Alpha Technology Litecoin (Scrypt) ASIC Miner Order Batch 1 Now!

[benjamin07]

Hey retro72 can you please check if that matching the competition is a condition of contract, if it is then it should be enforced

[retro72]

Hey retro72 can you please check if that matching the competition is a condition of contract, if it is then it should be enforced

That's an interesting question. I would say its not enforceable. It essentially amounts to a free upgrade for those who bought before the 28th and was superseded by the Managing directors statement for those buying after.

If KNC had announced their upgrade after the 28th pre-order round. It could have been argued that purchases had been made based on the "Matching the Competition" announcement and a legal case could have been made to enforce it. 

As that did not happen, I would say Alpha are legally in the clear on this issue.

[retro72]

There's a couple of things I'd like to point out in It's about Sharing's post.

Firstly KNC are not late regarding the Neptune. They stated it would be shipped Q1/Q2. We have just entered Q2 so I would not call that late.

This notion that Alpha will definitely be the first to ship is misguided at best. Hundreds of things can go wrong from here to final production. They have no experience with this or any other large scale product manufacturing.
Cointerra were made up of some of the best guys in the business. They had a prototype, tape out went well, then it all fell apart in the last couple of months. They delivered late, under powered devices that did not meet their power consumption targets.

Fiaz was pretty quick to back out of the July delivery guarantee, which shows just how much confidence they have in that promise.

This industry is littered with high profile failures. So to equate Alpha T to some of the great Businessmen who started companies without qualifications is just nonsense. There are many more business failures than there are successes. And very few Sir Richard Bransons or Sir Alan Sugars in this world.

If I were to back a horse in this race. Based on past form it would have to be KNC. Yes the favourite doesn't always win and a rank outsider does occasionally cause an upset but you will lose more money than you win if you keep backing outsiders.

Alpha-T's 30% down policy may seem nice on the face of it but when you look deeper, they have surreptitiously tried to claim you are all business customers, therefore are not covered by even the most basic consumer protections and are not entitled to a full refund of your deposit. Not only is this illegal but I would suggest immoral. It also opens up the possibility of Alpha walking away with half your money, even if they fail.

A couple of other things to consider. The reason a lot of Asic manufactors do not ship PSU's is that they tend to have major problems getting through customs. Your device could be held up for days, if not weeks while customs check the PSU meets the certification of your particular country.

It is simpler all round to buy a psu locally.
Personally I wouldn't  trust a PSU I know nothing about, running 24/7 under high stress loads. They can and do ignite, potentially taking your house with it.

Also Alpha T has stated their devices will be Wi-Fi enabled. Please do not connect your miner via Wi-Fi. You stand a much higher chance of having your device hacked and all your mined coins routed to another wallet. Run a wired connection through a firewall as a basic starting point. Anyone who connects via wi-fi is asking for trouble.

[jmlindn]

Reserve for doxing.

[retro72]

I just want to add.

Those of you buying the 16mh/s machines are not in the same race as those buying the 100mh/s + devices.

IMHO your strategy should be to mine low diff altcoins and stay away from the higher market cap coins such as LTC, DGC, DOGE etc. You will be pulverized.

With that in mind you should be in no rush to take high risks on unproven, potential vaporware. A couple of months here or there will not dramatically affect your ROI.

Therefore, if I were in your position I would wait, see who delivers then buy a batch 2 device. You could then mine low diff coin, on a low power consuming machine, with little to no risk.

[benjamin07]

Hi retro72, I bought before they reopened the batch.

The letter from the Managing Director, as (or if?) it changes the original terms of matching the competition, should come with a statement of "100% refund if not happy with the revised terms".
Without this the MD is changing the terms from their side without the Client accepting the revised terms.

Please have a look again and kindly confirm your thoughts on this for batch 1 early customers

regarding vaporware, you are 100% right, look at Bitmain now with their antminers, no pre-orders and their units are very much relevant to present day, not paperweights.

Seriously my last pre-order, but I don;t want to give away something that we have rightfully paid for.

Many thanks!

[jomay]

I just added up the total network hashrate of all GPU's running on all scrypt coins as reported by coinwarz and got to a total of 281g/h. So with a few missing say 300g/h.  300g/h is 300,000mh.  I wonder what the total m/h is being put into the market buy Alpha and KNC come the summer?

The main difference I see between BTC ASICS and Scrypt ASIC's is the sheer volume of altcoins this new hashrate will be spilt around vs all the BTC ASICS pretty much only chasing BTC when they arrived. And as most of the big boys have KGW / other quick difficulty adjusters its those that don't that may get mullered.

Am I correct that Litecoin is still vanilla scrypt only and has no KGW / Other difficulty adjustment yet?  Surely the difficulty on Litecoin will be pushed to the roof and then left high and dry when it's turn to be the most profitable Altcoin comes round for a day.

M 

I estimate the total network hashrate as 1.000.000MH/s in Q3 - or better 1000GH/s or 1TH/s. The KnC Titans alone will add about 625GH/s if KnC sells the whole batch (2500 Titans at 250MH/s). At this point the difficulty would go up at least 3x.

Regarding minor altcoins: they don't matter. They don't add much hashrate and much mining profit (in absolute $). The litecoin network is between 150-200GH/s right now, so makes up 50-70% of the total you calculated.

Regarding your last point: afaik bitcoin doesn't have KGW as well and doesn't suffer from it. I'd expect litecoin difficulty to go up massively and GPU miners leaking so smaller coins as well as Vertcoin etc. But Titan's cannot switch en masse to smaller coins, as these do not have the marketcap to absorb and pay for a few Titans.

[retro72]

Hi retro72, I bought before they reopened the batch.

The letter from the Managing Director, as (or if?) it changes the original terms of matching the competition, should come with a statement of "100% refund if not happy with the revised terms".
Without this the MD is changing the terms from their side without the Client accepting the revised terms.

Please have a look again and kindly confirm your thoughts on this for batch 1 early customers

regarding vaporware, you are 100% right, look at Bitmain now with their antminers, no pre-orders and their units are very much relevant to present day, not paperweights.

Seriously my last pre-order, but I don;t want to give away something that we have rightfully paid for.

Many thanks!

I've got a few solicitor friends I will run this by but I think they will agree with my initial conclusions.

As an early pre-order customer you bought under the terms of Alpha's initial offering, i.e 5mh/s@£1500 or 25mh/s@£5000
The "Matching the Competition" announcement, in essence was a free upgrade.and was not specific enough to be legally binding.

As you never purchased a product based on that announcement you have no legal foundation to enforce it. Anyone buying the product after the 28th will be buying under the terms of the "Managing Directors Statement".

If you are not happy with the situation I'm afraid your only course of action is to cancel your order.

Regarding a full refund. If you are not a business customer you are legally entitled to 100%. If you are a business customer, you are bound by the terms set out by Alpha T.

As I say I'll run it by some lawyer friends and see what they think but I wouldn't get your hopes up.

[greentea]

I can't play the mining game anymore. This is my last venture. Would be nice if KNC Miner made a $1000 miner, but why when they sell the 10k miners? Decentralization imo.

I really see VERT and/or Quark like coins starting to move as all those GPU's will find new homes. Also, Doge will be affected by this. I still don't like it since it is so inflated relatively speaking.

Why dont you check out Fibonacci, they are selling by the unit at 8.65 MH/s, purchase as many or as few as you want ... better act fast though, last time I checked they were 80% sold

It's a monster thread to read through however:
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=2702.0

[nightengale]

I can't play the mining game anymore. This is my last venture. Would be nice if KNC Miner made a $1000 miner, but why when they sell the 10k miners? Decentralization imo.

I really see VERT and/or Quark like coins starting to move as all those GPU's will find new homes. Also, Doge will be affected by this. I still don't like it since it is so inflated relatively speaking.

Why dont you check out Fibonacci, they are selling by the unit at 8.65 MH/s, purchase as many or as few as you want ... better act fast though, last time I checked they were 80% sold

It's a monster thread to read through however:
https://litecointalk.org/index.php?topic=2702.0

If KnC delivers as advertised, their units will be about 20 times more hash per dollar spent, and leaving a brief window of opportunity to make your money back before the scrypt difficulty starts going crazy.

[Its About Sharing]

I just want to add.

Those of you buying the 16mh/s machines are not in the same race as those buying the 100mh/s + devices.

IMHO your strategy should be to mine low diff altcoins and stay away from the higher market cap coins such as LTC, DGC, DOGE etc. You will be pulverized.

With that in mind you should be in no rush to take high risks on unproven, potential vaporware. A couple of months here or there will not dramatically affect your ROI.

Therefore, if I were in your position I would wait, see who delivers then buy a batch 2 device. You could then mine low diff coin, on a low power consuming machine, with little to no risk.

In hindsight I think I actually appreciate your posts. Nothing wrong with bringing balance and there are many reasons, as you have stated, in this space to do so.

Regarding your point above, I wonder how to best go about this. For arguments sake, lets say Alpha Technology delivers before KNC Miner. (And I have one, or whomever has one)
Will I have a substantial advantage over a miner with 20 video cards whose hash rate is about 16Mh/s? I think I probably would, due to energy costs. So, mining LTC might still be the best return.

But, to your point, a couple of sub points:
How would one go about selecting other coins to mine? Jumping around? (I don't think pool hopping works very well, unless the pool does it automatically. Morally, I wouldn't want to do that anyway.)
With a lot of these rigs out there, couldn't some smaller coins just be destroyed by a large hashing power hitting them and then pulling out?

Anyway, where I stand now is that BTC to me is the #1, LTC the #2 and DOGE I still won't touch as I think the number of shares make it more like government fiat potentially. What I am looking
for is that number 3. I think a coin like Quark or Vert can be that. Something VERY ASIC resistant. There will be a lot of GPU's looking for coins in the next few months...

[markm]

Just start merging coins alongside bitcoin and litecoin. That way you get more bang from your existing hashing gear and don't have to abandon litecoin nor bitcoin to mine more things.

Particularly good right now for small miners are CoiLedCoin and GeistGeld, as even block eruptors can merged mine them alongside bitcoin very nicely (using, for example, p2pool).

-MarkM-

[bamsterdam]

I thought geistgeld was dead? long time ago

[markm]

I thought geistgeld was dead? long time ago

No way. It is merged mined, so there is no reason to stop mining it.

All the merged mined coins did however have a RAM usage problem which was far more apparent in coins with faster blocks, so both I0Coin and GeistGeld were dropped by some pools that felt their RAM usage to be exorbitant.

I0Coin however found and fixed that problem, and its fix has already now been propagated to GeistGeld, IXCoin, DeVCoin and possibly other merged mined coins. The slower their blocks the less urgency there is in getting around to adopting the fix.

Being the faster block speeds among merged mined coins actually made I0Coin and GeistGeld very important to the merged mined coin family, because by their faster blocks they drew attention sooner to the RAM problem that all merged mined coins would eventually have been forced to notice.

The people who blindly threw away I0Coin and GeistGeld with vague claims that they must have memory leaks did a dis-service to the whole merged mined coin family, project, and research/experiment/development/testing by ignoring the problem instead of delving deeper and deeper to find out what it actually was; their deliberate ignorance would have led to the problem remaining in place until the slower block coins started to notice it. As it is, the slower ones can be fixed long before the problem causes them to use "inordinate amounts" of RAM themselves.

-MarkM-

[beetterer1]

if I had money i would be buying their orders

What i know is that come July we will be mining their KNCs to non-profitability land after we've had ROI in 3 weeks

[digitalindustry]

I am guessing KNC will deliver closer to 500 mhs in the Titan and will pull a surprise on delivery dates too.

Sure that might hurt Alpha Tech customers (me!) but really it comes down to when they can deliver.
The bigger question is, how will this impact GPU miners? I mean how much is going to be added to the network and then how much in GPU's subtracted?
Does the difficulty go down? Do the owners of the network, so to speak change hands or just technology or

Even though Alpha (in their newsletter from last night) said "At this point we would like to guarantee a minimum of 650 Mh/s for our second batch, this figure is just a preliminary minimum and it is more likely than not to be higher." it will come down to when KNC delivers. If they deliver around when Alpha delivers and Alpha doesn't once again up their customers a bit, they will all be out.

Further, as we get closer to that roughly 2 month before delivery "pay the balance date" for Alpha Tech customers, if KNC says they are going to deliver in the beginning or mid July ALSO, do any of the Alpha customers go through with their order??? Alpha may want to up things again but not match, say the 16Mh/s miners to 25Mhs (and not 2.5X more as KNC has done). Hardware wise, it would just be upping the lower end Vipers to the higher end Vipers (original specs). So instead of KNC running things, Alpha Tech takes over this role. 

Man, this is more interesting than the bitcoin mining ASIC "competition".

My advice generally (as I haven't changed it) is to look for an entry into Quark at this point , not only are the scrypt vectors there ( as I said they would be ) but I can also guarantee that ASIC capital will  move into Quark.

Also there is some other news on the horizon,  which of less specific importance to this mining subject.

[benjamin07]

The reason KNC miner is selling scrypt is because there is nothinf more to invent in sha-256 world. From here on it's these units and multiple thereof.

[nightengale]

The reason KNC miner is selling scrypt is because there is nothinf more to invent in sha-256 world. From here on it's these units and multiple thereof.

This is a good point, it's probably going to be a while before you see a sub-20 nm BTC ASIC, right?

[retro72]

@It's about Sharing.

The which coin to mine debate probably needs its own thread.

My experience is I starting mining with a couple of GPUs then built a mid sized Farm (24x7950s) to mine BTC. As the diff got too high I moved to LTC.
Early last year I began looking at PPC I liked the concept of POS and thought the devs seemed dedicated so I switched a couple of my rigs to mine it at low diff.

The rise in PPC alone has paid off my rigs many times over (I sold @$8). I retired my farm and sold off my GPUs late last year. I'm now looking at Asics.

Concentrating on the bigger coins is less hassle but with a bit of research you can find great low diff coins that can make really nice returns. As the power consumption is considerably lower with an asic you can take a punt without much risk.

Regarding coin switching. Never tried it. I stick with the coin I've picked and mine it till I've reached a set goal. Making decisions based on the daily price is the epitome of a busy fool.

I've never mined DOGE. It seems like a joke coin to me and I just have a natural aversion to it.

Personally I tend to look for what innovations the coin is bringing and how dedicated the devs are. You can make money through crapcoin pump and dumps but I tend to play a more long term game.

[bizzyb]

Anyone who has requested a refund from Alpha-T....
Has anyone who has paid with Paypal, received an actual refund yet?
Thanks