Hi Simon,
Thank you for your efforts to help develop the
BTC economy. After a lot of thought, I'm leaning towards your company for my final 2013 pre-order.
John K. has agreed, in principle, to hold in escrow my
BTC for ~20% of a Group Buy - and the group funds I'm organizing - to purchase 1 unit from either HashFast, CoinTerra, or some darkhorse that magically has powerful ASIC hardware on the shelf at similar or better prices (ex. KnC/BF at even lower prices). If HashFast continues to show good progress I intend to offer the best pre-order + hosting offer anywhere pre-escrowed by JK & backed by your MPP. The proposed GB setup will offer owners the best value and the best dual protection plan to be found anywhere.
At an additional fee, his escrow service will order and have the miner shipped to a trusted 3rd party hosting location and will oversee that miners get paid out fairly & on-time. I've offered him or an intermediary co-admin rights on the miner for auditing purposes. I'm also offering admin rights to AM1/100 shares which will be held as collateral for 2-3 months of miner payouts.
John K.'s exact words upon reading my pre-escrowed plan: "I've read a lot of proposals for group buys at this point, and I must say that yours came across as one of the best written and thought out.
"
This type of group buying is exactly what ASIC mfgs. are driving us towards. This is the lengths that I have to go thru in order to get access to the best values and best hardware. Us little guys who are the ones that help keep the network running will have no other way to compete except for group buys and mining shares. Not sure if you foresaw that when you wrote your paper.
I'm trying to get hosting pricing as electricity is too exp. in my home state of Hawaii (yeah, poor lil me). You mentioned power specs but hosting services charge by the RU size.
Nitpick from a fellow prototype IT HW designer colleague: Judging by concept pics offered on your site, it appears to be
not rackmountable, at the moment, which I think is a design mistake, if so. If you can build it with integrated rails, that would be ideal. I prefer the tower form factor for best cooling when designing my gaming rigs but for people trying to mount multiple units on a rack or in a server room somewhere,
having a bunch of Towers to service is not ideal (at least from this server ninja's exp.).
Can you give us some rough size estimate? People need this info for calculating hosting costs vs. self-hosting.
Is this considered a Mid Tower or a Full Tower? Thanks & GL with your product launch!
TL;DR: It's too hard to keep up with net. difficulty without Group Buys or mining shares. Also, the tower needs to be mountable on racks.
