8, perhaps 9 digit numbers. I think 75TH will be much much much too low as estimate. BFL fpga->asic upgrades alone could account for ~100-200TH.

[irritant]

can this one made with a number of network utp ports? so i can throw away my old router? 

[nusizu]

Hi Ngzhang

count me in for pre-order of 1 unit. BTC or PayPal preferred. I´ll finalize the order as soon as your ordering web site is online.

thx for all efforts and looking forward to it.

[max in montreal]

Hi Ngzhang

count me in for pre-order of 1 unit. BTC or PayPal preferred. I´ll finalize the order as soon as your ordering web site is online.

thx for all efforts and looking forward to it.

same with me.

[VeeMiner]

Would love to join the club, but even 1300 $ are a lot to send away in an irreversible currency with no guarantees and seeing no product for several months. It's not even about trust. I wouldn't do it with BFl, so why would I do it here?

yeah, I would definitely need lot more information if I were to spend 1300 dollars on a product

[robocoin]

Nice website btw, http://avalon-asic.com/

[flynn]

Nice website btw, http://avalon-asic.com/

How the hell did you find out for this site ?

[robocoin]

Nice website btw, http://avalon-asic.com/

How the hell did you find out for this site ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110090.msg1197494#msg1197494 

[theasian09]

So sad I wont have enough $ to get in on this =(

[flynn]

Nice website btw, http://avalon-asic.com/

How the hell did you find out for this site ?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110090.msg1197494#msg1197494 

HAHAHA shame on me

[squid]

0.11 or 0.13 process means that the transistors are 110  or 130 nm gate size? Do we know what our competitor size is? Since this obviously makes a huge different in terms of power efficiency (smaller transistor = less power, less heat, less size etc).

Also, can you please clarify on this risk of our funds when we preorder should this project fail? Previously you mentioned if failed we could lose 30-70% of value. Such a risk is fairly large and I feel should be clarified.

Otherwise thank you should the risk be low enough (70% is way too high) you can count me in for +1 preorder.

[nedbert9]

@ngzhang

Do you plan on using test-net or main-net for testing ASIC units?


BFL has just announced that they will be using main-net for "QC" activities of their batch production.  This could equate to 600GH+ per day of mining by BFL directly during the ASIC ramp up.
 

[willphase]

@ngzhang

Do you plan on using test-net or main-net for testing ASIC units?


BFL has just announced that they will be using main-net for "QC" activities of their batch production.  This could equate to 600GH+ per day of mining by BFL directly during the ASIC ramp up.
 

I would imagine that anyone testing ASIC or any new hardware would use testnet in a box, to avoid artificially raising the difficulty of either testnet or mainnet.  And BFL have not 'just announced' this - they've never said they are using mainnet for testing - link...?

Will

[nedbert9]

@ngzhang

Do you plan on using test-net or main-net for testing ASIC units?


BFL has just announced that they will be using main-net for "QC" activities of their batch production.  This could equate to 600GH+ per day of mining by BFL directly during the ASIC ramp up.
 

I would imagine that anyone testing ASIC or any new hardware would use testnet in a box, to avoid artificially raising the difficulty of either testnet or mainnet.  And BFL have not 'just announced' this - they've never said they are using mainnet for testing - link...?

Will

Will, I hope you are as disappointed in BFL as I am.  BFL has indeed lacked transparency and given the mining community the distinct impression that they would not be mining with produced equipment.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=110290.msg1204935#msg1204935

All of our equipment is burn tested after final assembly/testing for ~24 hours on a live pool (In this case, EMC).  After the burn-in, it's taken off the rack, packed and shipped the same day.  We do this for both the singles and the mini rig and the singles PSU's (we've had a few of those go bad, so now we burn those in as well).  

We are not mining with any ASIC equipment at the present time.  You can be sure there would be a big announcement if we had turned up the ASICs on a live pool.

If we tested on testnet, it would make testnet useless, since it would spike the difficulty to unmanagable levels.  

Regardless, we aren't testing any ASIC equipment on the live network either now or in the past, so it's pretty immaterial.  We already have a plan, which I explained to several people at the Bitcoin conference on how we are going to handle the live testing when that time comes.

Consider BFL is running this as a batch production and bulk shipment.  Depending on the exact volume of orders, unknown, this could result in a conservative estimate of 80,000 USD extracted from the mining community for that first month of "QC."

Looking at it a different way if BFL mines their products prior to customer delivery the price point per SC product has gone up.  Capitalism ftw.