► ► ►HashFast Endorsement

[Ytterbium]

that Icedrill/Digimex contract must be worth $millions.  i'm sure HashFast got a big chunk of cash upfront for that order.  

now what is the chance that they'll fail given that?

Same chance as before. Look how many millions BFL took in. Look how many millions Avalon took in just for it's chips.

Either the chips are going to work right, and they'll execute on PCB, cases and shipping, or they won't.  Having more money isn't going to change much, since everything needs to be in place at once.

It might mean they're able to fix problems that cause delays more quickly. But a month or two of delays is still going to be deadly.

[smoothie]

This made me laugh.

Translation: "Give me your money making machine. Once I get it setup and hashing to make me money ...then I will give you money."

It isn't that they need to be sure of themselves. You need to be sure of your tolerance for risk. Any investment has risk. You just have to determine your risk tolerance. Obviously you dont fit this risk model.

In order to have high risk you need high reward.  Given the future diff rate, it's not clear there's actually going to be a high reward here. Batch 1 Avalons cost $1200 when they started taking pre-orders. Batch 2 was $1500, and the difficulty was around 3.2 million.

Relative to the difficulty, this thing is about 7x as expensive as a B2 Avalon.

And I expect Hashrate to go up even more quickly through the last part of this year then the first half.

no.  i made a determination that they are legitimate.  once they figured out i was a supporter, was going to buy machines and who i was, they offered to make me a paid sponsor.  sorta like how Lebron James sponsors Coke    i guess he drinks it, right?

i have no problems supporting causes i truly believe in.

Uh, no, coke is a sponsor of LeBron James, not the other way around.

It essentially is as I said, one's own personal risk tolerance. Some people might have a high risk low reward approach. That's not the best approach but it is an approach.

[Ytterbium]

It essentially is as I said, one's own personal risk tolerance. Some people might have a high risk low reward approach. That's not the best approach but it is an approach.

The only people with a "high risk, low reward" approach are idiots.

[Flying Hellfish]

OP: TLDR
*payment only in BTC - so where is my guarantee that you will refund me anytime? may I use escrow?
*not working prototype, no video or photos. just some CAD render of black box and want our money now?
*almost 3 months of waiting and free thousand of dollars loan. splendid.

and because you are from USA, I should also add 20% VAT to webpage price. hm.(

as Ytterbium has so eloquently pointed out, you're not going to get any asic mining company to fund the entire NRE, tapeout, and production costs just so you can buy a profitable money generating machine.  otherwise, they would just mine with it.

I know this may be OT a fair bit but I think this is to generic of a statement and I can actually see why a company would want to retail a product vs mining with it if they funded NRE and production privately.

I mean I see mining as a bullish bet on BTC.  As it takes time to convert the sunk capital cost of the hardware to BTC until the BE point and then hopefully a profit (why wait for mined BTC if you don't believe price will increase).  Not to mention you lose the ability use that capital for anything else until the mined coins return over time.

That being said lets say there was a company that was already set up in the electronics manufacturing world, had retail and distribution, customer service, logistics infrastructure all in place humming along.  They could conceivably add a line of miners to their catalogue.  Now for such a company they don't have the resources on hand for mining farm (professional services required to set up basically a DC and manage it 24/7), they many not want to spend the capital, take time to learn, time to manage etc setting up a mine but could easily make a profit selling units to miners.  Now this same company isn't a hard core bitcoin supporter and doesn't like the volatility of BTC prices AND would rather have cash in hand for a miner sale (1 in the hand is worth 2 in the bush so to speak) than plug it in and wait for it to return the investment (maybe) all the while your monthly revenues go down (until saturation point) or increasing monthly costs to maintain your HR share.

The company has now made a profit without mining and has minimised their own risk at the same time.  I think a lot of folks are coming at this from a POV that only a miner can make an ASIC therefore they will all pre-order or mine.  I think its clear at this point the majority (if not all current players) may do this but that doesn't mean that no other method is viable.

[dogie]

This thread is a joke.

tldr: I've been paid to say these people are legitimate, so they're legitimate.

actually, it's the other way around.

You paid them?

no.  i made a determination that they are legitimate.  once they figured out i was a supporter, was going to buy machines and who i was, they offered to make me a paid sponsor.  sorta like how Lebron James sponsors Coke    i guess he drinks it, right?

i have no problems supporting causes i truly believe in I'm paid to support.

Fixed. And if you want anyone to take you seriously, announce your contract, remuneration and terms surround your 'support'.

[cypherdoc]

This thread is a joke.

tldr: I've been paid to say these people are legitimate, so they're legitimate.

actually, it's the other way around.

You paid them?

no.  i made a determination that they are legitimate.  once they figured out i was a supporter, was going to buy machines and who i was, they offered to make me a paid sponsor.  sorta like how Lebron James sponsors Coke    i guess he drinks it, right?

i have no problems supporting causes i truly believe in I'm paid to support.

Fixed. And if you want anyone to take you seriously, announce your contract, remuneration and terms surround your 'support'.

did you bother to announce how much you were charging Horserider to sell his unit?  if not, why not?

[reactor]

Oh this is just getting ugly now.  Great way to rock out a product endorsement!   

[Ytterbium]

as Ytterbium has so eloquently pointed out, you're not going to get any asic mining company to fund the entire NRE, tapeout, and production costs just so you can buy a profitable money generating machine.  otherwise, they would just mine with it.

I know this may be OT a fair bit but I think this is to generic of a statement and I can actually see why a company would want to retail a product vs mining with it if they funded NRE and production privately.

I mean I see mining as a bullish bet on BTC.  As it takes time to convert the sunk capital cost of the hardware to BTC until the BE point and then hopefully a profit (why wait for mined BTC if you don't believe price will increase).  Not to mention you lose the ability use that capital for anything else until the mined coins return over time.
[/quote]

The other option, of course is to sell you equipment at prices that will be unprofitable for their customers.  

For chips on hand, you simply charge a crazy rate. Like people trying to charge $19k for Avalon clones.

But there's another way to do it without appearing to charge exorbitant rates. Let's say you make a cheap ASIC, 10gh/s chip and order 1 million of them, at a cost of $5/chip.  That's 5Ph/s. At most, you could take 90% of the network, and make a couple million dollars a year. Mining.

or you could take orders at what seems like a really good rate right now: $5/Gh/s. That's $50 a chip or $2500 for a 50 chip 500Gh/s unit.

Seems crazy good, but, what people don't realize is that once all the chips ship the difficulty will go up by over 900% just from your chips alone.  

What you want to do, then, is maximize the time between when you take orders, and when you ship in order to take as many pre-orders as possible.

Then, think BFL: They keep talking about how they're the ones driving up the difficulty and that it doesn't make sense for their customers to complain, because if they ship faster the diff will just go up more quickly (while also claiming KnC and all their other future competitors will fail like they did, so no need to worry).

Butterfly labs sold units basically knowing full well that their customers would never make ROI, simply because of the volume of orders they took.

Now, the problem of course is that not only can you rip people off if you fund the chips yourself, you can also rip people off and crowd-fund a design. Which is what BFL did.

In any event, I think the price here is a little too high given the risk both that they'll fail, and the risk none of their competitors will.

[jspielberg]

It currently is the best deal out there, so I put in an order for one and I might get lucky if they deliver as they state.

If stock stays available and BTC appreciates, I may double down.  Kind of sucks that bitpay doesn't use Mt.Gox's higher exchange rate, but they need to be able to pull money out of Gox in a timely way to be a reasonable data source for them.

Getting back on topic, personally I have no issues with Cypherdoc is a paid endorser/board member/whatever with HashFast.  He made it clear that he is more than just casually involved with the company.  That disclosure is more than you get from a lot of folks here on the forum.

[cypherdoc]

It currently is the best deal out there, so I put in an order for one and I might get lucky if they deliver as they state.

If stock stays available and BTC appreciates, I may double down.  Kind of sucks that bitpay doesn't use Mt.Gox's higher exchange rate, but they need to be able to pull money out of Gox in a timely way to be a reasonable data source for them.

Getting back on topic, personally I have no issues with Cypherdoc is a paid endorser/board member/whatever with HashFast.  He made it clear that he is more than just casually involved with the company.  That disclosure is more than you get from a lot of folks here on the forum.

the simple fact that the BabyJets will be water cooled will factor in hugely in my own cost equations.  now i can store these things at home w/o the wife having a conniption.  no more data centers and no more bothering my office occupants.

[pmorici]

The hashfast shopping cart appears to be broken...

[Bicknellski]

It essentially is as I said, one's own personal risk tolerance. Some people might have a high risk low reward approach. That's not the best approach but it is an approach.

The only people with a "high risk, low reward" approach are idiots.

Marines.

[dogie]

This thread is a joke.

tldr: I've been paid to say these people are legitimate, so they're legitimate.

actually, it's the other way around.

You paid them?

no.  i made a determination that they are legitimate.  once they figured out i was a supporter, was going to buy machines and who i was, they offered to make me a paid sponsor.  sorta like how Lebron James sponsors Coke    i guess he drinks it, right?

i have no problems supporting causes i truly believe in I'm paid to support.

Fixed. And if you want anyone to take you seriously, announce your contract, remuneration and terms surround your 'support'.

did you bother to announce how much you were charging Horserider to sell his unit?  if not, why not?

No, because I'm not whoring my forum reputation out to advertise a likely scam LOL. Nice attempt at logics, I'm sure you'll get it next time.

[Bicknellski]

This thread is a joke.

tldr: I've been paid to say these people are legitimate, so they're legitimate.

actually, it's the other way around.

You paid them?

no.  i made a determination that they are legitimate.  once they figured out i was a supporter, was going to buy machines and who i was, they offered to make me a paid sponsor.  sorta like how Lebron James sponsors Coke    i guess he drinks it, right?

i have no problems supporting causes i truly believe in I'm paid to support.

Fixed. And if you want anyone to take you seriously, announce your contract, remuneration and terms surround your 'support'.

did you bother to announce how much you were charging Horserider to sell his unit?  if not, why not?

No, because I'm not whoring my forum reputation out to advertise a likely scam LOL. Nice attempt at logics, I'm sure you'll get it next time.

What metric are you using for calling this a "likely" scam?  You got some scamdar we don't know about?

[bbxx]

Taking btc only ... Yes
No refunds ... Yes
Price below market point ... Yes
Paid shills ... Yes
No evidence of product prototype ... Yes
Limited offer expiring in few hours ... Yes
Website with amateur/broken design ... Yes
Aiming for thousands of btc in few hours ... Yes
Domain name registered weeks ago ... Yes
No clear contact/phone on website ... Yes

10/10 scam in my asic checklist

[Bicknellski]

Taking btc only ... Yes
No refunds ... Yes
Price below market point ... Yes
Paid shills ... Yes
No evidence of product prototype ... Yes
Limited offer expiring in few hours ... Yes
Website with amateur/broken design ... Yes
Aiming for thousands of btc in few hours ... Yes
Domain name registered weeks ago ... Yes
No clear contact/phone on website ... Yes

10/10 scam in my asic checklist

Apply test to other fabrications in the past... results?

[bbxx]

Taking btc only ... Yes
No refunds ... Yes
Price below market point ... Yes
Paid shills ... Yes
No evidence of product prototype ... Yes
Limited offer expiring in few hours ... Yes
Website with amateur/broken design ... Yes
Aiming for thousands of btc in few hours ... Yes
Domain name registered weeks ago ... Yes
No clear contact/phone on website ... Yes

10/10 scam in my asic checklist

Apply test to other fabrications in the past... results?

Asicminer 2/10, knc 3/10, vmc 6/10, cryonic 7/10

[HeRetiK]

Taking btc only ... Yes
No refunds ... Yes
Price below market point ... Yes
Paid shills ... Yes
No evidence of product prototype ... Yes
Limited offer expiring in few hours ... Yes
Website with amateur/broken design ... Yes
Aiming for thousands of btc in few hours ... Yes
Domain name registered weeks ago ... Yes
No clear contact/phone on website ... Yes

10/10 scam in my asic checklist

Apply test to other fabrications in the past... results?

Asicminer 2/10, knc 3/10, vmc 6/10, cryonic 7/10

Check out Uniquify, those are the ones actually developing the chips:
http://www.uniquify.com/

[pikeadz]

once you see details of their Miner Protection Plan and refund details all your fears will melt away.

I am trying to be objective here, but it is hard when you sound more and more like a slick used car salesman.  ASIC consumers are not as desperate as they once were.  The preorder nonsense doesn't fly anymore after the BFL and Avalon fiascos.  A "Miner Protection Plan" is silly.  Just accept credit cards and deliver a quality working product on time like every other legitimate business.  Is that too much to ask?

[Bicknellski]

once you see details of their Miner Protection Plan and refund details all your fears will melt away.

I am trying to be objective here, but it is hard when you sound more and more like a slick used car salesman.  ASIC consumers are not as desperate as they once were.  The preorder nonsense doesn't fly anymore after the BFL and Avalon fiascos.  A "Miner Protection Plan" is silly.  Just accept credit cards and deliver a quality working product on time like every other legitimate business.  Is that too much to ask?

Even when you have a working product in this game there seems to be a real lack credulity. Only ASICminer and BitFury are delivering as per promise. The rest are either failing to deliver or just promising. If someone wants to put their reputation on the line then let them. Buzzdave seems to have rehabilitated himself but ya you are right to call people on their hype and bs. Just think that your metric doesn't really do much to make me feel either warm or fuzzy for KnC and the rest. Given what has actually happened it is BitFury or Asciminer, both offering units or chips that are way over valued.