Dear community,
due to posting restrictions as a new member, I can only post in this newby section. I hope that relevant parties still read it, there are a couple of threads where it would fit better. Please note that this is in no way intended as advertisement and it might really pay to read if you are currently considering purchase of an ASIC miner.
Official statement:
SciEngines confirms that on Monday afternoon, 4th of June, a short "performance test" for bitcoin mining was conducted on a scaled-down version of a RIVYERA FPGA-computer. The test was done on behalf of a 3rd party that claimed to be interested in establishing a business relationship but first desired some proof of performance.
For this test, the 3rd party supplied us with their bitcoin address and requested to do actual mining to some pool. Because that pool's statistics were quite delayed, we suggested Eligius instead, due to the close to real-time updates. The test ran for about one hour and showed 15G hash/s.
To our knowledge, this 3rd party started offering an ASIC miner of approximately that performance a few days after the "performance test" was conducted on our computer. Also, a video was put online, showing the performance on Eligius and claiming it to be their miner. We do acknowledge that it may theoretically be possible that the 3rd party (confirmed by use of the exact same bitcoin address) did a benchmark with ASICs also on Eligius during the same few days and that it had exactly the same performance, but we find it very unlikely.
We are posting this to warn against recently published 15Gh/s ASIC-miner offerings that uses Eligius statistics videos as "proof". Please use other means to verify the legitimacy of an offering or a provider in general. In addition, we would like to point out that this 3rd party is also offering larger ASIC miner setups (no videos of those can be found as of June 13th) and we are highly doubtful that those actually exist, if our FPGA computers were needed for a video of a 15 Gh/s setup.
Disclaimer:
We do not encourage nor discourage use of any specific mining-pool. Eligius was only mentioned by name, because it is an important information to identify the possibly fraudulent screen-video.
