Black Arrow 28nm 100Ghash Bitcoin ASIC from $0.49/GH/s

[blackarrow]

25% more Ghs than the cheaper competitor ?  In the .28nm chip competitor or any die size ?
I'm willing to pre-order but need more info about how the price will be determined.

Will you still honor this "not yet clear" promise even if the competitors sells for less than 1$/Ghs ?
Or even lower than 0.50$/Ghs ?

This scenario is quite possible IMO..

can you make new way to preorder ?
30% now, 70% on delivery ?
like on normal service buisness ?

This I already mentioned to them. You and I agree.

And we have posted the poll on our website http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/sales-preference.html .

That's a good start, but I think bbxx and I were referring to partial preorder payment where the equipment price remains the same.

Not knocking you, just saying that's where we were coming from.

The price will be discounted, but not 25%. There are clients who want to pay in full but lower prices. It has to be a difference between these 2 categories.

[woobone]

Black Arrow whats going on with lancelot trade-in option? thanks!

[blackarrow]

Black Arrow whats going on with lancelot trade-in option? thanks!

Customers are already placing orders and we apply the discounts manually. There will be a mass email today with instructions for all our Lancelot customers. Thank you for your patience.

[User705]

25% more Ghs than the cheaper competitor ?  In the .28nm chip competitor or any die size ?
I'm willing to pre-order but need more info about how the price will be determined.

Will you still honor this "not yet clear" promise even if the competitors sells for less than 1$/Ghs ?
Or even lower than 0.50$/Ghs ?

This scenario is quite possible IMO..

can you make new way to preorder ?
30% now, 70% on delivery ?
like on normal service buisness ?

This I already mentioned to them. You and I agree.

And we have posted the poll on our website http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/sales-preference.html .

That's a good start, but I think bbxx and I were referring to partial preorder payment where the equipment price remains the same.

Not knocking you, just saying that's where we were coming from.

The price will be discounted, but not 25%. There are clients who want to pay in full but lower prices. It has to be a difference between these 2 categories.

can you post clear rules with payment methods for both categories

[DoomDumas]

Im looking to order but need clear rules for both category too.

TIA

[blackarrow]

Im looking to order but need clear rules for both category too.

TIA

We are drafting them. We will post them on the website and here on the forum as soon as we have them finalized . We have to look into how to configure the shopping cart as well. Thank you for your patience. We work as fast as we can to keep up with you. 

We are sorry if sometimes we seem to work slow. We are doing our best.

[driksson]

At today’s Bitcoin price and network hashing rate, X-1 would return $523 in 15 days and X-3 would return $10631 in 15 days [1]

[1] As Bitcoin network is currently growing, we expect that the actual revenue by the time of shipment to be lower than this.

Why not update with expected return from any public website as source (genesisblock or btcinvest for example)? It's not really fair to display ROI on todays difficulty rate. When you are not delivering today.
If you are delivering today fine , if you are delivering in february, try and calculate return in february on expected february difficulty numbers.

[KS]

The prospero x3 just went up 500$ *while* I was doing the checkout! (4499$ instead of 3999$).

Explanation?

[blackarrow]

Shenzhen, 26 September, 2013: Black Arrow is proud to announce that it has upgraded the specifications of its Minion chip to 100 Ghash (up to 128 Ghash when overclocked).

Prospero X-1 will scan 100Ghash while using less than 55 Watts and Prospero X-3 will be able to scan an outstanding 2000Ghash while using less than 1050 Watt.

More details here:
http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/prospero-x-1.html
http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/prospero-x-3.html
http://www.blackarrowsoftware.com/store/minion.html

Customers who have placed and paid the orders until now are offered a free upgrade while customers who have placed orders but not yet paid still have 5 days from today to benefit of the free upgrade.

Our Lancelot customers will continue to benefit of the initial prices until 5th of September. We have emailed all Lancelot customers with information on how to use the trade-in program.

We are currently offering 35% discount to customers who pay their order in full and 20% discount to customers who wish to pay 50% in advance and 50% before shipment. After October 2013 we will reduce the discounts gradually until they reach their full retail price which is $415 for Prospero X1 (100Ghash) and $6999 for Prospero X3 (2000Ghash).

Please note that February deliveries are limited because we will produce a limited number of wafers. The remaining orders will need to wait 1 month more until the 2nd batch.

The current discounts and offers are limited. The promotion will stop once we've covered the engineering costs. We do not aim to make any profit on our first batch of ASICs and our sole target is to cover the manufacturing costs. We have funded more than 70% of the NRE from our own funds. We can get the remaining 30% from various investors but we wish to give our customers the opportunity to benefit of low prices while helping us complete this project.

[blackarrow]

The prospero x3 just went up 500$ *while* I was doing the checkout! (4499$ instead of 3999$).

The explanation is in the previous thread.  However, we will offer you 2000Ghash for the price of 1300Ghash. Please contact us to give you a gift certificate for the difference.
 

[frankenmint]

The prospero x3 just went up 500$ *while* I was doing the checkout! (4499$ instead of 3999$).

The explanation is in the previous thread.  However, we will offer you 2000Ghash for the price of 1300Ghash. Please contact us to give you a gift certificate for the difference.
 

for 3 grand I can have a 2 TH miner on 2/24/2013, why not just say March? 
Genesis block quotes the estimation to be maybe 7 BTC over the lifefime of the product ~ $952 if we choose to keep todays Gox price of 136.  What are your comments on this statement?

[solareclipse64236]

is this the cheapest 2 th machine?

also what can i do if i was also trying to buy the prospero x3 for $3999?

[DoomDumas]

Sounds like another negative ROI pre-order...

Whats your opinion... am I too pessimist ??

 http://btcinvest.net/en/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php?diff=148623691.94537259&dcosts=4500&diff_mincrease=35&blpbtc=25&dhsmhs=2000000&diff_mincreasedecrease=5&btcusd=128.53&dpowcon=1200&btcusd_mincrease=0&pcost=0.086&calcweeks=20&dleadtime=15&action=calc#

[JaredPWagner]

Will you still be able to use a 2U case for the X3 or do you anticipate transitioning to a 4U case?

[GodfatherBond]

Every ASIC manufacturer needs to drop prices heavily by end of this year if they are going to sell anything. Why not be the first one selling 2th @ 1000$ price tag as you are going to deliver end of feb? Will fullfill your order books sure and make roi for miners possibly possible... regardless that and if you deliver about by time you have then good and quite happy customer base ready to take your next offer. Good deal for you and miners?!

[Sitarow]

Every ASIC manufacturer needs to drop prices heavily by end of this year if they are going to sell anything. Why not be the first one selling 2th @ 1000$ price tag as you are going to deliver end of feb? Will fullfill your order books sure and make roi for miners possibly possible... regardless that and if you deliver about by time you have then good and quite happy customer base ready to take your next offer. Good deal for you and miners?!

The competition will spur a race to the bottom on GHs/$

[blackarrow]

Every ASIC manufacturer needs to drop prices heavily by end of this year if they are going to sell anything. Why not be the first one selling 2th @ 1000$ price tag as you are going to deliver end of feb? Will fullfill your order books sure and make roi for miners possibly possible... regardless that and if you deliver about by time you have then good and quite happy customer base ready to take your next offer. Good deal for you and miners?!

We wish we would be able to do that but the silicon is not this cheap. The only way we could sell 2th @ $1000 would be to loose money on each miner "sold".

There a threshold where no manufacturer can lower the prices. The miners cannot purchase cheaper and cheaper hardware because there is no lower node therefore no cheaper $/ghash.

As I see it, there is only one solution to this problem: the miners will stop selling the coin cheap and the price of the coin will go up proportionally with the difficulty.

[Puppet]

We wish we would be able to do that but the silicon is not this cheap. The only way we could sell 2th @ $1000 would be to loose money on each miner "sold".

Care to give some more insights in to the cost structure?

For the asic, allow me to make a guestimate based on cointerra's specs.
3 100mm² dies in a package yields 502-720 GH /chip
Lets go with the low estimate gives 166GH per die.

A 300mm wafer yields ~600 10x10mm² candidates or 100TH (at 100% yield).  AFAIK, processed 28nm wafer cost less than  $4000 in volume. Low volume runs may add significantly to that, if you have to go through to an intermediary.
Let be generous and for easy math put it $10,000 per wafer if you include yield, slicing, packaging, handling,.. thats ~$100/TH.

Now thats only silicon cost, excluding NRE and of course there are other costs, like PCB, assembly, housing, cooling, PSU, etc, but I find it hard to understand how over time, you would not be able to sell at (much)  less than $500/TH. Am I way off in my silicon cost estimate?  Or what else is so expensive? PCBs?

[eve]

$500 is reasonable price and sure these sellers will make good money, anyone let me know where to get that price?

[markm]

As I see it, there is only one solution to this problem: the miners will stop selling the coin cheap and the price of the coin will go up proportionally with the difficulty.

Miners minting coins is a tiny amount of coins, it cannot be the miners who have been suppressing the exchange rates of bitcoin all this time.

Maybe more likely it is all the ASIC makers dumping bitcoins for fiat.

Surely the number of coins being dumped month after month after month must be way the heck more than miners are minting?

-MarkM-