Can you please point out the advantages of the Drillbit system compared to the Bitfury Asic-H board ?
What I have determined till now myself:
Drillbit is 8 chips board for us$300, pairs of 4 boards possible. (The backplane price is TBD)
Bitfury Asic-H is 16 chip board for us$500, but needs a starter kit (us$1300-us$500, kit contains 1 Asic-H board).
No Drillbit prototype seen yet, Bitfury is up and running.
Bitfury probably delivers a few weeks sooner with October shipping.
Drillbit needs to wait for October chips and then assemble and ship.
Anything else I need to take into account ?
Hey Ben.
Firstly, we are getting our chips from Megabigpower. We are not in competition with them. We are their customers. By all means go ahead and buy their products, they are good products at good prices.
Our project is a group buy of chips along with an offer of assembly into the Drillbit Sytem, an alternate mining solution to the one offered by Bitfury and Megabigpower. We are a bunch of people chucking in together to buy some chips. We have designed a board to make use of those chips and we are offering it to people.
Both the Drillbit and the Bitfury systems have their advantages. The main difference is that our system is more friendly for smaller scale mining enthusiasts to start small and build it up from there. The Drillbit board runs standalone so all you need to pay to get started is $300, for an 8 chip board, or $99 for a one chip thumb. Starting cost for a bitfury kit is $1300. For that you get the M board (equivalent of our backplane) + one H board (equivalent of two of our Drillbit boards). They say if you are a “real hacker” you can get the H boards functioning on their own. So i guess if you are a real hacker then an H Board for $500 is cheaper than two Drillbit boards for $600. Go for that if that is you. You don’t need to be a hacker to run the Drillbit boards however.
So, for those who don’t consider themselves real hackers, with Bitfury, an initial $1300 gets you 16 chips hashing. With Drillbit, an initial $600 gets you 16 chips hashing.
Our anticipated cost on the backplane is approximately $100 - $150. It is a neat way to stack your boards together, but not required. 16 boards can be put into a backplane, or can exist as 4 standalone stacks of 4. The Bitfury backplane is essential for their system, unless you’re a real hacker, whatever that means.
Bitfury backplane: $800 - required (hackers excluded)
Drillbit Backplane: $100 - $150 - not required
Startup cost:
Bitfury: $1300
Drillbit: $300
Cost to have 32 chips hashing:
Bitfury: $1800
Drillbit: $1200
Cost to have 128 chips hashing:
Bitfury: $4800
Drillbit: $4800 (or $4900 - $4950 with backplane)
In summary, the pricing is pretty much the same when you start getting big, cheaper when you are starting small. $500 is less and $600, so if you feel confident getting the H board running on its own, then that is probably your best bet.
On delivery times, yes they have the advantage of a headstart on prototyping. I have seen their photos and the rig looks impressive. I still haven’t seen a video of the whole thing working, but it may well be totally kicking arse and ready to go. Who knows.
When they get their chips, they will still have to put them into manufacture, which will take some time. At the end of the day, if we get the chips at approximately the same time, i don’t imagine we will be too far behind if at all. If we do end up getting the chips much later for whatever reason, the yes, we will be way behind. Unfortunately, i don’t have any control over that, though i am doing everything i can to lock down chip delivery details. Maybe ordering straight from Bitfurystrikes back or Megabigpower is a safer bet because they will get the chips before us. And as i said, go for it, order from them. Either way, we are going to go ahead with our project, and welcome anyone else who wants to be involved.
Cheers.
Barntech
