[BitCentury] LittleFury USB Bitcoin Miner - Up to ~4GH/s! [CLOSED] *locked*

[rethaw]

As for the Oct 25GH/s boards, I believe those are just boards without any chips, hence why the description is "For Hackers". Also, those boards are currently only being sold to European customers. You'll note David (USA) also sells them for October but with a much higher price point. I believe this is because those specific ones titled "Starter Kits" come pre-assembled and with ASIC chips in them. Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken though.

I bought 3 based on Dave's recommendation.  That said, I'm guessing you are doing this with October chips, but November shipping is pretty late for this to be a viable player.  October 25 Gh/s H boards are going for $500...  

I don't believe this misrepresentation is deliberate but the H-Board is populated with ASICs and uses an M-board as the SPI hub. So the $500 price point represents 25GH/s with chips in October.

[digitalmagus]

As for the Oct 25GH/s boards, I believe those are just boards without any chips, hence why the description is "For Hackers". Also, those boards are currently only being sold to European customers. You'll note David (USA) also sells them for October but with a much higher price point. I believe this is because those specific ones titled "Starter Kits" come pre-assembled and with ASIC chips in them. Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken though.

I bought 3 based on Dave's recommendation.  That said, I'm guessing you are doing this with October chips, but November shipping is pretty late for this to be a viable player.  October 25 Gh/s H boards are going for $500...  

I don't believe this misrepresentation is deliberate but the H-Board is populated with ASICs and uses an M-board as the SPI hub. So the $500 price point represents 25GH/s with chips in October.

Ok, I'll check with David and/or the EU Bitfury guys. Clearly David sells a nearly identical product for almost 3 times that price, and their goal is to keep prices aligned to each other as they are all business partners, so we'll get an answer shortly I'm sure.
Cheers,
Luis

[Swimmer63]

Great idea but your pricing makes zero sense.
$100-90 per Gh/s is expensive now in July. In November it will be felony theft.
Spend a extra $175 and get a 25 Gh H board.

[rethaw]

Ok, I'll check with David and/or the EU Bitfury guys. Clearly David sells a nearly identical product for almost 3 times that price, and their goal is to keep prices aligned to each other as they are all business partners, so we'll get an answer shortly I'm sure.
Cheers,
Luis

Price goes with the inverse of production capacity, so the sold out boards for August are from a smaller batch I presume.

EDIT: Inverse, though you know what I meant 

[kaerf]

As for the Oct 25GH/s boards, I believe those are just boards without any chips, hence why the description is "For Hackers". Also, those boards are currently only being sold to European customers. You'll note David (USA) also sells them for October but with a much higher price point. I believe this is because those specific ones titled "Starter Kits" come pre-assembled and with ASIC chips in them. Feel free to correct me if I am mistaken though.

I bought 3 based on Dave's recommendation.  That said, I'm guessing you are doing this with October chips, but November shipping is pretty late for this to be a viable player.  October 25 Gh/s H boards are going for $500...  

I don't believe this misrepresentation is deliberate but the H-Board is populated with ASICs and uses an M-board as the SPI hub. So the $500 price point represents 25GH/s with chips in October.

Ok, I'll check with David and/or the EU Bitfury guys. Clearly David sells a nearly identical product for almost 3 times that price, and their goal is to keep prices aligned to each other as they are all business partners, so we'll get an answer shortly I'm sure.
Cheers,
Luis

Yeah. To be competitive you need to get under $20/GH...or even lower if the Hboards overclock well. I've been trying to figure out if it's worth it to mass produce these USB sticks. It probably will work but margins will be low and delays will be very costly.

[iANDROID]

Watching! I hope you can lower a bit the price.

[jspielberg]

Yeah. To be competitive you need to get under $20/GH...or even lower if the Hboards overclock well. I've been trying to figure out if it's worth it to mass produce these USB sticks. It probably will work but margins will be low and delays will be very costly.

I agree... I think if these priced these at $100, they would probably have enough pre-orders to order a second $60K reel of asics.  You would get people sending them as winter holiday presents and what not.

[pajak666]

What if I want a refund?

We are currently not offering any refunds relating to pre-orders from these devices. If we're unable to deliver your order by Jan 1st 2014, we will open up refunds for users to request. You will be refunded the full bitcoin payment which you sent to us when requested after the Jan 1st 2014 deadline.

This opens you very dangerous case,  you can assembly those chips, mine with them until 1st january 2014 and then pay refunds form what you have mined.
Seems not so safe to me.

[digitalmagus]

Hi pajak666,

We will not be mining any customer sold devices for more than a few hours, necessary only for testing purposes and to make sure we are not shipping any DOA's (dead on arrival) product. Thanks for pointing out this potential loophole, I will update the opening post. The Jan 1st, 2014 refund date is just to give us some head room in case there are any delays outside of our control by 3rd parties we will be depending on.
Cheers,
Luis

What if I want a refund?

We are currently not offering any refunds relating to pre-orders from these devices. If we're unable to deliver your order by Jan 1st 2014, we will open up refunds for users to request. You will be refunded the full bitcoin payment which you sent to us when requested after the Jan 1st 2014 deadline.

That opens you very dangerous gate, you can assemble those chips, mine with them until 1st january 2014 and then pay refunds form what you have mined.
Seems not so safe to me.

[brambi1]

No bank transfer payment option  What should ppl with no BTC do ? It will take too long to buy them, even longer to mine on GPU.

[pixl8tr]

No bank transfer payment option  What should ppl with no BTC do ? It will take too long to buy them, even longer to mine on GPU.

I use coinbase.com. Easy to transfer from Bank into BTC.

[Xian01]

Good luck with this project ! Really looking forward to seeing it become a reality and purchasing them in November once they become available.

-Mr. Burnt-Out-On-Pre-Orders

[senseless]

I agree... I think if these priced these at $100, they would probably have enough pre-orders to order a second $60K reel of asics.  You would get people sending them as winter holiday presents and what not.

Unfortunately, Chips alone are 1/2 that pricing.

[Swimmer63]

I agree... I think if these priced these at $100, they would probably have enough pre-orders to order a second $60K reel of asics.  You would get people sending them as winter holiday presents and what not.

Unfortunately, Chips alone are 1/2 that pricing.

I don't think you would have to go to $100.  My suggestion would to work with a break-even after 3-4 months.  Like 120,000,000 difficulty at ship time would put around $150-185.  Something like that.  You can definitely charge more per Gh/s than the other BitFury products.  But having to wait 3-4 months is an eternity in the mining world right now and everyone knows that date can move.
You would definitely sell some to the newcomers in November but experienced people have had enough of pre-orders unless it's a relatively safe bet they will get their money back in 6 months.  Right now you at over a year break-even in my estimation.  For what it's worth.

[senseless]

I agree... I think if these priced these at $100, they would probably have enough pre-orders to order a second $60K reel of asics.  You would get people sending them as winter holiday presents and what not.

Unfortunately, Chips alone are 1/2 that pricing.

I don't think you would have to go to $100.  My suggestion would to work with a break-even after 3-4 months.  Like 120,000,000 difficulty at ship time would put around $150-185.  Something like that.  You can definitely charge more per Gh/s than the other BitFury products.  But having to wait 3-4 months is an eternity in the mining world right now and everyone knows that date can move.
You would definitely sell some to the newcomers in November but experienced people have had enough of pre-orders unless it's a relatively safe bet they will get their money back in 6 months.  Right now you at over a year break-even in my estimation.  For what it's worth.

Keep in mind that when we build these things, they have essentially the same number of "doodads" (i think is the correct technical term) as the larger boards. Micro controller, power distribution, transformers, capacitors, etc, most of which can handle many more chips than what we have on board already. I would expect that the H-Board cost is nearly identical to our cost (Specially since their chips are dirt cheap for these boards, less than 1$ each is my guess.). Even if we were to build H-Board equivalent ourselves, you're still looking at 320$ cost in chips alone for a product that is being sold at 550$. There's no way we can compete. What a few posters say they would be willing to pay for this in Nov is already well under our cost for production. All of this doesn't even include the percentage of chips which will be DOA, or the percentage of boards which will be DOA out of the assembly, boards withheld (not sold) for warranty replacement if anything goes awry, etc. Then if there's a major hick up anywhere in the chain we're at that point taking huge personal losses to get these things to you. Unfortunately, 325$ is really our minimum pricing at this time. What it all comes down to is, If you want cheaper boards, we need cheaper chips.

[Swimmer63]

I agree... I think if these priced these at $100, they would probably have enough pre-orders to order a second $60K reel of asics.  You would get people sending them as winter holiday presents and what not.

Unfortunately, Chips alone are 1/2 that pricing.

I don't think you would have to go to $100.  My suggestion would to work with a break-even after 3-4 months.  Like 120,000,000 difficulty at ship time would put around $150-185.  Something like that.  You can definitely charge more per Gh/s than the other BitFury products.  But having to wait 3-4 months is an eternity in the mining world right now and everyone knows that date can move.
You would definitely sell some to the newcomers in November but experienced people have had enough of pre-orders unless it's a relatively safe bet they will get their money back in 6 months.  Right now you at over a year break-even in my estimation.  For what it's worth.

Keep in mind that when we build these things, they have essentially the same number of "doodads" (i think is the correct technical term) as the larger boards. Micro controller, power distribution, transformers, capacitors, etc, most of which can handle many more chips than what we have on board already. I would expect that the H-Board cost is nearly identical to our cost (Specially since their chips are dirt cheap for these boards, less than 1$ each is my guess.). Even if we were to build H-Board equivalent ourselves, you're still looking at 320$ cost in chips alone for a product that is being sold at 550$. There's no way we can compete, so we didn't even try.

A reasonably priced LittleFury may not be tenable.  And I'm not saying competitive.  Just reasonable from the standpoint of newbie willing to pay for one for the experience.
Agreed on the H-board.  BitFury would have been crazy to create their own competitors by selling chips cheaply.
But perhaps with some sort of assurance they may be willing to cut the chip price to you for a product like this that they don't want to build anyway.  Selling 40,000 more chips than expected because of a popular product that gets their name out there more might be attractive.  Even if it is at half the profit of the other chip sales.  It's not like it's more overhead for them to order more chips.  And in 6 months they will be outdated.  
I may be all wet, but perhaps there is still an opportunity here if you can get your costs down.

[AMD FTW]

I'd gladly pay that price now and order a ton of them. The problem is your eta is November which is too much money for the performance. Like mentioned, these would have to be around $150 each if your shipping them in November. The difficulty is going to skyrocket by then and ROI would take to long at current BTC value.

[kaerf]

or up the hashing power. Since you're using usb3, you should be able to squeeze more than 4 GH out of 2 chips...even try moving to a 3 chip solution.

[kevinm]

No bank transfer payment option  What should ppl with no BTC do ? It will take too long to buy them, even longer to mine on GPU.

Open an account on MtGox, use BWT to finance your account in USD, buy BTC for USD, withdraw BTC to your wallet.

Cheers,
kev

[digitalmagus]

or up the hashing power. Since you're using usb3, you should be able to squeeze more than 4 GH out of 2 chips...even try moving to a 3 chip solution.

Hi kaerf,
It's possible to up the hashing rate of the chip, but there are critical power usage and thermal concerns above certain levels. We wanted to start off with conservative numbers and design, rather than over promise. Further, we have not finished testing the chip at these higher hash rates (beyond 2.4GH/s). For more details on the tests we have performed so far and the efficiency ratings, you can read this blog post here: https://bitcentury.io/blog/initial-testing-of-bitfury-asic   (scroll to the very bottom of the post)

You can see that at 2.4GH/s the bare chip (no heat sink in these tests) is already at 76 degrees celcius and consuming 1.7W of power, which also translates to a W/GH efficiency  that is ~45% worse than the 2.082 GH/s per chip we're currently achieving.  So, while we can cool the chips down by various methods, we can't really do a whole lot about the significant power consumption increases. With USB3 having a wall of 4.5W's, even just at 2.4GH/s (nevermind 3 or 3.5 or the max theoretical 5), the power consumption of 3x chips would already exceed the 4.5W limit (3chips x 1.78W=5.34W).

As per our latest video, you can see that at 2GH/s, Nigel was able to touch the chip for many seconds in a row. In fact we had some earlier takes of similar video with him touching the chip even longer, without burning his fingers - but this was with a heat sink as shown in the video. Once we go above 2GH/s temperature rises quickly and we were also contemplating in the background safety issues around much higher hash rates considering that this USB product is pretty much targeted at people new to bitcoin, or those who are not wanting to do hardware assembly etc; as such, safety is an important consideration. Cooling fins and other methods probably will help that, we are currently looking into that, but wanted to get a product announcement out the door ASAP.

Cheers,
Luis