Hi all,
I'm one of the guys behind the Mini. Thanks for your feedback. We are still officially in the "pre-order" phase, but have shipped 3 units already. We are very excited to get feedback from those first few customers, too.
Anything above US$90 is way overpriced for these kind of things tbh.
Anything above US$90 is way overpriced for these kind of things tbh.
agree, there is no incentive to spend my money to get that Raspberry Pi 2 just for run a node, even if those 90$ sounds cheap, Raspberry Pi 2 is not a "good" hw to run it at least from my point of view, im not saying that it cant run a node, but i think that it still need some improvements.
in the other side, i think that with some improvements it could be the good alternative soon
( if they improve it a little bit )For what the Mini currently is, the price is about as low as we can go, because we include shipping, all the cables and things needed (and we are streamlining the shipping), and a full current blockchain on the flash drive. As technology in the open source boards quickly improves and we start seeing increases in sales, we'll be able to upgrade our base hardware.
agree, there is no incentive to spend my money to get that Raspberry Pi 2 just for run a node, even if those 90$ sounds cheap, Raspberry Pi 2 is not a "good" hw to run it at least from my point of view, im not saying that it cant run a node, but i think that it still need some improvements.
in the other side, i think that with some improvements it could be the good alternative soon ( if they improve it a little bit )
With an Rpi2, you need either a USB device (which disconnects regularly, it's common with USB media) or an SD card to continually process the blockchain. Neither are a decent solution imo.
Even with an SSD over USB, it's still a bit of a clusterfuck
We've not run into that particular issue, but we'll keep our eye out, and ask for that specific feedback from customers. Thanks.
We've been working on this project for several months, and have gone back and forth about who our target customer is, which affects our value add that we immediately offer. As bitcoin has been increasingly mentioned in MSM, international markets falter, and regulation has been somewhat clarified, we expect the user base of bitcoin to at least double over the next 12 months to 24 million+. The specific demographic we are targeting is 18-35 yr olds, smart, financially aware, but not command line savvy. That specific demographic gives us room for margin, because what we offer is a tight build of the products together, with a plug-and-play, all-in-one solution. But we also offer the expert something.
That something is what I personally am most excited about, the future of the Mini is as an open source platform (I envision Maidsafe and OpenBazaar running on a Mini). We will be working on an API for the Mini that people can build on top of. I envision a kind of app store/npm in the future. But that is a ways down the road.
We are very sensitive to open source. We will release our code as we go.
Once again, thanks for the feedback,
Ansel
